The Greatest Time Of The Year

This is the greatest time of the year! Forget Christmas or New Years or any of that nonsense. This is it, right here! Football season is in full swing and baseball playoffs are kicking into gear; Football and Baseball, together at last! To the part of my brain that deals with sports (read: all of it), this is about as good as it gets. You see, I don't really enjoy the "other" sports.

I get some entertainment from the Olympics. I like anything to do with skiing because it affords me the opportunity to experience a several hundred foot vertical drop without risking my own life. The winter Olympics only occurs every four years, though. I will admit that I also enjoy when any of the other hometown teams do well, such as the Bruins, Celtics and even, God help me, the Revolution. There is even a little bit of sports-related enthusiasm for golf, provided Tiger Woods is involved and is destroying the competition like a child destroys ants with a magnifying glass. However, all these other sports do not even come close to bringing me the joy that baseball and football bring to me. I cannot tell you why, or when I picked these two sports, but I do know it is unlikely to change.

It all started with baseball. I have been a huge baseball player since I was a fetus (my poor mother), and thankfully so was my father. I was able to enjoy long hours in the yard playing catch and "pepper," which was basically catch with an increased risk of cranial damage. I also have very fun memories of my dad pitching to me in the backyard and me hitting the ball towards our house. I always seemed to just barely miss a window, and yet we never seemed to be deterred.

Then, to my complete and utter shock, I discovered that there were actually people (real people, not super-heroes like Batman) who got paid real money to play the game full-time. This, by itself, would have been awesome enough, but I also discovered that they don't just get paid to play... They get paid zillions of dollars to play! Naturally, I immediately determined that this would be the line of work for me. I mean, who could possibly pass up on the opportunity to get paid to play such an awesome game as baseball? All the other fools who had real jobs, such as manager, postal worker, or President of the United States, were clearly (and I say this with the utmost respect for all those who are not the President of the United States) morons.

Of course, as I got older, I came to realize that pretty much every male that has ever lived since 1850, including a sizable number of the females, has wanted to play professional baseball at some point in their lives. The reason why most of these people did not accomplish that goal was because they came to the startling and soul-crushing realization that to become a professional baseball player you needed to be really, really, really good. If it were as easy to become a professional baseball player as it was to become the President of the United States, then there would be nothing for us to do in November except train for next season and watch football.

So, I continued attending school despite my desire not to, just in case some terrible tragedy prevented me from making it into the "bigs," such as a career-ending knee injury or gainful employment.

Well, I'm now nearly 25 years old. While I have yet to actually make the professionals in any capacity (even Rookie League), I am still holding out hope. Oh, sure, I went to "college" and now have a "job," but there is still a large part of my soul that yearns to play baseball full-time. I gather that this is something that never goes away. I can definitely imagine myself at the age of 85, throwing baseballs into a net, or maybe into some virtual-reality baseball simulation training device or whatever exists in 2068, at the frightening speed of 32 miles per hour. I will be risking serious and life-threatening injuries, completely ignoring the frustrated and angry shouts of my wife to stop being an idiot and come inside, all in the desperate hope that I will be ready should they change the allowable try-out age to include 85 year olds with an excellent change-up.

My interest in football, on the other hand, is very different. It started in my late pre-teen years. This was right around the same time that my male hormones kicked in and I started to develop an insatiable desire to hit things. Thankfully, proper rearing by my parents prevented me from ever unleashing my fury upon normal people. The only outlet I had for my raging hormones that was direct, but entirely non-painful, was through watching football. It was like watching all my inner male urges being enacted in all their glory without me having to risk a shattered knee.

Just imagine what it was like to first discover football; Here was a sport entirely dedicated to having large, muscular, truck-sized men barrel into each other at the absolute fastest speeds they are capable of and it was completely socially acceptable! They try to pretend the sport is about something else by adding numbers and lines all over the field, and keeping "score," but we all know that the only real reason this sport exists is so that men can run around acting manly for a few hours each week.

I immediately fell in love with watching football. It was a glorious sport. I even played for one year in high school, and I was pretty good, except for the fact that I weighed about as much as a bag of popcorn and most of my teammates were the size of Buick's. I made up for the drastic size difference, however, by being completely insane. I would run into guys head first without even knowing if the guy had the ball. For all I knew I was hitting my own teammates, or the referee, or a cheerleader. It didn't matter, though. All that mattered was that I got to hit something.

Fortunately, I could tell I had no future in this sport (unlike baseball, of course). I think coming to that realization was my ultimate salvation. I would have gotten killed in college.

As you can see, I have a deep love of these two sports. Tragically, during most of the year I can only enjoy one of these two sports at a time because they take place largely in different season. From November until February, I have only football. And from April until August, I have only baseball. It is only for the two glorious months of September and October that I get to enjoy both! Football pre-season and the first couple regular season games are suddenly fused together with the end of the baseball regular season and post-season. It's heaven for a guy like me. Even in spite of the fact that it only lasts for two months, I still get very excited each year when it rolls around.

Thank goodness I'm not the President. If I were, the world would be in a big heap of trouble every September and October. I would probably let Iran invade all the way to Des Moine before I even noticed something might be wrong. Then again, no other self-respecting male would notice either. I can just picture all the girlfriends and wives shrieking, "Honey, for the love of God, the Iranians are kicking down the door!" and all the boyfriends and husbands responding with "Later! The Pats are on the forty with only two minutes to go, and the Sox game starts in fifteen minutes!"

It's important to remember that the current President is also a man. I suggest all the women be on the lookout for any scary looking tanks until the end of the World Series.

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