Next month, we’ll be leaving our home and cat in the care of our son and heading off to watch as many Cactus League games as our budget will allow.

Good advice in the workplace is to never discuss politics or religion, and that holds true for the digital workplace as well (unless politics or religion IS your business).

But what about talking baseball in the digital arena?  Your baseball proclivities do not necessarily put you on the map for vindictive stalkers. Try tracking down a member of The Red Sox Nation; I’ll bet tons of those folks have never been to Boston.  Or, another example, my daughter once had a boyfriend whose mother cheered for the Yankees over the local team because she was crushing on Derek Jeter. Derek’s a cutie, but I did not complain when my girl moved on, because I’m for the home team.

Oh all right, I live in Southern California, so you know I’m supporting the Dodgers, the Angels, or the Padres.

Here’s a hint:  my national league team is the St. Louis Cardinals, because yes, I’m a girl who spent her formative years heckling redbirds for autographs. I won’t give any players’ names, because obviously that would date me, but I will tell you it wasn’t during the mustachio and tight shirt period of baseball.

But I digress. I don’t mind watching football, and I even get most of the rules. Basketball, in my probably heretical opinion, is much more fun played than watched—sort of like golf. Hockey is an absolute blast to watch, but only in person, so they can’t cut away to commercials during displays of passion. But baseball…baseball is zen and powerful passion all rolled into one.

If you don’t believe it’s powerful passion, then you’ve never sat next to a drunken citizen of the Red Sox Nation attending a game not in Boston. You’ve never watched the blue and the red fans duke it out in the far ground level seats of Angels Stadium. You’ve never had to bite your tongue to stay out of a fight with a booby-brained woman in black pinstripes.

Ahhh. Bring on some of the zen. If you don’t believe there’s zen in baseball, you’ve never sat through eight 0-0 innings. You’ve never been lulled to sleep by a baseball announcer calling balls and strikes. You’ve never settled into a seat on a perfect summer evening with a cold beer and a bowl of orange chicken from the left field Panda Express.

Watching the best of the best tough it out to celebrate the astonishing feat of getting hits thirty percent of the time reminds me to savor and celebrate my successes, no matter how they stack up as percentage of attempts. I will never be a Mike Trout, but I can jump out of my seat, at home or at the stadium, and cheer for a kid whose dream has come true. I can live a little bit of that with him, and my life is better for it.

There. That’s why I love baseball. How about you?