Goin' to the chapel

Weddings aren’t exactly my forte. I’ve been involved with a few since graduating from college and have attended a few more as a guest, and while I’m always happy for the couple, my enthusiasm for the wedding is usually focused on the bachelor party, pre-wedding golf, or the reception.

But I also appreciate tradition, especially when it comes to gifts and celebrations. And so it is that without any help from my girlfriend, I can easily identify the first anniversary for a married couple as the ‘paper’ anniversary.

Almost a year ago, my sister Lisa tied the knot. I’d love to give her a fitting anniversary gift, and seeing has how I have none of that fancy paper money stuff to throw around, she’ll just have to accept my written word account of her big day as recognition and remembrance of the good times that were had..

Right from the start, I knew that this was going to be a memorable trip. Just the preparation was enough to put me on edge. (See the adventure that was picking out Kelly’s dress in my 'Behind Enemy Lines' post from last spring).

But as the wedding weekend rolled around, things only got more entertaining. Let’s start the action with…

THE HOTEL

I’m a history buff, so I was delighted to learn that we’d be staying at the historic Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hotel for a few nights. Kelly and I were the first two guests of the party to arrive, so we had to wait for a bit while our room was made ready.

I thought we had hit the jackpot. Not only is the main lobby an old-timey train terminal, but there were dozens of old pictures and historical accounts of the building hung up around the lobby. It got even better as we walked the grounds and I poked my head into the 19^th century train cars that had been converted into hotel rooms.

We finally made it to our room and took in all the glory of…

Any Holiday Inn you’ve ever stayed at. And that wasn’t a horrible thing (save for the history-induced 50 percent markup on rates). In fact, the room was worth every penny seeing as how the air conditioning worked perfectly and that three-day span was likely the warmest that Chattanooga had seen since the last asteroid struck Earth.

But still, they could have at least given us a train whistle for an alarm clock or some gas lamps in the room. You're a national historical site, Chattanooga Choo-Choo. Act like it.

Anyways, as the first to get settled, I did the responsible Anthony family duty of cooling down as much alcohol as possible as fast as possible. Kelly had been wondering why I had insisted on bringing as many watertight bags/coolers as possible and honestly couldn’t believe that I was actually going to fill up the bathtub and sink with ice to prepare for that night’s festivities.

I just love it when she’s so naïve and innocent.

Kelly couldn’t wait to speak of my crazy antics when my parents arrived, but she was met with a response along the lines of “how the hell else are we going to ice down the beer?” This is exactly what I expected and why I knew it would be a fun weekend.

As the day wore on, more guests filed into town and the party really got started. As I’m recounting this a year after the fact, I’m struggling to get exact details. Things drunkenly and head-achingly dissolved into…

THE DAY BEFORE THE WEDDING

Surprisingly, I woke up in a great mood. I’ve long held a theory that the drinking gods take pity on people who party too much when they have good reason to. I’ve never been hungover after a birthday or after any of my graduations (Editor’s note: Sorry, mom and dad. I got trashed after my high school graduation). But god-forbid I have more than a couple of beers on a weekday night. The next day’s retribution is swift and unrelenting.

So Kelly and I took another stroll around the grounds of the Choo-Choo before eating breakfast in the dining room attached to the main lobby. I guess that all of the chickens and pigs of Chattanooga are kept at the top of Lookout Mountain as the $20 tab seemed steep for bacon and eggs for two.

Luckily, the 11 a.m. beers with assorted aunts and uncles took the monetary sting off of things. At least for the time being.

As a groomsman for the wedding, the next stop was a trip to the local Men’s Warehouse to pick up my suit. According to the latest census figures, the Chattanooga metro area is home to over half a million people. Apparently, this doesn’t call for more than one Men’s Warehouse as we embarked on a 30-minute joyride that took us around the entire city. Luckily, my dad was also along for the ride, so I got to hear all of the snarky comments without having to be the one to actually say them to my sister.

Having already been fitted for my suit a couple of months before, I was already prepared to shell out some cash for the occasion. But for the sake of more humor, I’m going to take my comments from the original fitting and fast-forward them into the timeframe of this story… I took a vacation to Las Vegas last year and have held the advertisements that seedy guys pass out on the strip. YOU CAN LITERALLY RENT A HUMAN BEING for 24 hours and it can cost less than renting a suit from Men’s Warehouse.

