Spring training is here in all of its glory, which means that I am once again rekindling my unshakable love affair with the game of baseball.
For several years now, it's been a little weird being a hardcore fan of the major professional sports in the United States. Like so many things we want to enjoy, politics continually gets its filthy fingers all over the sports we love. We all know where those politics lean.
This has understandably led a lot of conservatives to give up on watching pro sports they were either once passionate about or simply enjoyed for more casual reasons. Unfortunately, a lot of those people feel that they have an obligation to harangue those who still enjoy their favorite sports and try to drag them out the door too.
If one is a baseball fan like I am, one gets admonished both because baseball is too woke and, sadly, because not as many people like the game itself anymore.
They all want to make sure you know about that too.
Here's the deal: I don't care.
I'm from a different era. I grew up obsessed with watching and playing baseball. Nobody played soccer when I was a kid. It was baseball, football, or basketball back then, and the latter ran a distant third in popularity. I never had the size for football, so baseball it was.
In Olden Times, World Series games were often played during the daytime. My mom is from Michigan and a devout Detroit Tigers fan. When the Tigers faced the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1968 World Series, Mom let me stay home from school to watch the games with her. That brief, sanctioned period of playing hooky made me a fan for life.
I wasn't kidding about the love affair. My daughter grew up a big sports fan. One night when she was about eight years old, she asked which sport I loved more, football or baseball. I replied, "You know how much I love football, but I'm in love with baseball."
I compartmentalize extremely well, which is one reason that I am able to enjoy artists and entertainment no matter how much politics are trying to ruin it for me. When I am watching a baseball game, I'm not thinking about what stupid woke initiatives MLB is leg-humping that season. I don't care if any of the players recently said something stupid about politics in the press.
I'm watching a freakin' baseball game, which is something l love doing far more than I do interacting with people. I'm swept up in the magic of the game that I have been in love with for over half a century. There are so many decisions and possibilities from pitch to pitch in baseball that being caught up in all of that makes me not give three you-know-whats in a fountain about whatever politics may be swirling around me.
Or the chirping of naysayers.
Long before Twitter got its X, it was my sports trash-talk playground. People would occasionally try to turn sports Twitter banter into a political conversation. I'd just mute them.
Lately, whenever I get in the mood to tweet about baseball or football, some fellow conservative has to "Harumph!" into my timeline to inform me that he no longer cares about the NFL or MLB and wonders why the hell I still do. I have a lot of bad habits, one of them isn't constantly proclaiming to strangers what I don't like to do.
Even though that's kind of what I just did there.
I'm going to revel in this baseball season because every time I slip into my happy place, it's time that my almost supernatural powers of compartmentalization will take me away from the election nonsense.
There is also a sweet spot where the beer and the game begin to drown out any harumphing.
Look at me, I can be... well, you know.
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