Baseball.
It’s too long. It’s boring. How can you sit and watch that for three hours?
I get it. Baseball can be boring, but I don’t know what else to say — it’s my favorite sport.
When I was little, I played tee ball and then baseball in my local police precinct’s youth league. It was a lot of picking grass, getting chased by bees and looking directly into the sun, of course. I enjoyed it, but to the disdain of present me, I eventually stopped playing in the fourth grade.
I attempted to make a comeback in March 2020. I had even gotten a brand-new glove and bat, but I guess the world wasn’t ready. I knew I didn’t really have a chance on the high school team, so I ended up running track instead.
So, if I never really played baseball, why is it my favorite sport? Well, a part of it is because I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Brooklyn and the greater city have a rich history of baseball. At one point, the city was home to three teams: the Yankees in the Bronx, the Giants in Manhattan and the Dodgers in Brooklyn. Of all the World Series played between 1905 and 1955, these New York teams combined won 22 of them (the Yankees won the bulk of them with 16). These teams were home to baseball legends, such as Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson. New York City was a baseball town.
Unfortunately, both the Dodgers and the Giants would pack their bags for the West Coast after the conclusion of the 1957 season. Two entire fan bases were left heartbroken and with no team to support. My great-uncle was one of these fans. He had immigrated to the United States from Greece and took a liking to baseball, choosing the Dodgers as his team.
While some fans tried to keep up with the now Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, others switched allegiances to the Yankees and many sat waiting for a new team to return to New York. Eventually, one did.
In 1962, the New York Metropolitans, or Mets for short, took the field at the Polo Grounds, the longtime home of the Giants. In an effort to join the two old fan bases, the Mets took on the colors of both clubs: the orange from the Giants and the blue from the Dodgers.
My great-uncle was then proud to don a Mets cap, and passed along the love for the team and the game to his American-born children, nieces and nephews, including my dad, who passed it along to me. The orange and blue run strong in the Gabriel family.
I grew up watching David Wright (a Norfolk native, funnily enough) play third base for the Mets. When I was ten, Wright and the Mets made it to the World Series. One of the games was on Halloween, and I dressed up as their ace pitcher, Matt Harvey. They lost the Series to the Kansas City Royals the next day. This past fall, the moment I left New York, the Mets, of course, went on a deep playoff run. Ask any one of my dorm mates and they’ll tell you how excited I was. I probably wore a Mets jersey or hat every day for three weeks straight. It was a great run, even if it ended with a couple of blow-out losses to the eventual World Series Champion Dodgers in the National League Championship series.
I’m not here to argue that baseball is the best sport, but it is my favorite because there is just something about it that can’t be found in other sports.
There is no set time for the game. There are nine innings, but sometimes there are more. A called strike versus a ball often depends on how an umpire is feeling that day. Players can be fat, skinny, tall, short, fast, slow and even only have one hand (I’m not joking. Look up Jim Abbott). Each club plays 162 games in the regular season, amounting to a whopping 2,430 games played overall. It is insane.
Yes, the games are long, but after a long week of classes, it’s nice to just sit and watch a couple of innings of a Mets game. As the weather has been getting better on campus, I’ve been making good use of the glove I got back in 2020, too. Playing catch with a friend or two on the Sunken Garden on a sunny day is a great way to take a break from the stress of schoolwork.
Many will still think of baseball as a boring sport, and that’s alright. This is just why I enjoy the sport, and I encourage everyone on campus to take some time to reconsider their opinions on the sport. Hey, we could even talk it over at a Tribe baseball game at Pulmeri Park!
