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What you need to know about my favorite sport

Liam Ulland-Joy, 12

I bet you can’t guess my favorite sport. Seriously. I know what you’re thinking, and it’s wrong. Yep, wrong again. Aaaaand — definitely wrong. Okay, you’ve used up your three guesses. It’s baseball. I know, I know, I’m a 21st century kid so you’d think: football, hockey, basketball, but NOPE. Baseball. The reason being I’ve only ever-played baseball and soccer, and I barely remember my soccer games.

I started playing baseball 3 years ago while I was in the Minors. I was lucky to join a supportive and friendly team (not to mention they were pretty good I think). For those of you who don’t know what baseball is, too bad. I mean, seriously. How can you not know what baseball is? I like to think of myself as an average to below-average player of the game. For the most part, I play outfield, but for some reason I never play center field: just right and left. Maybe it’s because those are the two extremes, and I’m extremely good. Ha. Ha. See what I did there? But once in a while I do play second base. Just for a change of pace I think, since I’m not very good at it. I never know if those guys who are leading off of first base are silently telling me move 3 inches forward, you moron. You’re in the way of the baseline.

When it comes time to bat, I’m usually the last or second-to-last in the batting order. I don’t mind that though because something about my intimidating face (ha) scares the pitchers into walking me, leaving me in a good place when the people at the top of the batting order bat. A lot of the time I get walked, but I will occasionally hit a fairly solid hit into right-center field. Unfortunately, the pitcher usually catches it, but if he doesn’t it usually gets about halfway through center field, giving me a fairly easy single.

As you can tell there are a lot of obstacles for me to get past to get on base without walking, but with all my many life skills I can get past them. This year I’ve had a positive win vs. loss ratio on my games, so I’m pretty proud of that. I missed several games because I went to Spain (stay tuned for my sister Esme’s upcoming column for more information on that legitness). Unfortunately, several of the games I played were rained on, but since there was no lightning I had to sit in right field and get RAINED ON. That’s pretty much all you need to know about my baseball playing. You probably didn’t need to know it, but now you do! Yay!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Liam Ulland-Joy, 12, enjoys coding on a computer programming website called Scratch, riding his bike, and writing graphic novels and other works of fiction.

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