Baseball brings me great joy . . . and shouldn't everyone have something like that in their lives? We have family and friends and Hal the dog, but I was "given" all of those things. Baseball for me is something different. It's a passion, and passions aren't given, they're acquired. You find them on your own and then you explore them and cultivate them and play with them. A passion isn't one dimensional either. If you collect wine for a passion, you don't simply store bottles in your basement. No, you taste lots of different varieties and develop preferences. You learn about how they're made and how to tell one good ones from bad. Inevitably, you visit vineyards and learn how the stuff is made. You may even dabble in the history of great wines. Or your weekends might be occupied browsing wine stores or going to tastings with fellow oenophiles. If you're lucky enough to find something in your life to be passionate about, it's going to eventually push you into doing all those sorts of things . . and more.
Baseball is like that for me.
The course is titled simply "Baseball" because I couldn't think of a witty or meaningful subtitle to go along with it. In short what I wanted to try to do was pass along both the joy of the game and the desire to make sense of it. We'll meet for 4 days with the following rough agenda:
Monday:
Play catch, Baseball & America (Ken Burns), Learn to keep score, Play whiffleball, Attend the Stanford-USF game (5:30)
Tuesday:
How to watch a game, Stats & what makes a good ballplayer, A trip to the batting cage
Wednesday:
Scavenger hunt on the history of baseball in SF, Whiffleball at McCovey cove, Tour AT&T park, Meet with a Giants exec
Thursday:
Assemble pictures from SF, Final Blogs, Whiffleball, Attend the Giants-A's game (7:15)
The "product" of this course will be this blog - the thoughts & the pictures you find interesting.
The "product" of this course will be this blog - the thoughts & the pictures you find interesting.
