Fantasy Leagues
Numbers also make possible the very best fantasy leagues. Personally, I would no sooner join a fantasy league in anything than I would volunteer to be tasered. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate them.

And of all the fantasy leagues in all the sports, none is better than the baseball version because no game has such a plethora of numbers (see above) to assign point values to. In football leagues, offensive linemen may as well not exist. There’s no statistic that makes them relevant to fantasy players. In baseball, everybody counts. Not only that, you have different skill sets for pitching and hitting.

Arguments
At some point during the season, I’m sure to write a simple desultory philippic about baseball arguments. They’re childish and pointless. No one has had a call reversed based on the volume of spittle he can generate while screaming about a perceived bad call. But the game tolerates the crowd-pleasing tantrums in the same way that hockey tolerates fighting. They’re a jolt of excitement and drama in what might otherwise be a dull night at the park.

And there’s something to be said for allowing a player who has been called out on a close play — maybe even wrongly called out — being given an opportunity to vent his spleen right there and then. It recognizes that sometimes plays are too close to call and that sometimes the umps get them wrong.

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In the NBA, yell at a ref and you get teed up. Do it in hockey and it’s two-minutes in the time-out chair. In the NFL, it’s 15 yards in the wrong direction. In baseball, unless you say the magic word — and we all know what that word is — or argue balls and strikes, you’re free to behave like a three-year-old who’s just had a cookie taken away.

Walk-off hits — and walks
No other sport has so many ways to win a game at the last possible moment. The walk-off homer is the best because it's such a mighty exclamation point to a game. But walk-off errors, walk-off walks, walk-off suicide squeezes, walk-off singles are also way cool.

Although we whine all the time about how the games are consuming too much time, there’s something wonderful about the fact that baseball is the only game that doesn’t come with a game clock. That means that the outcome is always in doubt.

That makes baseball like life. We know there will be an end to the game; we just don’t know when.

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Wait your turn
Modern America is about grabbing for the spotlight all the time. In the other sports, teams can turn to one or two great offensive players for the bulk of their production or get the ball — or the puck — to the big gun at the critical juncture.

But not baseball. The game embraces the virtue that Mom tried to teach us — wait your turn. You get your chance to hit, and then you have to wait for eight others to have their turns before you can try again.

As the game goes into the late innings, the fan can calculate what it’s going to take to get the big guns up in the last inning with a chance to win the game. In other sports, you just give the big guy the ball. In baseball, he has to wait his turn.

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