I’ve always loved baseball.  As a player, umpire and coach, the game holds a special place in my heart.

As a player, it was a sport that satisfied my quest for a game that a person can easily pursue for decades after high school.

As an umpire, baseball is unmatched when it comes to rules intricacies and “exceptions” to the rules (think infield fly rule and when that is in effect).

As a coach, it is the grand champion form of competition when it comes to teaching the lessons of life.

I can think of no other sport in the world where the best players FAIL seventy percent of the time and still make it to the Hall of Fame (i.e. a .300 batting average).

One of the best ways to learn and practice a skill is to fail; in baseball, it is easy to fail.  Miserably.

Any player who has toed the rubber on the mound has experienced a day when throwing strikes consistently was a monumental struggle.

Some days, a batter can look at a pitched ball and see something that seems the size of a watermelon.  Other days, that same ball can look like a gnat.

Another fabulous element of the game is that there’s so much that depends on human effort.

In an average high school baseball game, the two teams’ pitching staffs will combine for about 225 pitches.  That’s a lot of balls and strikes for the umpire to call and with that comes chances for human error.  

Players of America’s past-time can learn plenty from those errors because it’s one of the areas in which baseball mimics real life.  How often in life can we as humans not control certain situations?  Quite often. But we can control how we respond to adversity, and overcoming those obstacles might be the greatest lesson that a player can learn.

I’m happy that these “kids these days” still find joy in playing the game of baseball.  Yes, there’s a lot of downtime in the sport and maybe it doesn’t provide the same level of action as a newfangled video game.  But the game can also teach patience, delayed gratification and a sense of accomplishment.

Baseball is tradition.  It’s also entertainment - from Morris Buttermaker to Willie Mayes Hayes - the game has inspired more characters who were “characters” than any other sport.  

It’s a game that is as much art as it is science.

It’s a chance for this old guy to feel young again by hitting ground balls to the next generation of ball players