This isn’t an indictment on my sister’s taste. The suit looked great and the cost isn’t even in the top three of suits that I’ve had possession of for less than a day. But seriously, get your shit together, Men’s Warehouse. Dry cleaning doesn’t cost that much. Just rent out suits for $50 each and still make a decent profit.

The rest of the day went off just as planned. We went through the rehearsal at a tennis club where there was a great view of the Tennessee River as well as any and all LifeFlight helicopters going to and from the hospital.

The rehearsal dinner was delicious and the toasts/tributes were great, but a day full of trekking around a scorching Chattanooga left Kelly and I no energy to go nuts with the rest of the wedding party as night fell. This wasn’t the first time that I had started to feel like an old man, but it was the first time I enjoyed turning in early as we witnessed…

THE MORNING OF THE WEDDING

So, I didn’t totally avoid the sting of pre-wedding partying. When I got back to the hotel room, I found out that Roy Halladay had left a game early with arm issues.

Not one to let the biggest day of my sister’s life interfere with keeping up to date with my beloved Phillies, I spent the next few hours pouring over any report I could find online while finishing off the last of the bathroom sink bourbon that had been chilling on ice.

It was right around this time that Kelly started loving the fact that our room came with two beds.

The late-night web surfing left me a bit groggy, but it was nothing that a $7 bagel couldn’t fix at breakfast the next morning. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the maid of honor.

Seeing as how Kelly and I were up pretty early, I wasn’t expecting to see too many friends and family in the hotel restaurant. We enjoyed a nice meal, but ran into the boyfriend of a bridesmaid on the way back. I immediately assumed that he might be on a ‘God help me and make this hangover go away’ run. After all, we’ve all been there before.

But it wasn’t just a few aspirin and some toast that he was going back to the room with. The guy had an ENTIRE PALATE of Powerades in tow. Knowing that the target of his rescue attempt was an integral part of the wedding, I thought that I’d at least see if I could help. The guy assured me that everything would be alright, but also regaled me with an awesome story.

There had been talk of the wedding party visiting a karaoke bar after the rehearsal dinner, but that was where Kelly and I had decided to call it a night. Evidently, we were the only smart ones in the group.

Not only did about a dozen people crappily sing their way through late-90s girl band songs well into the early morning, but most managed to get well over-served in the process. Right around 3 a.m., Lisa’s best friend from our childhood days in Pennsylvania decided to toss her expensive, pre-paid, rehearsal dinner cookies into a tin beer bucket. The mile-long ride to the hotel was an assortment of screaming, tears, and more puking, but no sign of consciousness had been seen from the bridesmaid since then.

That story made my weekend. It was all that I could have hoped for. I appreciate the novelty of the ‘Hangover’ movies, but appreciated that this situation was as crazy as a fully functional family would get in real life.

I was wrong.

Kelly and I went to my parents’ room to recount the events of the morning, only to be greeted by even crazier news.

I have two little sisters. While one had spent the previous night trying to relax on the eve of her wedding, the other was busy getting sweet-talked by the Chattanooga equivalent of a Jersey Shore bro.

My non-about-to-get-married sister (who we’ll call Tricia, since that’s her name) convinced herself that inviting this stellar argument for late-term abortion to the wedding was a good idea. Having never heard of this guy before, my family was a little surprised, but welcomed the extra guest since we’re awesome people and readily welcome those whom we think will make our drunken good times even more fun and/or more filled with booze.

Everything seemed to be going smoothly, which led us into…

PRE-WEDDING

Since we had gone through a pretty well-planned rehearsal, there really wasn’t much pressure on the hours leading up to the wedding. The closest thing to drama that we thought we’d encounter came from the best man – the groom’s brother, who was flying in from military duty just in time for the ceremony – but all of that went just fine.

As the groomsmen got to the tennis club where the wedding was being held, the only real hurdle was shooing away sweaty members. One crotchety old man actually had the (probably) saggy balls to claim that – despite the 48-hour heads up on the event - his membership dues entitled him to walk all around the clubhouse in his sweaty clothing.

In a fix-it-all trend that was just beginning to come to me, I politely informed him that if he really needed to have a Snickers so badly that he’d walk through the middle of my sister’s wedding, I’d be all too happy to insert it where it would eventually be exiting anyways.

Problem one: Solved.

All of the essential members of the ceremony – who had come from as far away as South Dakota – seemed to have no trouble getting ready for the big moment.

