Why Baseball?

I decided to care about baseball in 2018. What if I started paying attention to professional sports, I wondered? Would I, a not-particularly-sporty person, actually become emotionally invested in my chosen team and their performance? Would it be fun?

First I had to pick a sport, and baseball seemed like a good choice for a few reasons. One, I live close enough to a Major League team’s home field to attend games in person. Indeed, I’d already been to a few. It was fun and surprisingly affordable (the cheapest tickets at the time were $15 CAD). Two, baseball didn’t seem to have the same reputation for violence as many other sports: players weren’t frequently being carted off the field with traumatic injuries, fighting each other, or appearing in the news for assaulting women. (I intend to explore these topics in detail in future posts.) Three, I knew that baseball had a long and sometimes weird history. I’d heard enough quirky baseball anecdotes to be intrigued. And finally, my late grandmother was an avid Yankees fan. Despite being close to her, I never asked how she got into baseball or what she enjoyed about it. I wish I had. For these reasons, baseball interested me. It seemed like a sport I wouldn’t have to work too hard to care about.

Next, I needed a team to follow. The logical choice was the Toronto Blue Jays, my local team, but picking them just because they play nearby seemed boring to me. There were so many other metrics I could use to decide whom I wanted to root for. How long have they been around? How cool is their stadium? How much do I like their mascot, logo, and team colors? Do they occasionally win things, but not so often that people will accuse me of jumping on a bandwagon? And of course, how ethical do they seem? Are they relatively free from accusations of wrongdoing? The team I ended up choosing—for a variety of reasons I’ll detail in a future post—is the Chicago Cubs. (Please note: this is an explanation of how I picked a team to follow as a baseball newbie in 2018, not an endorsement of everything the Cubs have done before or since.)

The next step, of course, was actually watching games. Because the Cubs are unlikely ever to come to Toronto thanks to the way Major League Baseball works, and because I am not wealthy enough to travel to Chicago every time there’s a game, this meant watching TV. On one hand, this was a good thing because I got to listen to commentary. But as it turns out, baseball commentary is often completely unhelpful to newbies like me. Commentators spend a lot of time not talking about the game at all! While I was struggling to understand the basics of gameplay, the commentators were often deep in statistics that seemed to have little bearing on what was happening on the field. I found that the more I watched, the more questions I had.

Some questions were technical: how many foul balls is a batter allowed to hit before there’s some kind of penalty? Some were strategy-related: why did that guy decide not to run? Others didn’t fit neatly into one category, but touched on gameplay, history, and the personal experiences of players: why is Wrigley Field allowed to have that big wall of ivy with brick behind it and don’t outfielders get hurt when they crash into it? Thinking up new questions to answer became fun, and that’s when I realized I was hooked.

I still had lots of unanswered questions, though, and that’s why I started this blog. I wanted to document my own growth as a baseball fan and share my findings with other people. Resources already exist, of course. But they can be disorganized, heavy on super-technical details, alienating to queer women like me, or just plain not fun to read. There was an opportunity for me to create the kind of content I was looking for, and thus, Switch Hitter was born.

Baseball is the most important part of this story, but it’s not the whole story. Read about why this baseball blog is informed by my perspective as a bisexual woman here.