Because baseball season has started here in Japan, and because that means there’s nothing on the news other than lengthy baseball reports and features, I’m in the mood to talk about sports. More specifically, I’m in the mood to talk about why I’m not a big fan of baseball.

I’ve said before that baseball is simply a group of people standing in a field watching two other people play catch while some jerk with a stick tries to interrupt them. I’ve then had baseball fans say that I don’t appreciate the subtlety and nuance of baseball. Fair enough, but this strikes me as damning with faint praise. It’s basically the same as having this conversation:

A–Dude, your sister’s ugly.
B–No, dude, her looks have subtlety and nuance.
A–Whatever, dude.

My disinterest in baseball can be directly blamed on Colorado. When I was growing up, Colorado had no professional baseball team. They did have the Triple-A minor league Denver Bears and the first sporting event I remember attending at a major stadium was one of their games. I remember having been there, and I remember my cousin three or four times removed catching either a home run or a foul ball and joke-complaining that he’d dropped his napkin whilst doing so, but I don’t remember anything else about the game.

Also, until I was 10 or 11, Hayden, Colorado didn’t have any form of little league baseball, preferring to produce rather impressive football teams (to my Europeans readers, that’s the form of football where people attempt to knock each other down, not the one where people flop around pretending they’ve been shot) As a result, baseball wasn’t imprinted in my bones from a young age. (I still can’t judge where a fly ball is going to land.) In fact, if I remember correctly, I played “organized” soccer in p.e. class, and remember some European pro from the old North American Soccer League visiting our school and giving us tips long before I remember playing organized baseball.

What Colorado did have was basketball and the Denver Nuggets–I remember getting to see them play after some Boy Scout event and watching the great Dan Issel do a backwards dunk. Oddly, although I played basketball in junior high and for a year in high school (“play” being a very strong word for what I did) I never became a fan of professional basketball and couldn’t care less about who wins the championship. (College basketball, though, that’s a different story.)

More importantly, Colorado had the Denver Broncos. Although I sucked at football even worse than I sucked at basketball and didn’t play it at all, Hayden had, at the time, at least as I recall, a football culture that dominated all other sports and I’ve always been a football fan. Having grown up with the Orange Crush, I became a Bronco’s fan, gladly accepting the embarrassment and sense of tragicomedy that often accompanies that choice. Even after we moved back to Kansas right before my junior year of high school, I remained a Bronco’s fan. This, of course, meant constantly defending that choice:

A–Dude, you’re in Kansas now. You have to cheer for the Kansas City Chiefs.
B–Why does living in Kansas mean I have to cheer for a team from Misery, er, Missouri?
A–Because, well, because they have KANSAS in their name and that’s all that’s on TV, dude.
B–Whatever, dude.

I admit to having a soft spot for the Chiefs (Chieves?) and like to see them do well, but when I finally got to see them play Denver live at Arrowhead Stadium, I was decked out in my Bronco Brother Crap in the midst of many rabid Chief’s fans, costing me the friendship of my travel companion, at least during the game and until we were a safe distance away from the stadium.

Unfortunately, football season is a long way off. Until then, I’ll find myself wishing the Boys of Summer, actually only played in the summer.