"Why I Love Baseball" Win a copy of MLB The Show 15 for PS4

[Armor and Sword]

Tomorrow is the deadline.....and the I will also put a time stamp of 6 pm EST tomorrow for anymore posts to be eligible.

After 6 pm EST I will post the top 3 in consideration so everyone else can plan on picking the game up next week.

I will notify the winner via Private Message here at OS Friday night and will await to hear from them if they want it public that they are the winner.

So many excellent stories. It was tough to even wind it down to 3 finalist's at this point (which I have 3 in mind right now unless some more are posted by 6 pm est tomorrow that can jump into that top three).

So pumped about the game guys. It looks incredible yet again.

[jeremym480]

I don't really love baseball, but I commend you for doing this giveaway. You are the man A&S. Thanks for working hard to make OS a better place.


Edit: And if you feel like sending that free copy my way, so that I'll play The Show 15, then you will be the man × 2.

Thanks for the consideration.

[Houston]

Quote: Originally Posted by Armor & Sword

Tomorrow is the deadline.....and the I will also put a time stamp of 6 pm EST tomorrow for anymore posts to be eligible. After 6 pm set I will post the top 3 in consideration so everyone else can plan on picking the game up next week. I will notify the winner via Private Message here at OS Friday night and will await to hear from them if they want it public that they are the winner. So many excellent stories. It was tough to even wind it down to 3 finalist's at this point (which I have 3 in mind right now unless some more are posted by 6 pm est tomorrow that can jump into that top three). So pumped about the game guys. It looks incredible yet again.

I commend you A&S for doing this as well a very nice gesture. I already wrote my reason what baseball means to me already. I just wanted to say yesterday was the day my brother died 15 years ago and in memory of him I did some stuff on face book etc. I can't believe it has been that long already. It's so tough you know as many of you are getting excited for the baseball season and especially the release of MLB 15 THE SHOW. It was a tough day to get through yesterday as it is every year. I myself am excited and so anxious about MLB 15, but in the back of my mind that sadness when you wish you could enjoy the same excitement with someone that's no longer here with us on earth that loved baseball and the baseball games as much as you do. You want to imagine there with you still, that there maybe sitting right next you smiling watching you enjoy playing the game, watching that baseball game on TV with you. There was so much I left out when I first wrote because I didn't want to go over the initial 750 words, but here goes some of the stuff I left out. My brother and I and many of my cousins lived near my grandma's house that had a pee wee park we all would go play all the time there as kids. As we grew older some of us played on teams there all the way up to high school. The memories I look back on now the smell of frito pies, french fries, corn dogs and after a well played game me an my team mates lineing up at the concession stand for a a nice cold snow cone. As the years slowly passed and I did other things my younger cousins were the next breed to do the things all of us had already gone thru, but I was lucky enough to be able to coach t-ball and little league football being my cousins mentor and coach. My brother helped a lot of coaches and myself with teaching the kids about baseball and football. I had a younger cousin who loved sports and watched him grow up playing little league baseball his name was J.J. He was a catcher and loved the game of baseball. I remember just going and watching him play and giving him pointers remembering the days when I onced played. JJ was very talented and had so much potential but that was cut short when he died at the age of 13 from a heart condition that never was detected. My cousin died years before my brother had died but both of the losses nearly killed me to get through. As I said before I try to live these memories of this era of my childhood, managing days and the devastating losses of my family through playing MLB THE SHOW because it reminds me so much of them and how much life and video games have changed.

Sorry to get emotional and write so much Sword but you really just help me remember the great times I had with my brother and my cousins growing up at the ball parks.

[Badguy1985]

Baseball is a different sort of game. It's slower than the other major sports. There's no countdown to the end, no clock to tell you when to do something, or when it's over. It's like life, you just know.

I was 13 years old, which to me was significant for one reason: it was my last year to play little league for the Endeavor Lions. I'd been a pretty decent player for a few years, but always in the shadow of the older players. That was kind of how it went, the last year players were the stars. Like the year before, when our coach's son was in his last year. Shaun was a great pitcher who went on to play minor league ball. Still, even with him leading us, we'd finished in last place. We almost always did, we were a town with a population of 360 people, we had to get almost every kid in town to play just to field a team. But the point is, that was going to be my year, I was going to be the star. Even if we'd lost our best player, and might be even worse than the year before, it was my turn to shine.

