The point is to make you happy.

Baseball makes me deliriously happy. Baseball, with standings and leaderboards and the whole deal, nourishes my soul. If following baseball won't make you happy, please do something that will instead. Nobody wants you to be unhappy. But if baseball offers even the potential to make you happy, I want to help you get there.

You don't like baseball, though? Don't give up. I hated onions for decades, but a number of caring people taught me how to cut them, how to cook them, what to cook them in and what function they serve, and now onions make me happy almost every single day. Not every great joy comes as easily as a mother's love or a satisfying sneeze, and any number of my favorite things -- Prince, The New Yorker, Saturdays with the internet turned off -- are loves that developed only because somebody explained to me how to do so.

I want you to be happy. Here's what I've learned about the how.

How to watch baseball: Don't watch baseball

It's intimidating to start consuming something that will take up a lot of your time. I don't watch "Doctor Who," not because I'm afraid I won't like it but because I'm afraid I will. Who has the time to like a show with 827 episodes? The thing that makes something special -- its bottomlessness -- becomes a burden, becomes a flaw.

Baseball is a beautiful sport, a joy to watch on television. But every baseball team plays 162 games a year, and every one of them is long. I don't imagine you, a person who at the moment merely tolerates the game, are eager to sit on a couch and stare at a TV screen for 500 extra hours a year. Five hundred hours! That's long enough to organize your junk drawer, bake cookies and take 498 naps. That is long enough to seriously affect your health.

The good news is that you can follow baseball without spending 500 hours stationary in front of a television, because baseball -- with its seasonal omnipresence -- was never required to be a television sport. Back before every game was televised, only a couple dozen road games would be televised in most markets. And before that, there was no television at all. There was just Vin Scully or Ernie Harwell on the radio, filling the air around our most boring moments. Baseball on the radio takes baseball's burden, its flaw -- the bottomlessness -- and turns it back into something special. It is entertainment while you weed, while you stare at the brake lights in front of you, while you do dishes, while you take a walk, while you paint a room, while you stand in line, while you sit on a porch and stare off into the twilight after a bad day and try to remember how hopeful tomorrow is. It is a podcast that comes out every day, stretches for hours and has, as a bonus, a pregame podcast and a postgame podcast.

If you find a friend in baseball on the radio, you will never feel lonely again. And this, really, is the best part of baseball on the radio: It turns all your unpleasant activities into opportunities to listen to baseball. The great burden of living a life -- of managing thousands of tasks, demands and delays -- becomes a theater for your enjoyment of the sport. It's like a pilot fish, harmlessly following you through your life and eating the parasites that accumulate on your belly. And like pilot fish, it is said by many to be quite tasty.

Keep your eye on the catcher's mitt. It's a game within a game, rich with strategy and full of hidden clues about the action on the field. AP Photo

What to watch when you do watch: the catcher's mitt

There are people who like to consume the entirety of a thing, but I find that my happiness is increased by compartmentalizing a performance and focusing on one small, crucial aspect of it. I like to focus on the cuts in a movie, on the internal rhymes in a rap song, on the umami in a savory dish. When I watch baseball on TV, I like to focus on the catcher's mitt.

This is partly because it's almost always on screen. Another challenge of following baseball is how spread out the action is. You can't see what the left fielder or the runner on first is doing until the camera cuts to him, by which point any number of his previous acts have gone unnoticed and immediately upon which practically everybody else is off your screen. But the catcher's mitt, as a focal point, is reliably there, turning yet another "flaw" of the game's center field camera into a strength.