Bill Murray on the Value of Baseball Fandom, Accidentally

Class. In a glass.

It’s very possible that certain readers of the present site are entirely comfortable with the intensity of their baseball fandom. It’s also possible, however, that other sorts of readers harbor the notion that the resources which they’ve customarily allocated to the pursuit of base-and-ball expertise might actually have been better utilized in the foundation of better and more renewable energy resources or, alternatively, cleaning the bathroom just once ever.

American actor and freelance ubermensch Bill Murray, during the course of some sort of reddit social hour, recently, addressed what he regards as the best-case scenario in terms of comedy films — which resembles, very much, the best-case scenario of deeply felt baseball fandom, as well.

Regard:

RedditRalf
Hi Bill, for some reason my computer has started playing up, freezing and opening random pages when I tried to open up this link. I think my computer is excited that you are on Reddit. I just wanted to ask you, what is one of your best memories of meeting a fan?

_BillMurray
The best experience with a fan? It happens sometimes where someone will say “I was going through a really hard time. I was going through a really hard time, and I was just morose or depressed.”

And I met one person who said I couldn’t find anything to cheer me up and I was so sad. And I just watched Caddyshack, and I watched it for about a week and it was the only thing that cheered me up. And it was the only thing that cheered me up and made me laugh and made me think that my life wasn’t hopeless. That I had a way to see what was best about life, that there was a whole lot of life that was wonderful. And I happen to know (from her own spirit) that that person has really triumphed as an artist and as a human being, and if it’s just a moment when you can reverse a movement, an emotion, a downward spiral, when you can quiet something or still something and just allow it to change and allow the real spirit rise up in someone, that feels great.

I know I’m not saving the world, but something in what I’ve learned how to do or the stories that I’ve tried to tell, they’re some sort of representation of how life is or how life could be. And that gives some sort of optimism. And an optimistic attitude is a successful attitude.

Considerable attention is given to the morally vacant elements of this honored game — the considerable public dollars used to finance every last stadium, for example, or basically any detail concerning Alex Rodriguez’s career over the last year-plus. Nor ought those issue to be ignored. That said, it’s important to recognize that, at a basic level, the game produces a lot of data — both quantitative and qualitative — over which an otherwise marginalized person can pore. That’s not without its merits. And those merits are probably overlooked pretty often.