Until it wasn't. Word made its way around our tiny school that Shaun's dad, no longer having a kid on the team, wasn't going to coach anymore. Worse than that, nobody else wanted to. It was a small, poor place. Everybody worked a lot. Nobody had time to spend 3 or 4 nights a week coaching a little league baseball team. There was talk that we wouldn't have a team, that the kids who really wanted to play would be allowed to play for nearby Briggsville, or our hated rivals Montello.

I was despondent. I'd looked forward to that year for so long, and I knew if I went to a new team it wouldn't be the same. I probably wouldn't even get to play catcher, which had been my position in Endeavor for 3 years. I moped around the house for weeks. The school year drew to a close with no solution.

On the second day of summer, my mom came home from work early. This was a pretty rare occurrence, my mom was a widow with 2 kids. She worked almost non-stop to give us the same things other kids had. "You've got practice in half-an-hour," she said. "Get ready."

I was confused. "Who's our coach?" I asked.

"You're looking at her."

My mom didn't know a lot about baseball. She let me handle most of the practices, organizing batting practice and hitting grounders to the infield. Still, we got to play baseball, and not only that, we weren't that bad. We definitely seemed better than we were the year before. The biggest reason for this was our new players. A family had moved up from Texas and their 3 kids Lorenzo, Albert, and Lupe were instant starters for us. We got another new player named David. David was small for his age (smaller than most of the 1st graders in our school) and didn't seem like he had ever played baseball before. I figured if my mom let me handle the lineups I'd hide him on the bench and give him some garbage time in the outfield.

I told her as much before our first game, but she had other ideas. "Everybody plays the same," she said. "You either play the first 3 innings or the last 3." I didn't like it, I felt like we had a chance to be good for once, but what could I do? It was her only rule, and there weren't any better strategists lining up to coach us.

The games started, and so did we. We weren't just better than last year's team, we were playing a different game. Lupe gave us 3 innings of shutout ball every game, Albert played shortstop like the position should be renamed guy-who-catches-everything-somebody-else-doesn't, and I was hitting the ball all over the field. Then something else started to happen. We'd come up with the idea to mix our best players with our worst, to give us the best chance of winning under my mom's system. But those lines started to blur. We didn't really have worst players after awhile. Halfway through the season, everybody was pretty good. David, who I'd written off after the first practice, became one of our most valuable players. He was fast as lightning, and really difficult to pitch to because of his small strike zone. He developed an affinity for punching the ball into the outfield when pitchers would slow down their pitches to try and throw him strikes. He was on 3rd when I hit a game-winning homer against Briggsville late in the year, my favorite memory from sports.

I wasn't really a star player anymore. It wasn't the season I'd expected, or hoped for. It was so much better. It was baseball, as good as we could possibly make it. We owe my mom for that. We made it to the league championship series. We got swept by Montello, 2-0, but it was farther than any Endeavor team had made it since I'd been there.

Baseball keeps going, like life. Players get too old, whether it's a major leaguer who's 40 and loses his range or me turning 14, baseball ends for all of us. And even though there's no shot clock or play clock, baseball doesn't ever stop in the 4th or 5th inning so you can realize how special it is. You play until you're done, and then someone else gets their chance.

But you do get to remember. Years later when I'm getting married, and David is the best man, I think about how much I learned that summer, about baseball, about my mom, and about me.

Why do I love baseball? Because I played it. I had my time with it. I don't see how anybody who got to wouldn't love it.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

[Armor and Sword]

Badguy1985.

Strong....very strong brother. That was some story. Youth baseball to me is the absolute purity of the sport. Untainted, unjaded, just pure bliss.

[Armor and Sword]

Thank you to everyone who participated. I thought there were so many high quality posts.

Here are the 5 finalist's. I will announce the winner shortly after going back and re-reading each one one more time. I wish I could give away a dozen copies to really be frank. But there can only be one (little Highlander reference he he).


Turbojugend
Bullit
Saucerset
Fairplayleagues
Badguy1985

Those are your finalist's. Thank you to everyone else...again awesome stuff and a lot of fun to read everything and get all pumped up for 3/31/15 and pass some time till release.

The winner will be announced by Saturday.

[Trackball]

I'm actually glad I didn't win.

One, I already bought the game in the PSN store, and am waiting for the big download to start.

Two, my post was just to see if I could get why I love the sport into a mere ten-character post. Looks like it worked.

...But seriously, Ken Burns' documentary is awesome. Get it on Amazon. A fantastic show of why the sport has lasted as long as it has.

[COMMISSIONERHBK9]

Congrats to the finalist