The same couldn’t be said of a guy entrusted with knowledgably driving people about two miles across a city that he lived in.

In a proactive effort to keep over one hundred people from travelling across town in the blazing heat (read: from driving through a foreign city while thoroughly plastered), a shuttle was hired to take guests from the Choo-Choo hotel to the site of the ceremony.

Just under an hour before the ceremony was set to begin, there was still no sign of any guests. At just about that time, frantic phone calls began to pour in to the parents of the bride and groom.

Apparently, the guy tasked with driving the bus to and from the hotel/ceremony couldn’t handle the monumental task of making about three turns while covering less ground than a 5K. Numerous attempts to talk the driver into the location failed, leaving plenty of guests stranded on the shuttle while even more waited to be picked up back at the hotel.

Seeing everything quickly falling apart, I came to the realization that I was going to murder lots of people if I had to keep standing outside in a suit in 185-degree heat (I’m pretty sure that’s accurate. Check the almanac). There was a grandfather – whose will I’m likely in – that was stuck out in the heat, so my only option was to spring into action. After about 10 minutes of searching, I ran down the wayward shuttle, getting the first wave of guests to the ceremony and ensuring that the rest would be there in time for the vows.

Problem two: Solved

While my impromptu chauffeur impression kept me away from the ceremony site, I wasn’t able to see what exactly went on. What I do know is that the slight delay in all of the guests arriving somehow caused (A) the pictures to not be taken at the right time, and (B) my sister to have to walk across clay tennis courts to make her grand entrance instead of easily walking down a stone path.

Since this was a late evening wedding and all of the pictures were to be taken outdoors, daylight was getting sparse. There was a constant shuttling of groomsmen, bridesmaids and wedding guests all around the ceremony area that tried to get everyone seated while also making sure that Lisa and Ryan didn't bump into each other during the madness. To make matters worse, the photographer didn't have an exact plan as to what poses and settings she wanted, wasting even more time.

By the time I returned from getting the shuttle in order, my parents were set to murder the wedding planners, who were on one of their first jobs and clearly over their heads.

There are no assault/battery/murder charges currently pending that I know of, so I consider my pep talk to my parents as…

Problem three: Solved

Once the guests had all arrived, everything went perfectly. It was a picturesque sunset wedding on the banks of the river and the bride and groom couldn’t have had a more perfect moment to start their lives together.

That’s a little gushy for me, but I wanted to make sure that I captured the great romantic moment. It’s important to stress that it was a storybook moment so that we can distance it from…

THE POST-WEDDING

This is what we all came for, right?

I mean, it’s great to see someone you care about tying the knot, but how often do you get to go to a party where someone else (Hi, mom and dad!!!) has shelled out a ton of money for food and drinks and you don’t have to feel bad at all for gorging yourself and not even offering to throw in a few bucks?

Not only was the wedding food served buffet style, but my sister had the good taste to make sure that all of the food items came in their mini form. This was solid planning. Not only was I able to try a little bit of everything, but the shame of eating three pounds of food goes away when everything is bite-sized. How can I be a disgusting garbage disposal of a human being when I’m only eating one shrimp or 1/3 of a normal sized crab cake at a time.

As for the alcohol situation, I had spent the morning helping my dad haul all of the booze through the reception area. After making about a half dozen trips from the car, up the elevator, and into the kitchen with case upon case of beer and wine, I was drenched in sweat – and absolutely confident that we hadn’t brought enough alcohol.

Sadly, that thought came to fruition right as the night turned sour for a few of us as we got to really bond with Tricia’s date. This person – let’s call him Chad McDouche – had shaken a few hands of family members upon arriving and managed to make it through the ceremony while keeping up the appearance of a fully functional adult.

Unfortunately for Chad, the free beer was just too much to handle.

After fulfilling all of my obligations in the wedding party’s picture session, I headed straight to the bar. Upon receiving my first drink, I saw that Chad had already single-handedly put a good dent in an entire case of Bud Lights. It was at this moment that he decided to make a good impression on the brother of his date.

I’m a very accepting person and have never said one word about any guy that my sisters have ever brought to the house. This is mostly because my sisters are well-adjusted people who make good life choices and, therefore, associate with good people. I’ll give Tricia a pass on her pre-wedding excitement in thinking that her super-bro of a date was a good selection, but that wasn’t going to stop me from raising a warning flag.

