Around this time last year, amidst the dark and cold of winter, I came to a conclusion:  the reason I love baseball so much more than any other sport is because it is predicated on one concept:  hope.

Football, basketball and hockey, all of these sports are set against an actual clock, so you are never just playing the other team, you are playing the clock as well.  In American football, especially, if the winning team maintains posession of the ball with less than a minute left, they don’t even pretend to play the final minute.

Maybe there’s something symbolic about the fact that one plays football in the fall and winter while baseball is played primarily in the spring and summer.

We are not all optimists.  In fact, I may even wager that most of us are not.

We see doom and gloom, the Hobbesian view that life is nasty, brutish and short.  We see Darfur, Afghanistan and Haiti.  We see man’s cruelty to man and we tell people that no matter how bad things get, they could always get worse.

Baseball says otherwise.

It dares us to challenge the way we think; dares us to stop saying no and to start saying “yes, yes it is possible”.  Baseball dares us to hope; it dares us to believe.  It might be the bottom of the ninth inning, our team might be down by five runs against their best closer, but until that other team gets that final out, well, you just never know.

Baseball on its own, of course, cannot change the realities of the world around us.  It’s just a game, right?

Yet the mindset that one develops, the idea that it’s okay to hope, that maybe, just maybe…that changes everything.

Hope changes everything, from something as unimportant as what we see on a baseball field, to something as important as the way that so many with little or no connection to half of an island in the Caribbean have banded together to help, in whatever way, shape or form possible.

Hope reaches into our most primal emotions, makes us imagine, makes us dream.  Hope is contagious–it starts with one and then spreads to another, the same as any virulent plague but instead of spreading bad it spreads good, the belief not just that things can end well, but that they will.  Reality keeps us grounded, but hope makes us human.

This is the enduring power of baseball, as it channels this, and lands a sucker punch in Hobbes’ survivalist gut.

Life can be beautiful, baseball tells us.  All you have to do is hope.