Editorial by Jeremy Joustra

As a sports fan, these past few weeks have felt like paradise.  The football season has been filled with great games and storylines up to this point, both college and pro. The NBA season just began, and looks to be more competitive than it has been in years. College basketball is right around the corner and the World Series featured two of baseball’s most storied teams. With all these sports going on at once, it got me to thinking, which one is the best?

People love to hate baseball. “It’s too boring,” they say. “There’s not enough action; it takes too long.”  That’s just because they’ve never taken the time to fully appreciate the game and its beauty. Even though I may be a bit biased because I played the sport, it didn’t have an effect on my decision. Baseball isn’t called America’s Pastime for nothing.

Unlike any other major sport, baseball can be played by anyone. You don’t have to have to look like the Incredible Hulk to play (steroid era aside), you don’t have to be incredibly fast, you don’t have to have great size and you can even be clumsy and awkward – such as yours truly – and still be highly successful.

Baseball is 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical, and that’s what makes it so great. It’s a thinking-man’s game, almost like a chess match. There’s no time limit, and the manager is constantly strategizing about his next move even before he makes his first one.

The degree of difficulty on the sport is unlike any other. Hitting a baseball has often been said to be the hardest thing to do in a sport, and that’s correct. A player who fails seven out of 10 times is still an all-star or maybe even a hall-of-famer.

So next time you want to bag on baseball, just remember one thing; anyone can go out on a field and hit someone, run around, or shoot a ball at a hoop, but it takes a real man to fail 70-80percent of the time and come right back the next day looking to do it all over again.