I informed my parents of the overwhelming levels of general assholery that Chad was able to project in our brief conversation and said that we should keep an eye out.

In a rare instance of me being 100 percent correct on something, Chad proceeded to steal the show in the worst way. After finishing off a Gatorade cooler’s worth of beer – leading to the booze shortage that I had feared – he then figured that the wedding reception for one of my sisters was the perfect time to openly grind on the other sister.

This finally got my parents on the same level of uncertainty about Chad as I had been. Things got worse when the bouquet was tossed and Lisa – in the only showing of athletic competence that she has ever had in her life – nailed Tricia right in the numbers with her toss. Chad thought that it was his day and was clearly planning some ill-advised show with my little sister if he caught the garter.

I had never spent more than the occasional meal with my now-brother-in-law Ryan, but he earned my lifelong respect when we shared a look and nod and immediately understood that there was no way that this dickhead was going to get anywhere near that garter.

Once Chad was denied his moment in the spotlight and was further dismayed by the low levels of beer remaining, my parents had finally had enough. Thanks to having done my part in draining the wine and beer, I was incredibly eager to deliver the news to Chad that he was no longer welcome. Unfortunately, my mother – having already put up with last minute changes and inexperienced planners – was ready to get an entire day’s worth of angst off of her chest. I watched gleefully from the steps as my 5-foot-3 mother put a drunken 6’4” amalgamation of beer, pot, and bro bibles in his place and kept him from even thinking about rejoining the party.

With an assist from mom in the parking lot and my dad and some family friends readying themselves with blunt objects, I proclaimed problem four to be solved.

As elderly relatives vacated and the caterers and DJ were paid, things led quickly to…

THE AFTER PARTY

Despite the rental on the reception site running out at 11 p.m., there was never a doubt that this party was going to carry well into the morning. That’s why my parents had already booked a party room back at the Choo-Choo. Not only was there a new place to carry on at, but it was adjacent to the hotel beds that we’d all be passing out in. Brilliant!

Unfortunately for everyone still in a partying mood, the low alcohol situation remained.

Luckily for everyone, I still had some clutch moves left in my arsenal. I had already been dispatched once during the reception to track down cigarettes. Seeing as how we were in downtown Chattanooga and I had no idea which stores sold smokes, it was quite the challenge. I finally found some and had the foresight to ask about places to buy more beer, since nearly everything closes before midnight in that godforsaken town.

As a couple of dozen relatives made their way back to the hotel, Kelly and I found a gas station that was still open. We came back with plenty of ammo and party number two was a go.

Problem number 5: solved.

I swear. I should open up a best-man-for-hire business. When faced with the wrath of an unhappy bride, I get results, dammit!

Our beer-finding heroics gave another couple of hours of life to the party and – once the hangovers hit the next morning – probably contributed to an extra few hundred dollars of sales at breakfast for the hotel.

In the end, even the hardest partiers succumbed to the heat and humidity (and maybe those strong scotches that the other groomsmen and I had begun the day with). The rest of the night is a haze, but I know that we sent Lisa and Ryan off like champs, and that was the only thing that mattered.

The whole wedding weekend was one hell of a party, but I’m glad that we only have to celebrate the date from now on and not put on another spectacle each year.

I mean, I’m up for it, but I think that Chattanooga has had enough Anthony family weddings for quite some time.

Moving baseball back up in the standings

Anyone who knows me or has even engaged me in a drunken conversation at a bar can tell you that baseball is my favorite thing in the world. As a lover of many sports, I appreciate things like football, hockey, golf, etc. But ever since I started watching Phillies games on television as a kid, every other sport has been in competition for a very distant second place on my list of priorities.

For a sport that is just a few decades away from turning 200 years old, there are plenty of things that baseball nailed right from the start. Athletes have gotten a little better, but 90 feet between bases is still the perfect distance to make for close plays on balls hit in the infield. Similarly, 60 feet, 6 inches is still a perfectly measured out space for the drama between pitchers and batters to play out with both sides able to claim their victories throughout an afternoon of play.

Of course, there have also been misfires. For all of their character, those wacky old parks with 250 foot foul lines, 480 foot power alleys, hills/flagpoles/light towers in the field of play, and scheduled doubleheaders were probably bad for players and fans alike. And that’s just talking about integral parts of the game. We could go on forever about ‘Disco Demolition Night’, uniform trends of the 70s and 80s, and most of the Expos/Nationals’ franchise history in general, but that’s all easily fixed.

