Baseball is a hard game to learn by Christopher Romeo. I’m not talking about the rules but rather the physical skills needed to play the game.  Not even to play the game well or professionally.  I mean well enough to play without embarrassing yourself.  Learning the hand-eye coordination needed to hit a baseball is akin to explaining how a bumblebee flies.  You’re hitting a round ball with a round bat, both of which are moving.  Never mind that the guy throwing the ball is trying to put it in a place where you can’t hit it, sometimes doing things that make it move in a less-than-straight line, or that the crowd is screaming at you.  The mere act of putting a bat squarely on a ball is a stunning feat.  Throwing and catching the ball are just a bit easier but still much harder than the basic skills needed for most other major sports.  Can you kick a ball?  Then, you can play soccer.  Can you hold a ball and run?  Then you can be a running back on a football team.  Basketball probably has the second-hardest skill set of any of the major sports.  Yet, they still don’t compare to baseball’s because the main “skill” needed for basketball is height.  No offense to players and/or fans of those other sports, but when was the last time you heard this story:  “John Papadokoulis never played baseball until he went to college, and here he is playing in The World Series”?  You hear about those players all the time in football and basketball, or, at least, a heck of a lot more than you’d expect for sports where the best players make millions of dollars a year.  In fact, there have been many players who have failed at baseball and then played professionally in other sports.  Very few have made the transition the other way, though.  In fact, the best basketball player in the history of the known universe, Michael Jordan, couldn’t get any farther in baseball than two levels below the Major Leagues.  Even then, he probably didn’t deserve to be promoted to double-A ball, but ticket sales were awesome.  So, he stayed.  The only two players that I can remember who did well in baseball and in another sport were Brian Jordan and Bo Jackson, both of whom played in the NFL.

    Think about how unnatural the throwing motion is in baseball.  It takes years to learn to throw a ball well.  I’m not talking about the years it takes to throw a ball well enough to be a professional pitcher.  I’m saying that it takes years to learn to throw a ball well enough that you don’t look like your arm is made of wet noodles when you do it.

    What about catching a baseball?  You don’t think that’s hard?  The natural reaction to catching an object thrown at you is to use your dominant hand.  In baseball, though, your dominant hand is your throwing hand.  The glove is on the other hand.  You have to teach yourself to catch with your non-dominant hand.  Still not convinced?  Watch the face of a child learning to catch a baseball with a glove.  When she does it cleanly for the first time, her face lights up like she got a pony for her birthday.  Now, have her run with a football or dribble a basketball.  Her face won’t light up like that when she does those things for the first time.  Even young children know that catching a ball with a glove is a special achievement.

    The professional level of baseball excellence is something most people can’t honestly understand.  Partly, that’s because, as with most activities, the best make it look very easy.  Trust me; it’s not.  When someone says “Baseball’s not neurosurgery, you know,” they’re right.  There are more neurosurgeons in the United States than there are Major League Baseball players.  Baseball funnels players up from high school to college to the minor leagues to the majors, all the while stripping away the ones who aren’t the best.  When you get to the majors, you’re left with men who are so skilled that they make these skills look like things of beauty.  If you think I’m being too poetic here, imagine seeing a well-turned double play.  It’s like a ballet.

    I say all of this because, if you watched Game One of the 2009 NLDS between The Rockies and The Phillies and if you didn’t already know how hard it was to play baseball, you might think that baseball was as easy as throwing a ball past a guy holding a stick while your teammates hit the ball at will.  Cliff Lee dominated The Rockies in a way rarely seen in the postseason.  At one point, he got sixteen batters in a row.  He didn’t allow The Rockies to score until there were two outs in the ninth inning.  Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.  He was still pitching in the ninth and final inning.  Isn’t this the 21st century?  Who pitches a complete game anymore?  I guess the answer is the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner . . . in his first-ever postseason game.  And, just to show how unbelievably good he is, Lee also got a hit and stole a base, becoming the first Phillies pitcher to ever steal a base in the postseason.  All in all, not a bad day.

