Every year all MLB teams (probably excepting the Jays) wear a special hat for the 4th of July.

This year’s hat was my Father’s Day present.

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Two points of which you should be made aware before you read this:

  • I work for Automattic, the parent company behind WordPress.com (so I work “here”), and
  • You should ask me about my love of baseball and the Cardinals sometime.

Through links to my own site, some random searching and perusal of the baseball tag here on WordPress.com, and looking through the tag page for Cardinal Nation (which I suggest you use if you are a blogger who is all about the Cards), I’m trying to compile a list of Cardinals-related blogs on WordPress.com. If you think your blog should be in this list, please leave me a comment and I’ll check it out.

Perhaps this should lead into a meetup or something of the sort, as it’s always awesome when WordPress peoples get together and always awesome when Cardinals fans get together, so getting those things together can only be a winning combination.

The list:

WordPress.com blogs that have moved elsewhere:

Comment if I missed you. :)

Baseball is more to me than simply a game. It is a tradition that I share with my children, that I share with my father, and that he shared with his father. It consists of stories told from one generation to another of who is the best, who you have seen play while sitting in the stands, and the comparisons and discussions that come along with those shared experiences and memories. It is neglecting to study for finals to go to a day game at Wrigley, taking the entire family out for a day at Busch, and staying up late listening to the west coast games. It is a love of a game that connects both halves of our family, and a baseball game is the gift I’m giving my wife for our tenth anniversary.

Baseball gives a shared language, a lore of well over a century of organized play, and a history that follows the contours of the events that shaped this country. It is a profoundly personal thing that you watch along with tens of thousands of people in a stadium or millions of people on television and radio. Grown men wait for the season to start every year to sit in the stands and feel like a child or to own imaginary baseball teams and challenge each other in the field of statistics.

I love baseball. Opening Day is the day of dreams—the day where every team is in first place, if only for a couple of hours. The day where fans’ hopes are refreshed (even the Cubs fans), the future seems bright, and optimism abounds. It’s the day where the heroes of children suit up and take the field of competition, as their fans watch and wait to see what will take place for the next six months.

It is the only major professional sport in the United States where the end of the game is not dictated by a clock—and in more than one way, it is timeless.

Welcome to spring.

Continue reading “Spring Can Start Now—Baseball Is Back”