What We're Reading Now
Baseball is Back and Anything is Possible
2 April 2013
Allison celebrated the return of Major League Baseball yesterday and enjoyed reading many Facebook posts, Tweets and articles about Opening Day. (It’s clear that fans everywhere feel optimistic and believe absolutely anything is possible.)
Tags: allison read, balance, baseball, happiness, virginia festival of the book
It still makes me laugh to think about how long I resisted joining Facebook, Twitter, and blogging every Tuesday. I enjoy social media personally and professionally so much now that I can’t quite imagine life without it. And there’s no better time to be a part of social media community than when a sport season returns.
Yesterday was Opening Day for Major League Baseball and fans everywhere celebrated game one of 162 games to be played in the regular season by their favorite teams. If you’re curious about my lifelong love of the Atlanta Braves, then you might enjoy my 2012 post about Chipper Jones’ foray into the Twittersphere before his retirement last season or my 2011 post about leadership lessons from the former General Manager of the Atlanta Braves, John Schuerholz.
All day yesterday, I enjoyed posts from fellow baseball fans who were excited about the return of our pastime and hopeful about their teams' prospects. Many of us haven’t communicated in quite some time, others I haven’t seen in decades, and others I only know through social media and have never met. And yet, baseball and its infinite possiblities unites us. I often wonder what it is about baseball that’s so special.
For me, I know it’s primarily something I share with my daddy. He’s loved the Braves since he was a little boy and they were in Milwaukee. We agonize over trades and contract extensions in the off season and worry about the players and their successes and failures every day during the regular season. Like everyone, we both have important and sometimes stressful things to deal with when it comes to work and the rest of our lives. I think our time spent on the Braves is a welcome relief from those realities and mostly just a whole lot of fun. There’s also something about the pace of baseball that we find incredibly relaxing. I know some people find it boring, but I think this quote from Jane Leavy author of The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle, at our recent Virginia Festival of the Book sums up our retort to the boring criticism pretty well, "Baseball is only dull for dull minds. There's room to think."
And finally, there’s something wonderfully optimistic about the beginning of a season. Everybody starts at the same place and anything is possible. This graphic from a 2011 Opening Day blog post gets right to the heart of the matter. There are 30 teams and absolutely anything is possible for each one of them. That’s the kind of optimism we know leads to healthier minds and bodies. I’m glad baseball helps me to remember that lesson and so much more.
Comments
Our Comment Policy:
Our blog posts are only half of the conversation. What our readers have to say is equally important to us, and we're grateful for all the comments that continue the dialog.
To ensure that the discussion here is as useful as possible to all of our readers, please be respectful of our contributors and refrain from harassing, threatening and/or vulgar language. We reserve the right to screen and remove any comments from the site. If you have a question about a comment or want to discuss our policy, please contact us. We'll talk it over.
There are no comments for this entry yet.