Why baseball is not boring: The cathartic ramblings of a lifelong hardball fanatic

It was cold, it was wet, and it was suposed to be the climactic moment of my sports fandom. It was my first Cardinals opening day. And I was bored. Why? Because baseball can be boring.

Part of me thought it was because it was cold. Maybe I would have been enjoying it more if I wasn't shivering the whole time, but still... Why was I so bored? We were winning most of the game, only to blow it in the ninth, but none of that should've even mattered. It was opening freaking day. For my St. Louis freaking Cardinals.

Now let's jump forward, shall we, to another opening day (kinda): the opening game of the World Series. Somehow my dad was able to score tickets (Parking: $30. Assorted World Series memorabilia: $150. Seeing the Cards in the World Series: Priceless. No seriously, my dad somehow got free tickets. Considering he works with Energizer, I'm sticking with the story that he threw batteries at someone until they gave him their tix.). And even if this had been the most boring game ever (which one could argue it kind of was), it still couldn't have been boring. It wasn't the miraculous Game Six — possibly/probably the greatest finish to any sports game I've ever witnessed — or the clinching Game Seven. It wasn't making the playoffs on the last day of the season or watching Albert Pujols hit three bombs. But it was my team in the World Series, and it was a perfect microcosm of why baseball is great, why I shouldn't have been bored at opening day. Why? Hold your Clydesdales, I'm getting there.



This has been a pretty big couple months for baseball. Not only did we have this outlandishly entertaining World Series and that last night of the regular season, which many believe to be the best night of baseball ever, but the movie Moneyball came out to pretty good reviews and served as another reminder to the American public that baseball exists, even if only because Brad Pitt was in it. As a baseball fan, I liked the movie because it was intriguing and it gave me a little early '00s nostalgia (although I wasn't actually a big fan thematically; I think it was a good sports movie, but not a good movie about sports). But thematically, I really didn't like the movie. The moral of the story seemed to be that statistics trump all. And yes, Billy Beane's moneyball system worked, if only for a little while, and yes it was an underdog tale of a small-market team winning 20-straight games. But what kind of movie about America's pastime discounts the importance of personality, of guts in the clutch, of individuality?

I remember reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson in elementary school. In the book, the teacher asks the protagonist — a little Chinese girl named Shirley Temple Wong who moves to America after World War II and finds a love for baseball — and her classmates why baseball is the quintessential American sport. She is distraught when no one is able to give the answer: Baseball is the only sport that relies on one man at a time. In an at-bat it is one man's fate to get the job done, all by himself; it's a sport of individuality.

This is where Moneyball falls short. The A's never won the World Series, and this year was perfect example of why (besides being financially deprived, of course). The Red Sox, who supposedly picked up Beane's stats-based recruiting strategy and then fucked the system by playing moneyball with egregious amounts of money, gave up a nine-game September lead in the AL East to let the Tampa Bay Rays slip into the playoffs on the last night of the season (that best night ever I was talking about). They were supposed to win — not just the division, but everything. They allegedly had like the best team ever, according to some random experts/dolts. And instead, they lost 18 of 24 and didn't even make the postseason. Their stats didn't matter. Something was messed up in the clubhouse and all the .300-hitting players in the world weren't gonna fix it.

If only there was a foil to the Bosox... Some team that did the exact opposite... Oh yeah! Those pesky Redbirds. Not only did they complete a comeback just as impressive as the Rays' — they were down 10.5 games at the end of August, if you haven't heard — to make the playoffs, but then they took down the Phillies and their "perfect" rotation, who everyone had winning it all. Next, they took down the Brewers who beat them by six games in the regular season. And, to top it off, they won Game Six, down to their final strick twice, thanks to some late-game heroics by hometown hero David Freese.

This, again, is where moneyball falls short. Creating a team of .300-hitting guys is gonna get you a lot of wins in the regular season, but when you're down to your last at-bat, three out of 10 is just not comforting. Clutch is. This is when the intangibles matter, when the scrappy, gutsy, never-say-die attitudes win out over the Billy Beane-based ballclubs. The Cardinals proved the importance of character this year, as cheesy as that sounds. They won when they shouldn't because they were able to win when they needed to.