    Possibly the most important part of all of that, though, is that Lee threw a complete game, allowing Phillies’ manager Charlie Manuel to rest a suspect and battered bullpen for one more day.  If The Phillies win this series against The Rockies, even if Lee doesn’t pitch again or pitches badly, it will be in huge part due to Lee’s performance in the first game.

    A NOTE ABOUT THE TWINS AND THE TIGERS: One advantage that Major League Baseball has over football and other sports is the 162-game season.  At the end of such a grueling marathon (more games than an NFL team plays in ten years and two seasons worth of NBA games), the cream really does rise to the top.  So, when The Twins and Tigers ended the season tied, it wasn’t typical.  The fact that the two teams went to extra innings in an extra, tie-breaking game to settle things means that it could just as easily have been a coin toss that decided which tam would be the AL Central champs.  Truly.  Imagine what happened here.  At the end of 324 games, 162 for each, The Twins and Tigers had the same record.  (Yes, I know that many of those were games in which The Tigers played The Twins, but they each get credit for playing one game when they play each other.)  At any point in the season, a wild pitch here or a bloop single there could have given either team one more win or one more loss.  Still, they ended up tied.  Then, when they went to the tie-breaking game, they were even tied at the end of that one.  Sure, The Tigers had to do something no other team had ever done - they blew a three-game lead with four games left in the season - in order for The Twins to be tied with them at the end of 162 games.  The fact remains, though, that the two teams were tied.  Tied after 162 games.  Tied after nine innings of the tie-breaking, 163rd game.  These two teams could play ten thousand games against each other, and they’d still each have had 5000 wins and 5000 losses.  I congratulate The Twins for their come-from-behind division championship, but The Tigers have nothing to be ashamed of.  They weren’t a second-place team . . . except for the final inning of extra innings in the extra game of the season.  Congratulations, Detroit Tigers.  You deserve it.

I haven't forgotten your offer to me to write something for your site. Quite simply, I have nothing to say about baseball. I've tried. I've waited for divine inspiration. I went into the desert and ate peyote. Nothing. I could write "Go Sawx!" fifteen hundred times, but that's not a very keen way to crank out three thousand words.

I guess I just look at the game today, and I don't feel the connection that I once did. Sure, I follow my Red Sox and the phucking Yankees. For some reason on which I can not put my figurative finger, I just have no feelings for MLB anymore. Baseball, sure. But the AL and NL, day-in and day-out? Not really.

Was it all of the steroid accusations? Not really. I couldn't care less who's on steroids. Other than the fact that Johnny Law says that they're illegal (and kids shouldn't idolize illegal drug users), I don't care which MLB-ers use them. They don't help them decide which pitches to swing and and which to let get. They don't help hand-eye coordination. I just don't care about their use. Hell, let 'em all shoot 'roids into their asses. Home runs sell tickets, and strike outs make pitchers look better.

Was it because of all of the corporations insinuating themselves into every facet of the game? Probably not. I'm a child of the cable teevee boom. Watching the Sony HD Game of the Week, sponsored by Bud Light Lemon-Lime, the official children's beer of Major League Baseball, between the team that plays its home games at Bank One Ball Park and the one that calls Citifield home is just the way it is. So what if the replays, first pitch, every walk, each RBI, the seventh-inning stretch, and the extra innings all have their own sponsors? This is America, and baseball is America's pasttime.

Pasttime. Past time. Past it's time. Is that the problem? Is the game no longer one that I can care about? I don't think that's it, either. I still adore baseball. I read BEYOND THE SEVENTH GAME and IRON HORSE about every other year. I still pin the timing of my life's events to baseball. The asymmetry of the game is very appealing even now. As a "real adult" (i.e. one over 35 with a wife and a mortgage), I appreciate even more how baseball appears to be linear and symmetrical - nine innings, with each team getting half, line-ups, box scores, the perfect square around the bases - but really isn't. You know, like life.

I wish I knew why, but I can't pinpoint it. All I know is that I don't have anything useful or important to say about baseball beyond this: the Yankees suck.