Somewhere, there's baseball.

I suppose it’s inevitable.

As a writer and a sports fan, you will hit a certain age when you’re overcome by a compulsion to write about baseball. The urge to wax poetic about the game comes on much like back problems and high blood pressure—slowly at first, then all at once, and with a frightening inevitability. It is with a heavy heart that I must report I have apparently reached that age.

Caveat emptor; don’t say you weren’t warned.

Baseball was the first sport that I truly loved.

There’s a good measure of situational happenstance to this; I grew up in Cleveland in the 1990s, and in the 1990s, Cleveland was a great place to love baseball. A once-moribund laughingstock of a team playing in a dank, oversized barn of a stadium moved into a glittering new ballpark and became the most exciting team in baseball seemingly overnight. The 1995 Cleveland squad might just be one of the very best teams in any professional sport to never win a championship; they sported a lineup full of future Hall-of-Famers and just-as-good-in-that-moment shooting stars that won often and often won in thrilling, come-from-behind, last-at-bat fashion. I was thirteen years old and relished every minute of that season, to the extent that I can still recite extensive details of the team and its stats twenty-seven years later.

As time went on, my love of the game didn’t diminish, but the time I had available for it did.

An active appreciation of baseball takes up a lot of time—something that’s an asset for a teenager in the era of dial-up internet who’s truly got nothing better to do, but a liability for a 40-year-old with two kids and two jobs. I still love the game, but these days I check in with the Cleveland Guardians’ season the same way I check in with old friends—that is, with sincere interest, but not nearly as often as I’d like.

I can tell you that they’re in first place right now, a fact that delights me, and I can tell you that Jose Ramirez and Triston McKenzie are very good, but I’d be hard-pressed to run down the 40-man roster the way I once could have. We are bound to drift away from the things that once seemed the most important in the world to us as kids.

Last week, I was worn out.

The third week of each month is an exhausting slog for me right now, a stretch that finds me traveling for my day job, visiting a series of in-progress construction sites in back-to-back-to-back fashion. Wednesday evening, I was driving across central Pennsylvania on my way from one such set of meetings to another, when I saw that I was approaching Altoona. I don’t know much about Altoona, other than that they have weird regional pizza, but I know they have a minor-league baseball team, and that latter fact excited me. I checked my phone, and they were home that night.

I pulled off the highway.

I still had three hours to drive before an early-morning meeting the next day, so I couldn’t stay for a whole ballgame, but I figured it’d at least be a chance to stretch my legs and check out the team shop for a hat.

To my surprise, a game was already going at 4:30 in the afternoon—a continuation of a rainout from the night before that was tied 2-2 in the eighth inning. I bought the cheapest ticket I could, and headed into the ballpark.

It’s a charming venue, everything you’d want out of a minor-league experience. The few fans who’d showed up early for the continuation mostly sat in picnic tables on the covered concourse, as a few drops of rain peppered the grandstands. A historic wooden roller-coaster looms over the right-field fence, with the Allegheny Mountains visible in the distance. One could wander anywhere in the park and still feel like they’re right on top of the field. I know, because I did.

I’ve found it frustrating trying to appreciate sports lately.

I take immense pleasure in college football, especially as my beloved Cincinnati Bearcats continue on an unprecedented run of success. That enjoyment is clouded by the sport’s relentless consolidation, however; the feeling that television money will eventually boil a historically-sprawling and contradictory sport down to two super-conferences and a playoff outside of which nothing else will matter.

The NFL, NBA and MLB seem hell-bent on monetizing every aspect of fandom, to the point where things as routine as schedule releases are delivered with maximum prime-time fanfare. Gambling has always been a part of sports, but it’s never been so shamelessly integrated with those sports’ broadcast as it suddenly is. Worst of all, the professional football team I spent the past few decades loving has undertaken one of the most disgraceful and cynical attempts at winning I’ve ever seen, and will surely face no consequence if it works.

There is no innocent fandom anymore, and perhaps it’s naïve to believe that there ever was. I’d just like to enjoy a ballgame.

I wandered to the patio beyond the left-field fence, and bought an Italian sausage and a Pepsi from the concession stand. (Again, I still had driving to do.) I stood at a cocktail table and ate, watching as the game rolled into the 10th and then 11th inning, still tied. A couple of fans near me chatted excitedly about their trip to visit every minor-league ballpark in the state of Pennsylvania, a journey that sounded both pointless and divine.

I finished my impromptu dinner, and looked at my watch; I’d have to get back on the road before these teams resolved the previous night’s game, and well before they started that night’s. Real life was waiting for me hours down the highway, with deadlines and responsibilities and consequences, all the things minor league baseball abhors. I sighed, took one last look at the field, and headed back to my rental car.

As I merged back onto the highway, I felt something.

I hadn’t found the fountain of youth in that ballpark. I hadn’t chased down the ghosts of blackballed players or of tortured parental relationships, nor redemption of any sort. I’d just found a ballgame, and that was enough.

Baseball’s greatest asset is its sheer mass. Between the majors and the minors, there are hundreds of teams in the United States and Canada alone—hundreds of teams playing hundreds of games each summer, a mountain of sport the totality of which is impossible to perceive from a single spot. There’s so much game action that any attempt to surround it with unnecessary pomp and pomposity will inevitably be interrupted by action on the field; there’s a drive to deep left by Castellanos, and so on.

In those many thousands of games, virtually anything can happen, and quite often does. The magic isn’t in any single game, though, but the promise of more games tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It’s in the feeling that no matter how much you drift away from the things you loved as a youth, they will still be there when you come looking for them.

Perhaps it was fitting that I left before the final out was recorded; in doing so, I could maintain the fantasy of a game that never ended, of one that just kept going forever.

This is the promise I choose to take comfort in, the promise the sport offers.

No matter when it is, no matter where you are, or what’s occupying your time, somewhere, right now, there’s baseball.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)