Southland Amateur Baseball League

Baseball is for losers

I love baseball. It’s a great sport, emblematic of everything that makes America the rowmantic and weird place it deserves to be.

Sports feel over-specialized and over-refined in our modern day. I’m of the mind that everyone should do a little art and everyone should do a little sports, rather than most people doing neither and simply watching an elite group of artists/athletes have all the fun. I think the real benefits of art and sports come from having done them yourself. Our understanding of ourselves changes in the struggle for excellence at games and artwork.

To that end, I started playing baseball. Rec leagues (those I’m aware of) still tend to be run by a retired reserve of ex-specialists—I can’t compete with them. I’m someone who didn’t hold a bat for over a decade. No, I wanted baseball to feel like something you could drop in on, flirt with, and get out of with no strings attached. So I took over a small, relatively unknown field for one saturday a month and invited all the people I knew to come play.

I was worried there would be a skill floor to achieve basic pitching and hitting that would take most of my friends a few weeks to get right—I was totally wrong. People are pretty great at baseball, even when they shouldn’t be, and we’ve had high scoring and close games almost every time. It has been revelatory. It has kept my spirits high through much trouble. I implore you to see if you can do something like this yourself in your community.

If you’re in Los Angeles and want to play, send me an email.