Learn How to Cheer for a Home Run from Former GOP Presidential Candidate John McCain!

Since you are a baseball fan, you probably have cheered for a home run before. You probably have been cheering for home runs for years. But you probably never have examined how you have cheered for all of those home runs. Maybe you never have asked yourself what the optimal way to cheer for a home run is; you never have fretted over cheering for home runs before a home run happens, nor have you felt dumb about the way you cheered for a home run after you did so.

Well, you should feel dumb. Because no matter what you have done to cheer after a home run, you have never done it correctly. You have been doing it all wrong for all these years.

Thankfully (and thanks especially to NotGraphs reader Eric Rood for his hot, GIF-able tip), former GOP presidential candidate and current senior US Senator of Arizona John McCain is here to show us the way — the only way — to properly cheer for a home run. He shall show us all.

First and foremost: tuck in your shirt. You don’t want to look like a slacker when cheering for a home run. The cheering of slackers doesn’t really count as cheering.

Next, if at all possible, try to stand in front of a guy in a Zac Brown Band t-shirt. This provides an awesome, patriotic backdrop for your cheering.

Then — here’s the really important stuff — do your best impression of an elated zombie by reaching out your arms, and keeping them stiff. Open your mouth in something that resembles a palsied yelp. Rotate 90-degrees away from your wife (so as to disassociate yourself with her pathetic clapping), and then back again — with stiff arms still outstretched, of course.

Then you need to wave your hands in front of your face as if you can’t see, but make sure you still look really really happy. Then remember that you are a famous person, turn to wave at someone who was not really waving or even acknowledging you, and give them a big old American thumbs up.

Finally, clap one time.

If everyone else is still standing and cheering, repeat from the beginning.