Hope springs eternal as baseball fans anticipate the rollout of the 2017 season this Sunday. As one who was involved in organized expressions of the most perfect of human endeavours since I was eight until a few years ago, it’s like waiting impatiently at the train station for a lover whose been away for far too long. Heart rate up, concentration on other things, down. I’m also a non-partisan when it comes to baseball. Let me explain.

As a player, coach and writer over these many years, I am simply in love with the game. This brings me to what is becoming a recurrent and irritating insertion into fleeting but frequent encounters with my friends who are Jays fans.

“Can’t wait to see if the Jays can do it this year” or “Eddie would have been a better fit than Joey Bats, right?” or “How about the rotation, looks solid, heh?” “Think Smoak can learn to take a slider on his ankles with two strikes?”

Naturally, I enjoy engaging in any banter about baseball but what’s the source of irritation? I’m a fan of the game, which seriously overtakes my support of the Blue Jays.

“You mean you aren’t a Blue Jays fan?”

Nope. My fanaticism is reserved for something above and beyond. Yep, I get it, I come off as some kind of elitist. But here’s the deal. As a local, of course I want the Jays to do well and I follow them because it’s the most geographically accessible way of connecting to the game and its many intricacies.

But as with my politics, I am a non-partisan, guided by a compass of values, principles and a knowledge base that underscores the ease with which I can appreciate and support the actions of any team or an individual player doing something that advances my own understanding of a better game. Even after a six-decade love affair, still much to learn and appreciate!

That’s the beauty of a non-partisan lens. Eschewing blinding homerism, one can see more clearly what is taking place that expresses the best or worst of the game — all in service of a better and deeper grasp of the special nature of baseball.

I am still processing the World Series of season past. Sure, as a kid who grew up 10 blocks from Wrigley Field, I was pleased to see the Cubbies win after a 108-year drought. I was also excited to see two of the game’s best managers go head to head, still reflecting how ironic it was that the winning manager was so out-managed by the losing manager.

My favourite local observer/commentator of Jays’ baseball is Gregg Zaun simply because he is unabashedly committed to telling it like it is. He understands the fundamentals of the game and can catch a player or manager doing something really well or something really stupid and advances the “whys” and “hows” in clear and blunt terms.

My favourite political columnists similarly analyze the actions of politicians with a detachment that is unphased by the editorial biases of the owners of the media outlets for whom they work. Zealous devotion to a political party makes it difficult for appreciating good ideas from the “other side” with better public policy the casualty.

I love that the Jays have an ever-increasing and knowledgeable fan base. But can one be both a fan of a team and “the game?” Unequivocally, maybe.

For me, I love watching Jays’ games and when I do, I want the Jays to win — big time. But I also watch one or two games a week involving teams outside the Jays’ division to remove the win-lose emotion to more clearly observe the best and worst examples of inside baseball.

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Adding a modicum of non-partisan perspective might help situate and bring greater understanding of where our more parochial interests fit, and could be improved, in the context of something larger and more important.