The Pre-Resolution Stage, and First Encounters of the Nerd Kind
Monday, March 03 2008 @ 09:17 PM EST
Contributed by: Leigh
We've written about Baseball Withdrawal here before, a grim topic to be sure. The first week of March, however, represents the tantalizing near-end of the anticipation, the sun's teasing peak from behind the cloud, that here-comes-the-waiter-and-I-think-that's-my-Reuben-sandwich-he's-carrying feeling. This is the post-adjustment, pre-resolution stage of Baseball Withdrawal Syndrome. I freakin' love this part.
In addition to the more obvious signs (the turning calender, the
fantasy drafts, the Spring Training games) of this stage, there are a
couple that have become perennial for me:
- Watching Ken Burns' Baseball on DVD. It's the fastest 1,140
minutes you'll ever experience. I've developed a Pavlovian contentment
response to the voice of narrator John Chancellor. Every March, I
watch it, and I never tire of the stories. It's playing on my TV as I
type this.
- Waiting for a baseball video game to be released. This year, I
am waiting on a game that is being released tomorrow, whereupon I will
take some flex-time in the afternoon to marvel at the modern
technology and reluctantly acknowledge that my thumbs aren't as fast as
they used to be. Over the weekend, I went to every store in the GFA
(the Geater Fredericton Area; LOL) that could conceivably stock video
games, just on the chance that some clerk either blatantly disrespected
or willfully neglected the "do not sell before 3/4/08" stamp on his
store's shipment. My fruitless efforts to prematurely game were
restrained compared to some.
The most significant, however, seems to be the introspection. That is,
the self-awareness that accompanies the sheer nerdiness of the early
March experience. How did I get here? This year's bout of
introspection hit while I was at a business lunch last week and some
colleagues were discussing the books that they had been reading of late
and I had to think fast and lie through my teeth, because the real
answer to the question "what are you reading now?" would have been
something like "well I've just polished off Shandler's Baseball
Forecaster, I've been rereading Brunt's Diamond Dreams, Prospectus
ships soon too, and I've been hitting refresh every five minutes on
Rotoworld's player news page".
The unfailing annual reduction of this introspection are the
questions: how did this happen? When did it all start? How did I
become such a baseball nerd? I vividly remember that as an
eight-year-old I would lay out all of my baseball cards on my bed and
sort them by home runs, most to least, first for the most recent season
and then for career. I remember the first time that I learned that
some baseball statistics were context-dependent: at the age of seven or
eight, I explained to my father how Vince Coleman was the best
base-stealer because he stole over 100 bases every year, and he replied
that Coleman must be a good hitter to have had enough opportunities to
steal that many. I remember that at age twelve my parents bought me
Strat-o-Matic, and when I explained to my friend who lived next-door
(and with whom I had played countless hours of a baseball trivia board
game that he had) that I got a new board game called Strat-o-Matic that
we should try, he said, "great, how hard are the questions?" The rest
is history.
Two questions, Bauxites: what are your signs of the post-adjustment, pre-resolution stage of Baseball Withdrawal Syndrome that hits us every year in early March? Also, when did you first realize that you were a baseball nerd?
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