By Josh Randolph
It has been a while since I’ve written anything for my sites, hell it has been a while since I did anything baseball related for any reason. There are a lot of reasons for it, and I’m sure at some point I will dig deeper into those (like a part 2 to this article) but I wanted to start by talking about the relational side of baseball and the impact of losing that.
Baseball is still one of my two favorite sports ever (fastpitch softball is my favorite, which is really a different version of baseball that has some great game dynamics that I enjoy). I love being at the field, hearing the chatter, eating hamburgers and just being in the excitement of the game.
The last few years though I have found myself distancing myself from the game. It wasn’t uncommon in the past for me to get out to 200+ games in a year, but in the last few years I think I’ve made it out to maybe 20 baseball games total. Last summer I even got free tickets to the local summer league team and after an inning I just wanted to leave.
A lot of things have played into me not attending baseball games; moving from Washington state to North Dakota, a new job, and multiple other factors played into this decrease. One of the biggest things that I realized impacted my lack of desire to go to games was the lack of relationships I had, both with the baseball community in North Dakota and the overall community in North Dakota. In the northwest I was blessed to know college coaches, travel ball coaches, players, and parents.
Baseball is an amazing sport, but truly it is a sport built around relationships, just like in life. In an article I wrote like 10 years ago I talked about how going to games is just as much about talking and hanging out with other fans around you, as it is about watching the game on the field.
This lack of relationships led me to feel frustrated. I thought the frustration was because of baseball, but really it was a form of grief for what I had lost by moving to North Dakota. This feeling made me feel like I needed to get away from what was frustrating me. Though, now I’m realizing I need to do the opposite. I need to get back to the foundations of my sites, which was promoting, supporting and encouraging all of the amazing players, coaches and others in the baseball community.
Now I want to be very clear that the coaches and players I have met in North Dakota have been just as welcoming as those in the Northwest. The challenge though really is the distance. In Washington I had about a dozen colleges within an hour and a half drive, tons of high schools that I knew coaches, and was pretty close to where Baseball NW hosts their annual championships.
In North Dakota I have two colleges near me and then I have to drive at least an hour and a half just to get to the next closest college. Even the teams that are here in Bismarck sometimes have to play home games in other states because of the weather. Getting to games is harder and as a result building relationships is harder as well.
So I’ve had to reassess how I approach things here. Regardless of my approach I know my goal moving forward is to try and build relationships in the baseball community here in the Great Plains region, while also trying to reconnect to the Northwest Region. I’ve been looking into restarting the podcast/youtube videos I used to do, and of course getting out and photographing as much as possible this upcoming fall, spring and summer.