Between the Pitches

At Wrigley with My Daughter

In 2014, during my Baseball Buddha Tour, I stopped in Chicago for a Sunday game at Wrigley (not even sure it was a Sunday, felt like a Sunday). My daughter, who was in college then, came down from Milwaukee to meet me. She’s always been a girly girl, and I mean that in the best way. Stylish, smart, full of joy.

“Yeah sports, go team!” she would say with a smirk.

We’ve always been close.

We grabbed bleacher seats and soaked up what felt like a postcard-perfect day. Blue skies. Wind gently curling through the ivy. You could smell beer and brats in the breeze. I couldn’t tell you who the Cubs played or who pitched. The details of the game? Long gone.

But one thing I’ll never forget is her asking me, somewhere around the third inning:

"Why do you like this game so much? It’s kind of boring." I don’t think it was “kind of”, it was for her, very boring.

She said it with curiosity, not judgment. But it hit me. Not because she didn’t get it but because I realized I had never really shown her the game. Not the real game. Not the game within the game.

I’d failed to explain the beauty that lives between the pitches.

I hadn’t shared that the left fielder shifting five feet over matters. That matchups, righty vs. lefty, sluggers vs. sinkerballers, aren’t just statistical trivia, they’re tactical warfare. That a catcher calling a changeup after a fastball isn't just mixing things up, he’s setting a trap. That a batter stepping out of the box isn’t stalling, he’s recalibrating the whole plan of attack.

I hadn’t told her that the managers are like battlefield commanders, making micro-decisions that ripple through the rest of the game and into the next. I didn’t teach her how baseball rewards patience and punishes distraction. How a team is managed for the season and not just a single game. Why they’re players playing catch on the first and third base line.

And that day at Wrigley, I started to.

She leaned in. I explained why the pitcher held the ball an extra beat. Why the infield played in. Why this guy got the start even if his stats didn’t impress. I showed her the invisible threads that connect each moment to the next. Baseball became something else for her that day, something layered and alive.

And yeah, she still wanted to leave early. But we didn’t. We made it to the end.

She jumped on the train north. I moved on to my next game that year.

But here’s the part I keep thinking about, what I loved about Wrigley then was that if you didn’t pay attention, you didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

There weren’t massive screens replaying everything. No big digital graphics feeding you every stat. You watched. You asked. You turned to the person next, “What happened?” Or you explained what just happened.

You were in it together.

Now? We look down at our phones. We wait for the scoreboard to confirm what we missed while scrolling. We check standings in real-time. But back then, the scoreboard told you what was happening in baseball time. You waited for it. You looked up and hoped the scoreboard operator working up in the heat would change the score in Pittsburgh or in L.A. And you talked about it. Not online. In the bleachers.

Baseball wasn’t designed for the speed of now. It was built to breathe (It had to be said). To unfold. It teaches you to pay attention to people, to pauses, to the subtle shift of a glove or the tap of a bat.

That day, I realized how much I had taken for granted. That the game I loved wasn’t just mine to keep. It was mine to share. And that sharing it meant more than just buying tickets or watching games together it meant telling the story that lives between the innings, in the silences, in the signs, in the why.

That’s baseball.

And that’s why I still chase it.