The number of baseball-related posts has been increasing over the past few years, huh? If you’ve known me from high school or college, you know I’m not really into sportsball. Take the Vandal football games, for example. I really didn’t pay attention to the football at all because I didn’t care; I was just there for the marching band experience.

But baseball is different, and I figured I’d take a few minutes to explain why (in case you’re wondering why the hell there are so many baseball posts when I’d really never talked about sports before).

Let’s do it!

My mom used to watch the Braves a lot when I was a young kid (she liked their announcers). I don’t remember too much from my first few elementary school years (apart from coos and other miscellaneous nonsense that doesn’t matter), but it seems like my mom had baseball on every night during the season. I was too young to really understand it (or at least I didn’t seem to care enough to try to understand it past the basic premise), but the sound of a baseball game (and that freaking tomahawk chop chant the Braves fans do) triggers serious nostalgia for me.

Apart from my grandparents being obsessed with Mark McGwire during his steroid home run era and that one year that the Mariners were good, I never really watched much baseball after that. I didn’t know the teams, I didn’t follow who won the world series, I didn’t really even think about it much.

Fast forward a whole bunch to 2015. Nate and I started living together in June of that year. He’d expressed that he liked baseball and I told him I liked it too (even though I was definitely not up on current baseball news/players/etc. and I definitely didn’t have the knowledge of the game that he had). So at some point he decided to get a subscription to MLB TV so that we could watch the Mets (his favorite team).

But it wasn’t really until the 2016 season where I really got into it. I started to know the game better (thanks mostly to Nate, haha). I started to know the players and become invested in them. I got more familiar with the teams, leagues, and the general competition.

Now I love it. I love all the stats. I love all the weird little things that can happen in a baseball game. I love how long the season is and how that means that there are so many opportunities for teams to hit winning or losing streaks. I’ve got, of course, my favorite players.

Plus, it’s something I enjoy watching and discussing with Nate. I can also watch and enjoy it while still having my music blasting on my headphones, so that’s always a plus.

I don’t know. I just really like it. It’s exciting to me.

(Apologies, though, to anyone who reads my blog who doesn’t like baseball, haha.)