IN case the batting sound was too faint, baseball was played in these parts two weekends ago, and a champion was crowned.
It was Game Two in a best-of-three series of the UAAP Season 79 Baseball Championship between the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Santo Tomas. The Blue Eagles, as Ateneo teams are collectively known, captured their fourth title in five years following a 14-12, five-hour contest, which was witnessed by a far smaller crowd relative to that of collegiate basketball games, at the legendary Rizal Memorial Baseball Stadium in Malate, Manila.
Of the three sports I had to learn on the fly as a campus journalist, none made me more confused—or fall in love with harder—than baseball.
I hardly knew anything about it. All I remember were drawings of diamonds when I asked my editor to explain the frameworks of the game. He said the only important thing to know is that a team scores when a batter returns to home plate after clearing the three bases—learning the nitty-gritty comes natural after.
Baseball is a battle of endurance, both for the teams and the spectators. Tagged as America’s pastime, games can go for four hours or more. It wouldn’t be called pastime if it were quick, would it? It’s a slow-burning spectacle, and perhaps it’s for this reason that the sport never had a following as huge and consistent as basketball. Sports analysts say Filipino fans want to watch high-octane scoring, and seldom does the final score of baseball games reach double digits.
Nevertheless, Philippine baseball still has a following. It’s a small market, but it’s still there, still watching. And I’m part of that.
I was at the Ateneo championship-clincher game two weekends ago, and the sport still gets me the way it first did some seasons ago.
It’s all about the sights and sounds of the game: how the stairs of the 83-year-old Rizal Baseball Stadium is designed, where at the end of the steps waits a panoramic view of the field, the seats, the batting order display, the walls on the other side where names of the venue’s home-runners, like Babe Ruth are etched, the bang of ball to bat, the bounce of ball to roof, the gusts, the mount, the discomfort in the butt from the hours of seating, the cheers, the chants…everything.
All of these mean so much more now that the future of the venue, and quite possibly the sport along with it, hangs in the balance, because the Manila government just can’t have enough commercial space for yet another sprawling, soulless mall.
But for us fans, we’re just here savoring each remaining batting thunder that will echo around the confines of Rizal Memorial, one that most people outside shrug off as nothing more than a faint distraction.