It’s Officially Summer Now That MLB Is the Only Game in Town
There are a million ways to define summertime, but for me, summer arrived for real on Friday when the Golden State Warriors finished off the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. The Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup the night before, meaning the 1-2 exit of meaningful hockey and basketball competition came together about as quickly as it ever could.
And now, America, baseball is all you’ve got.
June, July and August are the best months on the calendar, by far. Think of backyard cookouts and days at the beach. Think of weekend road trips. Think of eating ice cream and sitting in the shade because it’s too hot to be in direct sunshine. Just don’t think about any sport that doesn’t have an endless red seam on its ball. Baseball is what carries us through these summer months. As it always has and always will.
No other professional team sport gets to carry our collective interests by itself, at any time. Basketball and hockey—in the guise of the NBA and NHL—are co-dependent entities that play one-off games over the course of the fall, winter and spring. They’re like a bike with training wheels, where neither one gets to break apart and go it alone. Basketball fans and hockey fans are two different sorts of people, and both get to follow their respective sports, teams and players together.
Football—in the form of the NFL, and to a different degree the NCAA version of it—storms in during the fall and does its one-day-on, six-days-off routine through the winter. Baseball joins it during the fall, and the basketball/hockey tandem starts up again in early October, meaning that football, for all its swagger, never gets to be the sole focus of our sporting attention, either.
Baseball—the everyday sport we’re brought up with as children—now has the playing field all to itself. Some might claim soccer—in the form of the soon-to-begin World Cup tournament—will take up the slack. But I say they’re wrong for two reasons: there’s no USA team to root for this time, and that game’s star players just don’t capture our imaginations the way Aaron Judge, Clayton Kershaw, Jose Altuve and others do for baseball. Go ahead and get excited when Messi or somebody else scores a goal during a World Cup game, but an international soccer tournament just doesn’t get the heart pounding like your everyday bases-clearing double or home run-stealing catch does. That’s just who we are as Americans. This game suits us like nothing else can.
Kids are out of school, graduations are nearly over, and—to borrow a line from John Fogarty—the time has come to give this game a ride. Every day, with the exception of July’s All-Star break, players will take the field, counts will be worked, pitches will be fouled off and we will be reaffirmed that baseball is the essential American sport. Call it the National Pastime, even, because until further notice, this game alone has all of us in its grasp.
