Home » Sports » Baseball Hall of Fame » Thanks to Cable, Baseball is a Four Season Sport

Thanks to Cable, Baseball is a Four Season Sport

© Joseph J. Checkler

Nowadays, free-agent filing and signing period are considered an extension of the baseball season. The hot stove league, as they call it, cooks just long enough to bridge the gap between the World Series and pitchers and catchers.

But for baseball purists, there is ESPN Classic, and really big books that are fun to read. I do not need to read the financial status of baseball teams, or listen to press conferences about contraction. The off-season is time to catch up on stuff I need to learn.

I know what happened in game six of the 1986 World Series. But I watch it every time it is on television. A young Roger Clemens against Bobby Ojeda, the Red Sox one game away from ending their 68 year world championship drought.

I pretend that I have contracted Alzheimer's disease, and grab a cold one from the fridge. Sometimes, if I'm feeling ambitious, I take a really big baseball encyclopedias out of my closet, the kind that makes me want to start lifting some of those dumbbells on the other corner of my closet.

I watch the game, and look up the stats of Marty Barrett, or Tim Teufel, or Dave Henderson. I wonder how much longer their careers lasted, if I had overlooked anything about their careers or where they were born. People my age would call me a geek, but I just call myself someone involved in a lifelong love affair with the greatest sport ever invented.

I do not want to be misunderstood. I love basketball, hockey, and especially football. I run a fantasy football league. I like non-sports stuff too. I like to read the New York Times, listen to Led Zeppelin and have sex as much as the next guy. But I will never totally divorce baseball during the off season. It gives me too much from April to October for me to turn my back on it.

Writing about the Baseball Hall of Fame during the offseason may sound like a tedious job, but it is not. It took me a while to think about what the hell I was going to write about this month, and then it came to me. Like that Shane Spencer throw from right field came to Derek Jeter in Oakland during the 2001 A.L.D.S., this article came to me. Why not write about the underrated, if non-eventful portion of the never ending baseball season.

Call me dull for watching baseball games that were played 15 years ago as if they are being played today. Call me a stats freak for dusting off those old books to look up some obscure numbers. But most importantly. call me a baseball junkie who prepares for next season more tirelessly than the players do.

The copyright of the article Thanks to Cable, Baseball is a Four Season Sport in Baseball Hall of Fame is owned by . Permission to republish Thanks to Cable, Baseball is a Four Season Sport in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.