I’m a baseball fan in a hockey town.  For the past five years, trying to talk baseball has been pointless.  Not only were The Blue Jays fielding losing teams, those losing teams were hard to watch.  About three years ago, while very few of us were paying attention, they became interesting again.  This year, they’re off to a good start and the bandwagon is growing.  Cito Gaston has returned.

They might have a chance.

But, in Toronto, baseball is a usually a conversation killer.  I know too many art-fags, geeks and fashion folks.  The rare birds amongst these who like sports, tend to watch hockey.  Baseball is boring, they say.

And they’re right:  It is boring.

Baseball is more game than sport, a chess match played with live bodies, and it takes a certain turn of mind to appreciate the thing.  This type of mind should be found in the creative classes. Yet, in this, their imagination fails them.  All they see is a bunch of overpaid, roid-eaters scratching their crotch and spitting.

Anyone can see that.  But that’s not all there is to it.

There is a lot to be learned from baseball.

Being in the Right Place

We’ve all seen the diving catches that makes the highlight reel.  These are often protrayed as baseball’s great plays.  They’re not.  They are baseball’s very worst plays.  A last minute attempt to correct a devastating error.

In baseball, location is everything.  If you have to dive for a ball, it means you were standing in the wrong place.  It means the pitch was in the wrong place.  It means a mistake was made.  You may have corrected it.  But it was still made.

The best play in baseball is the groundball hit to the waiting infeilder.  The best teams are not the ones who can correct the most mistakes with the flashiest plays, but the ones who make the fewest mistakes to begin with.

Hit It Where They Ain’t

Because defense revolves around being where the ball is going, offesnse revolves around hitting that ball to where no one is. Abscene and presence are in constant contest. Baseball is an attempt to connect the two.

A pitcher is successful when he can throw the ball to wear the batter is not expecting it.  The batter is successful when he can hit the pitch to where the fielders do not expect it.  In both cases you need to put the ball into the void.

You can only succeed in baseball if you can enter the emptiness and establish yourself within it.  There is one way to do this.

Capitalize on Mistakes

Great teams do two things:  They don’t make many errors and, when you do, they make you pay for them.  Bad teams make a lot of errors and never make the other team pay for theirs.  They strand runners, miss the pitches they should hit and just watch opportunity pass them by.  When you get a hanging curveball with a man on third, you have to hit that thing good and proper.

Both sides employ logic, prediction and research to perform their jobs.

Yet the result is often iirational.

There is a reason why baseball’s greatest poet, Yogi Berra, shuns western rationlism in favor of Zen Koans.  He instructs us: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

In baseball,