I recently took up watching baseball.
This was a disturbing development to not a few of my friends. I have made clear, through ample words and disdainful looks, that the wide world of sports holds no interest for me. When I find myself surrounded by suspicious fans who cannot believe any actual man would reject sports as a whole, I weakly offer up that I enjoy watching soccer. This compromise hardly satisfies Americans, but it works well as the sport is virtually never on, and no one wants to watch it anyway. A very few times this white lie has nearly been exposed; one particularly hair-raising incident involved a customs agent in Peru, where, much to my dismay, they actually know and love the sport. Fortunately I was able to feign incomprehension of his broken English, and he let me into the country anyway.
Why, then, baseball? To be perfectly frank, watching baseball is for me a spiritual discipline.
