This post…to follow-on the last two and last evening’s crazy night of baseball…will be even shorter.

Joe Posnanski wrote one of the best columns about last evening’s games, baseball and life, that I’ve read in a long time.  Do yourself a favor — pull up a chair and read it.*

It begins with this thought:

“Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That, in many ways, is the beauty of it. I realize that’s a hard thing to explain to someone who doesn’t love baseball. No, more than hard, it’s an impossible thing to explain, because many people want sports to be more than life. They follow sports to jolt them out of the steady rhythms of the shriek of alarm clocks, the monotony of morning meetings, the rush to get the kids to soccer practice by 4 p.m. They want sports to be bigger than life. What’s the point, otherwise? There is nothing in baseball as jarring as a blind-side hit, as jaw-dropping as a perfect alley-oop, as tense and heart-pounding as a breakaway.

And the hard thing to explain, the impossible thing, is that many of us love baseball not in spite of these failings, but because of them.“

Then Posnanski has one wonderful line, one wonderful thought, after another.  I’ll just pull out this one:

“I never argue with people who say that baseball is boring, because baseball is boring. And then, suddenly, it isn’t. And that’s what makes it great.“

And then his final paragraph:

“The Braves failed to score. Papelbon blew the lead. Longoria homered in the 12th. Elation. Sadness. Mayhem. Champagne. Sleepless fury. Never been a night like it. Funny, if I was trying to explain baseball to someone who had never heard of it, I wouldn’t tell them about Wednesday night. No, it seems to me that Wednesday night isn’t what makes baseball great. It’s all the years you spend waiting for Wednesday night that makes baseball great.“

More to come…

DJB

*Posnanski has since changed his blogging platform a couple of times, and the link no longer works (and he’s usually behind a paywall). So my excerpt will probably have to do. Ah…the joys of the internet.

Image: A much later image at my own church: Nats parks during game 3 of the 2019 World Series