Opening Day of Baseball Season - How to Pretend Like You Care

Opening Day makes baseball fans forget how boring baseball is to other people. Here’s a few tips to keep you from having to explain why you’re not a fan.

By Jason Salmon · March 28, 2024

This is exactly how you feel when people talk to you about baseball Unsplash/Chris Chow

It’s officially spring which means the flowers are in bloom, the clocks have betrayed us, and in baseball, it means the end of spring training and the beginning of the summer. Does that not make any sense to you? No? Then you can count yourself among the millions of people in America who do not care at all about baseball. Sure it was once the national pastime, but that was a bygone era when people wore full wool suits to games in the middle of July and the top 40 was cluttered with songs about tiskets and taskets.

This was an iPhone when baseball was America's favorite sport Unsplash/Library of Congress

But tiskets and taskets have been replaced with tiks and toks and we now know that cargo shorts are the uniform of dads who catch foul balls without dropping their baby or beer. We also know that our current national pastime is outrage. So we’ve come up with some useful phrases you can say to keep those hardcore fans from getting outraged at you for believing that baseball is just a reality show about men who wear tight pants:

“It’s a long season”

This is a good one to start with because it is honest for you and accurate for them. The season will be long for them because of how many games are played and for you because of how they won’t stop yapping about it. Also if you shake your head, “No,” while saying it, he’ll interpret that as, “who knows” but you’re actually saying that if he paid this much attention to his wife he wouldn’t be living in his car right now..

Either way you look at it... it's just too much Unsplash/Jose Francisco

“We’ve just got to throw strikes”

This one makes them think you know something about pitching even though you majored in musical theater and you think pitching is when people get off key during karaoke.

“If the big bats make contact this thing is over”

This one works on two levels. First, it makes them think you know something about hitting. But more importantly, referring to big bats making contact in the wake of the pandemic may bring up bad memories of cross species disease transmission and they may stop talking to you about baseball altogether. Isn’t that what you’re really after?

Remember, these tips are only if you have to get along with the these baseball fanatics. If burning bridges is an option, definitely do that instead.

In the world of professional sports, where physical prowess and mental strength are paramount, athletes often turn to peculiar rituals to gain a psychological edge. We delve into the fascinating realm of these unusual practices, from the mildly quirky to the outright bizarre.