I personally have no problem with the way today’s game is played. I take some exception to absurdly large contracts causing specific players or positions to be over or underutilized because of preconceived notions of what a power bat or closer should do, but the game is still pretty much perfect to me.

Unfortunately, that’s not what a lot of sportswriters will tell you. Those guys will say that games are now dragging on far too long. They’ll also complain that later and later starts for the season’s most important games are costing the game a new generation of fans who are asleep well before the final out of the World Series.

This sentiment is shared by the powers that be at ESPN. It used to be that a normal spring or summer morning brought highlights from just about every MLB game and took up the majority of airtime on SportsCenter. Nowadays, only front-running teams or thrilling finishes will make the highlight reel and baseball in general is taking a backseat to NBA/NHL playoff games and even offseason NFL news.

I think that the rationale behind all of this is relatively simple. The nature of baseball doesn’t lend itself to plenty of opportunities for enthralling television. The ball spends the majority of the game not in play and when there is action – especially on balls hit into the outfield – the runners and the ball often aren’t on the screen at the same time and it’s hard for people without a firm grasp of the game to fully grasp what is happening.

Compare that to basketball games where all 10 players are on screen or football, where the ball is as big as everyone’s head and is always the focal point of the camera. Specific drawn up plays and telestrators are tailor-made for a great television viewing experience.

These advantages and disadvantages flip-flop when you look at these sports as viewed from a seat in the stadium.

Taking in a baseball game from the bleachers puts all of the action right in front of you. Additionally, the overall atmosphere of sunny days, entertaining stadium vendors, and cheesy organ music is Americana at its finest. Hockey – another sport that suffers when viewed through a single camera – is similar in that the hard-hitting action and constantly moving puck are much easier to track when you’re actually at the game.

Meanwhile, football games can be a bit boring to watch in person if you can’t afford the insanely expensive premium seating or you aren’t a student at a college powerhouse.

Where these discrepancies hurt baseball is that its allure as a television broadcast is lacking. That leads to lower ratings, which leads to less valuable contracts for broadcasting rights. With these deals growing exponentially and now easily reaching billions of dollars, baseball is missing out on plenty of money that sports like football are all too happy to pick up.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that baseball is suffering. Attendance throughout the league is doing very well aside from a few struggling teams and going out to games has become a much more fashionable thing to do. Even the economic struggles of the last few years haven’t stopped fans from showing up all summer long.

But there’s only so much that seats worth a few dozen dollars each can do to make up for nine and ten-figure television contracts. Add in the continued droning of some talking heads who insist that the game is boring and unsuited for television and the hits will eventually start to hurt worse throughout the league.

So what can be done about all of this?

Old-school guys aren’t going to want to hear this, but there are a couple of things that baseball could do to retain some of its mainstream appeal without changing the nature of the game. Both ideas will have some purists cursing my name, but (even as an old-school guy myself) I really think that these relatively minor concessions are worth it to make baseball more enjoyable for some fans who may have strayed away while keeping all of the best parts of the game that I love.

A 138 game season

Baseball is a grind. There’s no disputing that. Baseball players don’t endure the contact of football players and they don’t run nearly as much as basketball or soccer players, but they do stay in peak athletic condition while going out there just about every day through the hottest months of the year.

But this isn’t about that. Baseball players have been playing their 162-game schedule for over half a century and today’s medicine and nutrition are light years ahead of the 60s as far as keeping guys in playing shape is concerned.

The reason that baseball needs to hack a month off of its schedule simply has to do with making a given game more important to any given viewer or fan. It takes repeated matchups between division rivals to find out which teams are most deserving of playoff spots, but 138 is enough to do that. These 18-game season series against every division rival in the weighted schedules that have been used for the last 10 or so years are more than enough. It gets a bit stale when teams play over 40 percent of their schedule against the same four teams.

Eliminating six of those games (one home series and one away) still gives division rivals plenty of chances to go head-to-head and cuts out the necessary 24 games from the schedule.

Here is where things really start to get beneficial. By starting the season at the same time as usual, this will put end of the regular season in the first week of September. Throw in the playoffs as they are currently set up and we’re left with a full season that ends right around October 1.

