That time of year has once again rolled around. Opening pitches have been thrown and fans everywhere have whipped out their calculators to figure the odds of the Yankee’s left-handed batters bunting off inside pitches when the team is down by three in the fourth inning and there are two outs.

Or something like that. From what I’ve observed, people who love baseball, who really love it, are numbers people, and the sport provides endless statistics to compute, consider and compare. Frankly, I don’t really care. I mean, I like baseball; I love to head out to the ballpark, and I’ll catch games on TV. But I can’t list the Yankee’s batting order, much less the ERAs of their top pitchers, and I suspect most Americans can’t either. Yet baseball remains, indisputably, our national pastime, as quintessentially American as Apple Pie and hating the French.

After brief consideration, the reason becomes obvious: liquor. There are few other sports that you can follow as well as baseball when completely and thoroughly piss drunk. Cross a certain threshold and hockey, basketball or football games just move too fast. But in baseball, there are plenty of strikes, balls, crotch-scratches and tobacco-spits between anything exciting happening. Even once you’ve reached that precarious point of drunkenness in which, when you turn your head quickly, the world seems to lag a bit behind, you can still handle baseball.

Which is why the start of the baseball season is a happy and patriotic time for America, a time for us to reflect on the American way of life, at least as represented by pot-bellied guys running around a dirt square wearing stretch pants. A toast! Three rude cheers (hey ump, can I pet your seeing eye dog after the game?) and a big swig of Bud Light.