For the past couple of years I've been trying to teach myself to become a baseball fan. I'm a slow learner.
There's something about baseball that makes it completely unlike other sports. For me, it takes no effort to be a fan of football, basketball, boxing or any sport in which contestants race to a finish line.As I have done on several occasions in recent years, I took the 200-mile round trip this past Sunday to catch a Texas Rangers home game in their beautiful new ball park up in Arlington. Once again, I hoped close observation would reveal insights to help me become a baseball fan.
On this trip, I took a pair of small binoculars and a new portable radio with headphones. Fan tools.
On previous trips I noticed many fans listening with headphones to the game. At first, I thought it silly to listen to the same game on the radio that you were watching in person. Then I noticed the fans with the headphones passed along baseball tidbits that seemed to impress their fellow fans.
The first time I tried to imitate the fans with the portable radios, I brought along a tiny shirt-pocket model with no headphones. I wanted to avoid the bulky, loaded-down look. My idea was to listen to the radio while it rested in my shirt pocket or, if need be, hold it to an ear.
The little radio was not up to the job. Besides, you cannot crack peanuts, eat hot dogs or applaud praiseworthy plays when holding a radio to your ear.
It took several ball games to work my way up to a digital AM-FM stereo cassette player with mega-bass and headphones. I now have both hands free to eat, drink, applaud and pass food and change along my row. I also can now hear the broadcast of the game clearly, even over stadium noise that includes loud music, the field announcer and the heckling shouts and the roar of the fans.
Of course, I feel like a geek when I head for the restroom or the stand with the grilled-onions jumbo dogs with my headphones over my Rangers cap and the travel binoculars dangling from my neck. But now I detect a new look of respect from die-hard fans who see me as one of their own. One man even asked me a baseball question under the false assumption that I was a full-fledged fellow fan.
It's not that I don't understand how to play baseball. I played sandlot ball, lettered in baseball every year in high school and even played some American Legion ball. It's just that I don't understand how to be a baseball fan.
Even when I played baseball, I realized there was something interesting, if not beautiful, that I didn't understand about the game. Most kids my age collected baseball cards and memorized a library full of statistics about current and past baseball players and their teams. Not me.
Waiting for someone to hit or throw the ball in my direction, I used to look at the fans who came to watch us play and wonder why they didn't have something more important or interesting to do.
The key to becoming a fan, I've begun to think, is to not compare baseball to any other sport. You have to shift into another gear to appreciate baseball. A low gear.
Baseball is not a sport that requires athletes to be extraordinarily tall, big, fast or strong. But they do have to be extraordinarily good at playing baseball, which is extremely difficult when pitchers can control the flight of the ball and know the hitting preferences and weaknesses of the batters.
I'm beginning to think the secret of becoming a baseball fan lies in all those statistics that I never wanted to learn. The strategy, and the appreciation for the nuances of the strategy, must come from those statistics.
Perhaps. I'm still trying to figure it out. In the meantime, I think I've got the look of a baseball fan down. And I really like those jumbo hot dogs with the grilled onions.