Bumping up the World Series by just 25 days or so will make a huge difference as far as ratings are concerned. This is because there are less important competing games for baseball to contend with at the beginning of October than there are just a few weeks later.

On October 1, the nation’s best college football teams are largely still beating up on non-conference cupcakes. At the end of the month, conference matchups and rivalry games are in full swing and dominate the national headlines. The NFL is also playing throughout the month, but – as with the college game – the games that would be occurring in mid-September and early October would still be very early in the season and not take up as much of the news cycle with previews.

If MLB used this period to conduct its postseason and avoided most of its clash with the NFL by not scheduling playoff games for Sundays, baseball could reclaim its hold over much of the nation’s attention span as its most important games are being played.

Cutting about 15 percent of the regular season out would basically render records as they currently stand useless, but baseball has always been the only sport that focuses so heavily on its old marks. Besides, just think of how fun the first 20-30 years of the new setup would be with all of today’s best players desperately scrambling to fill the new, totally empty record books.

Add the DH in the National League

I’ll just stand over here for a few moments while some of you toss your computer out the window and start downing the hard liquor.

…

I’m well aware of the fact that this is a hot-button issue for any baseball purist. Make no mistake. I’m fully in Crash Davis’ corner when he calls for an amendment to the Constitution outlawing AstroTurf and the designated hitter.

But this isn’t about appeasing those who are already die-hard fans of the game. This is about drawing in new fans or regaining those who have wandered away recently. Simply put, the designated hitter leads to more offense and – as proven in every sport – more offense leads to more excitement and happier audiences.

We can talk all we want about how all nine guys should be responsible for both offense and defense, but it is unwise to just ignore the benefits of the DH. Not only is there more offense, but never having to worry about hitting can also improve the talent level of pitchers. Without having to grab a bat, pitchers would be free to focus more on their main role for the team and wouldn’t have to spend any extra energy on a scorching summer afternoon like they currently do when they find themselves on the base paths.

It’s really gotten bad for some National League teams. A resurgence in dominant pitching throughout all of baseball in the last few years has left scoring down across the board. For offensively challenged NL squads, this has left virtual black holes at the bottom of their batting orders.

No one is going to get drawn into watching games when every third inning is basically punted away by offenses.

Changing over to the DH in the National League would be a big shift to be sure, but it’s not as if we’d be fundamentally altering the game. Half of MLB has played with the DH for 40 years and it has led to higher scoring without giving a definite advantage or disadvantage when playing NL teams.

This change is even more necessary now that there are exactly 15 teams in each league.

Teams can no longer shelve their worries about finding a DH or getting their pitchers to swing a bat only during a few weeks set aside for interleague play. The new division setups ensure that there will always be at least one interleague series going on at any given point of the season.

I’d much rather see pitchers have to pull their own weight at the plate and I think it hurts the game to see older guys totally give up on playing defense or hitting for average in hopes of becoming a well-paid, all-or-nothing DH in the middle of the order. I don’t think that either of those things makes the game more enjoyable, but plenty of people on the fence about baseball do. Baseball already has my money and interest. The only smart move is to go after those who aren’t flocking to the ballpark or shelling out money for the Extra Innings plan.

There are plenty of other tweaks that could be proposed, but I think that just these two changes would make baseball a bit more attractive to the general sports fan without causing a mutiny from current fans.

Baseball gained its status as our nation’s pastime back when there weren’t as many options and there just wasn’t as much to do.

But America has grown, and our citizens are now wrapped up in the huge demands of everyday life and the millions of different entertainment options vying for their attention. If someone is going to invest upwards of three hours on a baseball game, the game had better live up to our big expectations.

The good news is that – for all of the heat it takes from some talking heads – baseball is still one of the most ubiquitous things in this country.

The average person might not know how to calculate slugging percentage or that Will Meyers is supposed to be the next big thing in the sport, but it’s almost impossible to go through a normal day without having some aspect or terminology from the game enter your life.

Entrepreneurs will continue to swing for the fences, nervous college graduates will often strike out in their first real job interviews, and high school kids will never cease to try and make it to second or third base with their date.

Baseball is firmly engrained in our culture. Even as some say that it can’t compete with flashier sports for the public’s interest, it is still everywhere around us. Maybe the game just needs a little kick in the pants to give it a way to confidently put itself out there for the country to see.

I’ll go ahead and let Terence Mann bring us home:

“This field, this game: it’s a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again.”