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Why baseball? That is a very good question. And, like every other good question, there is no good answer. Those who love baseball will nod in agreement throughout any explanation, and those who don’t love baseball will just look on with bafflement. Those people are clearly insane.

Baseball has excited the passions for over a century. Cubs fans have been waiting in agony for almost a century for that one moment of glory—for that one day when they can say “World Champion Cubs” without someone adding on “1908.” Looking around Wrigley Field, you can still feel the hope behind the history. Who would go to Wrigley if they weren’t living in hope that someday the Cubs would again hold the title of World Champions? (Okay, I’ll grant that it’s amazingly beautiful.) There’s always hope. Baseball history is full of amazing victories.

There is a conclusion to every game. If it's rained or snowed out, or suspended because the local college football team needs to use the field to play their ESPN-broadcast game that evening and they need to convert the field, the game will be finished at a later date, and there will be a winner. Like every game, there will be equal opportunity for both teams to score runs. Until the last out, there always will be fans sitting in their seats, knowing that anything can happen.

During the regular season, there are only two days when a major league game is not played, and the longest break between games for any single team is the All-Star Break. Thus, when your team has a horrible loss—say 28-3—you don’t sit around for a full week waiting to redeem yourself. You wait until tomorrow (unless it’s an off-day). During the game, you can become riled up and passionate, but you don’t have to sulk in the agony of defeat for very long (unless it’s the last game of the season, but then you’re starting to look ahead to next year).

You want your team to win every game, but you know it’s not probable. On any given day, the worst team can beat the best team., and no one gasps in shock. It’s not just the statistical ability-- it’s everything from the luck to intensity of play.

Beyond the passion, baseball is the haven for nerds. We adore reading the statistics about our team and opposing teams before and during each game. Even people who aren’t interested in math want to know stats, like how many pitches per at-bat Shannon Stewart averaged versus Lewww Ford (3.57 versus 3.99) or what percentage of inherited runners J.C. Romero allowed to score (42.9%). I’m happy to locate or calculate these things for anyone who asks. Yes, I’m a nerd.

I am a scorekeeper--not an official scorekeeper, but just a girl in the bleachers with her scorecard. When a player comes up to bat, I can look back and see how he’s been hitting. During some games, I keep track of pitches, so I can say things like “Jesse Crain just pitched a six-pitch inning!” or "That was Justin's fourth at-bat, but he's only seen five pitches all game!” Of course, I feel very lucky that I live relatively close to the Metrodome, so now I make many treks downtown Minneapolis to watch the Twins.

I love playing Twingo at the Dome, too. For those unfamiliar with the game, it's Bingo with the plays on the field: K, 1HR (one-run home run), E7, 2-3, etc., but each card will have its share of unusual plays: 1-2-3, 9-5-6, etc. Twingo goes to show that every game has some weird plays. The first time I played Twingo last year, I sat down with my card, and turned to my sister and said, "Strikeout-wild pitch. Like <b>that's</b> gonna happen." Yeah, it happened in the bottom of the first inning. I shook my head and laughed. That's baseball.

Baseball amuses the whimsical side of me. I like to find the odd and unusual things that happen every day. With 30 teams playing 162 games of baseball each year, there’s 4,860 regular season games every year. If we add the playoff, spring training, minor league, and instructional league games, then we conclude that there's a lot of professional baseball being played in the US and Canada every year! (If you include other countries, other leagues, high school, college, little league, and town ball, the number of total games is huge. The “sand lot” games would make the number even larger, if you felt that it just wasn’t big enough.) There are plenty of opportunities for something different to happen.

The unexpected, weird plays are still unexpected and weird, no matter how many games you go to. You can expect every game to have something unusual--even if you dream up wild and crazy possibilities before the game, something will make you turn to the total stranger sitting next to you and say, excited or disappointed, "I can't believe he did that!"

And it's funny how the "total strangers" aren't total strangers. It doesn't matter who’s sitting near you. In the ballpark, the only thing that matters is what’s happening on the field. Everyone knows better than the manager, and we have a much better view than the umpire. It's only right that we all complain, cheer, and celebrate together. Season ticket holders might start the year as total strangers, but can end the year as friends--sitting together 81 days of the year is more often than most people see their families.

What brings fans to the Dome? We know our Twins (we giggle about the Barbie backpack), revel in the little trivia facts about the team, and enjoy watching our team grow.

Twins fans rarely get to see trades that make headlines (even if they should). We get to see a few guys hang around “forever” as stabilizing forces (most often pitchers, like Bradke), but we know that we can't hold onto them all. Being a Twins fan means we say teary farewells to well-loved favorites every year, but at the same time, we’re saying, "Finally we can see what {minor-league player} can do!"

We get excited about "kids" coming up to play. It means those of us who are older than 27 will often joke about the youth of the team: "Baker was taken out after the seventh inning, because it was his bedtime." On the other side, we also get to see guys who seem to be career minor-league players make debuts (Glenn Williams and Chris Heintz). We get to see guys who've never been great stars in professional baseball come up and perform (Brent Abernathy and Jason Tyner). We don't see a team of larger-than-life superstars—unless we’re playing against them. We see guys who play baseball with heart. We see guys who keep playing year after year--so we know they love the game as much as we do.

And that’s what brings us back, day after day for 162 games, good years and bad: the love of the game.