BASEBALL IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN

There is an American sport called "BASEBALL," and it's about to happen. However, "BASEBALL"'s preseason, "SPRING TRAINING," happens first, where teams from around the country find themselves in Florida and Arizona while the ivy freezes on the outfield bricks at Wrigley Field, ten more seats are added to Fenway Park, and the Yankees find new homes for the decimal places in their ticket prices. Firstly, you should know that baseball comes  from the words "BASE" and "BALL" (check my etymology), two integral parts of the game. You can figure out the goal of a sport by deconstructing the word into an analogy against other sports, like BASKET : BALL :: FOOT : BALL, which of course proves the goal of the latter as putting the ball through your foot. If you clicked that link, however, you'd learn something else, in the second entry. Apparently, the term "southpaw" to denote lefties comes from early baseball parks being oriented so that home plate faced east, meaning a lefty's throwing arm faced south as he stood on the mound. YOU AND I BOTH JUST LEARNED SOMETHING. At least I did. My working origin of the word was that they adjusted their cups more than righties.

*Not to scale

I like baseball. It's chill, it's fundamentally crazy, and people like it for the wrong reasons, which triumverates into a pretty sick sport. Point one: few other sports, professions, or life experiences pay off when you succeed three out of ten times. Yet when it comes to baseball at-bats, doing just so makes you great. While we're talking about numbers, however, I've convinced myself that baseball's numeration is the result of not wanting to make hitters sound like they're terrible. Why? Saying someone is a "30% hitter" sounds like they're dumb and awful. Saying someone is a .300 hitter (spoken as three-hundred) sounds slightly more impressive. Point Two/Three: People claim to be "numbers guys" and like baseball because statistics are so dominant in the game, as they are used at every turn. However, as much as someone puts faith in numbers and their truthiness, numbers in baseball lie harder than numbers in any other sport. Home runs, balls and strikes are all crazy subjective! It all starts with the fact that every major league park has different dimensions. The distance the ball must travel to leave the playing field is different everywhere! That's like allowing football fields to be longer or shorter than 100 yards in different stadiums (excluding the end zone and Canada) or ignoring the nearly decade-old basketball standard of wearing at least a foot and a half of shorts (obligatory John Stockton picture).

In other baseball news, I just learned that the longtime Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek is retiring, meaning that he and the Yankees' Jorge Posada, two of the most important catchers of the last fifteen years, who have seven combined championships to their combined names (which I imagine would be either be Jasge Posatek or Jorson Varisada, the latter being a type of specialty steak), won't be playing for the first time in a long time (that was obvious but I couldn't figure out how to end that sentence). Posada is best known by me for peeing on his hands in lieu of wearing batting gloves (or "in Alou of wearing batting gloves" if you catch my drift) despite having a bathroom in his house that has two toilets in it (a fact reported to me by my high school Spanish teacher), while Varitek is best known for rallying his team and being named captain after  pushing Alex Rodriguez in the face with his glove while wearing a mask. People like to say he "stood up to him and punched him in the face," but I feel both were ill-achieved by the power of his wearing protective face gear and a catcher's mitt. As I like to say, six dozen one way, half dozen the other. I don't hate the Red Sox though! I didn't even rub in, much less mention that Posada and the Yankees won five of those seven titles I brought up! This is all ancient history! That 4-game rally to beat the Yanks in 2004 might have been 86 years ago for all I care! I don't even care that I just used the number of years the Red Sox spent without winning a championship! Let's just enjoy this picture of David Ortiz doing what everyone thinks they should do with Coco Crisp.

But vitriol is not the best way to start the season! It is best begun with an afternoon of crushing a frozen pizza  and falling asleep on the couch to a game where a team's starters only play 3 innings. Happy Spring Training errybody!