Put Me In Coach

I'm ready to play, today! Baseball season is right around the corner and I can already smell the grass in my nose, hear the crack of the bat, and hear the sound of a little league team shouting their heroes name when they step to the plate. This, my friends, is baseball. America's pasttime and my favorite game. I've been into baseball since I was 4 or 5 years old and I have never stopped loving the game. Unlike many other things, a baseball game never seems to lose its luster. I long for the first pitch of the season, the 4-6-3 double play, the roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat, the smell of garlic fries and hot roasted peanuts, and the feeling I get inside my chest whenever I see a young boy and his father taking in a game. I love it when little boys get up and attempt to start a wave. Future leaders...these young ones. Baseball also makes me think about my future. I long for the day that I can take my first-born son to a game and explain the game to him. I can tell him about my childhood experiences with baseball, my first game, and the stories that my family told me growing up. I will show him movies like "The Sandlot", "The Natural", "Field of Dreams", and "Major League" (when he's older, of course). As soon as football season wraps up, like an adult salmon swimming to the place of his birth to spawn, I get a feeling that the baseball season is right around the corner. Baseball brings me back to the world of the fantastic. Problems, worries, bills, etc. disappear as soon as my ticket gets scanned at the gate. It's like an invitation to a place where time stands still and you are allowed a brief return to your childhood. Unlike other sports, baseball will never lose its luster with me. To quote Robert Redford from The Natural, "God, I love baseball". I couldn't have said it any better myself.