We should all praise the Lord for any athletic event or natural phenomenon that saves us from having to watch professional basketball. For two weeks we have been distracted by the Winter Olympics, with every American male living in absolute fear of encountering a room full of women watching figure skating – but it’s better than basketball, so praise the Lord!

Now, mercifully, we have made it to Spring Training, and in a few short weeks, we will be able to watch baseball for about 250 straight days. In a world that can be mad and maddening, we can take comfort in bat and ball and lazy fly balls on warm summer days … And it makes me feel so nostalgic and groovy that I’m not even going to mention the fact that, for the sixth straight season, I won’t be able to watch the Dodgers on television because of greed and ineptitude by management; a fact that stands as the single most egregious example of a franchise completely fucking over it fans in the entire history of professional sports.

No, no, I’m okay. That just slipped out. Really, this is a story about a baseball friendship.

Baseball is almost totally generational—you’re a baseball fan because your dad or grandpa was. Like so much in life, you do the things your mom and dad did, adopting the things you’re exposed to. So if your dad took you to ride motorcycles on weekends, or flipped on ultimate fighting or showed you how to do tricks at the skatepark, chances are that’s gonna be your gig. If you grew up in a baseball house, you got a glove when you were still in your crib, you followed baseball and passed it on.

I end up having a generational hook to baseball, but it’s not just blood with me, it’s more about the language, the dialogue of baseball. It begs to be described, to be written about, to be told as a tale akin to a faraway conquest, a great battle, a character study or an old joke, the kind with a punch line. It’s poetic, lyrical, a sonnet that makes a man search for noun and verb that will make the telling feel like a romantic tale of discovery and intrigue.

Of Pete Rose, masterful sportswriter Jim Murray said, “Rose hung his uniform on a railing to dry and it promptly got up and stole second.” HOF pitcher Bob Feller said of Ted Williams, “Trying to get a fastball by him is like trying to get a sunbeam past a rooster.” When Satchel Paige pitched, a writer said he “looked like a lounge chair unfolding.” When they asked Satch whether he pitched that fast consistently, Paige replied, “No sir, I do it all the time.”

The game of baseball is as much about the turn of a phrase as it is about turning a double play. That’s something a writer can appreciate. The funny stores, the lore, the history, the shared memories … Everything’s gonna be okay, there’s baseball.

Here are some baseball fun facts to tide you over until Opening Day.

• Connie Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics until he was 88.
• For the first seventy-five years of baseball, until 1954, players left their gloves on the field when they went in to bat.
• Fernando Valenzuela was the youngest player in the Bigs when he debuted on Opening Day 1981. He pitched a shutout in just two hours and seventeen minutes, prompting Vin Scully to say, “And a child shall lead them.”
• Opening Day in Cincinnati is a holiday. The Red Stockings were the first professional team in 1869 and the first to join the National League in 1876.
• Pitcher Dickie Noles was traded by the Cubs to the Tigers in 1978 for “a player to be named later.” In his first game, he gave up three runs in the ninth inning so the Tigers then designated Noles as the “player to be named” and sent him back to the Cubs.
• Cap Anson was named the nineteenth century’s “Mr. Baseball.” He batted over .300 in twenty straight seasons. He was the last guy to play first base without a glove and he was a raging racist.
• In the 1920s Brooklyn’s Burleigh Grimes intentionally hit a player in the batting circle. He was the last pitcher to be allowed to legally use the spitball.
• The first major league game Babe Ruth ever saw, he pitched in and won.
• During Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six game hitting streak he would smoke two packs of Camels a day and drink twenty-three half cups of coffee a day. The day after the streak ended he started a sixteen-game hitting streak. DiMaggio had a sixty-one game hitting streak in the minors with the San Francisco Seals.
• Wee Willie Keeler used the smallest bat they made and choked up six inches. During the 1890s Keeler had 700 ABs in a single season without striking out.
• As late as 1941, big leaguers were still leaving their gloves in the field when they went in to bat.
• DiMaggio hit 361 home runs and struck out only 369 times in his career … the typical rate is about three strikeouts per home run.
• They rub Lena Blackbourne Rubbing Mud on all baseballs to remove the gloss from them while keeping the ball white, it comes from the Delaware River’s Pennsauken Creek.
• Wade Boggs would not allow his bats to touch those of another player’s, fearing his bats may learn bad habits.