If you're not watching fall baseball, you're missing out.  I know that you might think thatbaseball is a "slow, boring" game, but it just looks that way from the outside.  Instead I would call baseball a "still" game.  The pitcher lifts his front leg and balances for a split second before exploding forward and releasing a 95 mph fastball.  The batter holds the bat upright just behind his back ear before driving it through the strike zone.  The whole game is stillness followed by explosion.  It is not a game that ends when the clock runs out, it is a game ends with an explosion every time with the final run crossing the plate or the final out being made.

The playoffs started tonight with a one game playoff between the Colorado Rockies and the San Diego Padres.  The two teams played 162 games and even after all that were still tied.  So they went to a one game playoff that lasted 13 innings.  The lead went back and forth, do or die.  One team was somber, the other upbeat, and then the roles were flipped... multiple times over, until a controversial play at the plate in the bottom of the 13^th ended the game. 

The rest of the playoffs start this Wednesday on TBS (here's the schedule) and I would be sorry not to recommend that you watch.  Maybe you haven't watched baseball at all this season, maybe you find it boring, but playoff baseball is pure baseball-still-explosiveness distilled.  There is no logical reason why people act like they do in the stands, hugging perfect strangers, or why million dollar athletes dog-pile on each other like little kids.  It's pure joy rubbing right up against pure agony.  I feel these things at this time of year (for now it's only anxiety), and I know there are so many bigger things to be worried about.  But for some reason the joy and pain brought on, in the explosive way that playoff baseball brings on these emotions, is just as real as any other pain or joy I know.  Even if you only watch as an outsider and a sociologist, there is something to be said about the explosive excitement of baseball.  It is a wonderful time of year... it is playoff baseball time.