And as much as Beane (at least, the one played by Pitt) ignored the importance of the manager, a certain man named Tony proved that wrong this year. La Russa may have made mistakes (warming up the wrong pitcher, for instance), but he was put under the spotlight and characterized how much a manager can really add to a team by doing whatever it takes to snatch every possible advantage, no matter how slight.

Billy Beane was right about one thing though (okay, let's be fair: I'm making him sound dumber than he was; he succeeded in a tough situation the only way he could): The regular season, those 162 games over which a stats-based club pays dividends, is important — and it's not boring. Okay, baseball can be boring at times, but the real reward of being a baseball fan is wading through the muck of such a long season, year after year, to finally, one day hit paydirt when that waiting pays off with a championship. (Unless you're a Cubs fan. But let's be real: If the Cubs ever win, their fans are gonna revel in it more than any fans prior.) It's kind of like a slow-building techno song, or a long, dense novel or, you know, any other rewarding thing ever. You gotta put in the long hours of work — or sitting through endless errors and blown saves — for that final victory to really feel worth it, to make it feel like you earned something. Not to say that bandwagon fans can't enjoy it too. I'll admit, I gave up on this team multiple times this year. Not to a bandwagon extent (anyone questioning my true fandom can take a look at my room at home), but there's no way I thought we'd make the playoffs — hell, not even our own GM really thought we would. Just imagine if I'd watched every game. The victory probably would've been even sweeter. Although, I don't think I could really have taken any more sweetness...

Okay, let's re-live that Game Six, why don't we? The Rangers (they were the other team in the World Series, by the way) had scored three runs in the top of the 7th to give them a 7-4 lead. We didn't answer in the bottom of the inning, and, although we were more than capable of an offensive spurt, the game appeared to be over. In flashbacks of the '06 Tigers, pitchers were throwing the ball over infielders' heads, and the Cards were losing their shit. Well, it was a nice ride, more than a few Facebook statuses said. But I wasn't ready to give up yet.

I won't say I thought they would come back, but I did have a little hope. Not to be a self-righteous douchebag, but I wasn't really surprised the Cards were in a spot to win it all. Don't get me wrong, I never thought we'd make that run to get to the playoffs, like I said. But once we were in the postseason, I knew we had a chance. Baseball playoffs are anyone's game, if only because there are so few teams (eight). Plus, the Cards had experience and seem to always have success in the early rounds, at the very least. Still, I knew we were in trouble. We were living on a prayer, I thought.

So, I played "Living on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi on my laptop. And then, seconds later, Allen Craig hit a home run. After that, you know damn well I was not turning that song off. I left it on repeat, and an hour and half of glorious '80s cheese later, something magical had happened.

I'm a pretty superstitious person when it comes to watching sports, and for the longest time I thought that I somehow had an impact on what was happening on the TV screen (in fact, I have long blamed the Rams' Super Bowl XXXVI loss on the fact that I forgot to bring my rabbit's foot to the Super Bowl party). Yet, somehow I've recently come to my senses that it doesn't matter what I'm wearing, what I'm eating or where I'm sitting. Except this time, it did matter. Somehow, I knew that I had to keep cheering in my rally cap and rally squirrel T-shirt while waving my rally towel, no matter what. Even after Josh Hamilton annihilated our bottom-of-the-ninth rally with a two-run, top-of-the-tenth, practically Kirk Gibson-esque shot, I knew I had to get up from my groaning and moaning on the floor and keep on cheering. "Well, let's do it again," I said. And we did. And then, somehow, by the grace of David Freese, we won.

Now I'm not saying that I single-handedly (with the help of my fellow rallier, Eric) caused the Cardinals to magically come back to win the greatest World Series game of this millenium, at the least, a win that would propel us to an inevitable Game Seven win. (Although, if you're willing to give me that credit, I'll gladly accept on behalf of Jon Bon Jovi.) What I'm saying is this: FUCK YOU, BASEBALL IS NOT BORING. It's all about that one (or two) decisive moment that determines the fate of a team after the longest grind of any sports season. It's about the scrappy, the clutch. It's about America, goddammit. And it's about being a fan and sticking with the guys the whole dang time, even when your only hope is a historic collapse and a squirrel.

In conclusion, baseball is awesome. Thanks for jumping back on the bandwagon.