What on Earth would possess me to watch a Tampa Bay-Oakland baseball game Thursday afternoon?

Baseball.

It’s the same reason people will watch World Cup matches between two countries they’ve never heard of. Or watch a Tuesday night college football game between Akron and Northern Illinois.

Some would say it’s the same reason people actually watch the NBA Finals, but that’s another story.

When you love a sport — or sports — it doesn’t matter who is playing. And we don’t have to defend our viewing habits. “How could you watch that?” often gets said by the great unwashed.

There are plenty of sports that I don’t care much about, but I’ll watch just about anything. Everybody loves the big events, but to me, the best part of sports are the Tampa Bay vs. Oakland games, even in May.

Everybody loves to passionately root for their team, but it’s the sport that makes you a true sports fan.

Do you think I am ever going to remember a single thing from Thursday’s Rays-Athletics game. I hope not. (Oakland won 7-3 but pitcher Daniel Mengden’s scoreless streak ended in the ninth inning. See, I told you.)

We watch these otherwise meaningless games because you never know when something might happen that you’ve never seen before. It’s why Golf Channel shows the first round of a tournament, even if Tiger Woods isn’t in it.

Not every sporting event has to be about a championship or a milestone. Sometimes, it’s just meant to be watched and enjoyed on a purely pedestrian level.

He was my Little League “grandad.”

When we showed up for coach pitch around age 8, Robert Pringle was in charge of that part of Shreveport Little League. He explained to me what to do and how to do it. He did it with patience and compassion.

That changed when we coached against each other years later “fo reals,” when there were little baseball men out there on 90-foot bases doing what little baseball men do. There were games when I wanted to walk to the other dugout and strangle him. But before I could, he’d always hit me in my weak spot. He’d yell to his pitcher or to mine, after a particularly good pitch, “NOW YOU CHUNKIN’!”

It always neutralized me. He knew it would. We had few conversations that one of us didn’t say it, just to make the other one laugh. It’s how all of our conversations ended.

I love a good “Now you chunkin’!”

Robert Pringle passed away in March, just about the time we would have been starting Little League practice. Now the season is over and All Stars looms. I have thought of him often, and would give a lot of money to turn the clock back a few years and have one more night out there with him and his guys and me and mine, him with his sons and me with mine.

Pringle (we called him that because it sounded right, for some reason: he was a last-name guy at the ballyard) loved LSU, the Houston Astros, Shreveport Little League, and Loyola. A standout Flyer among Flyers, he was inducted into the Loyola Hall of Honor five years ago.

I am Protestant, Pringle is Catholic, so our paths didn’t cross in church. But throughout his cancer treatments, he kept showing up for mass. I’m glad that back in the day he kept showing up for what Annie Savoy in the movie Bull Durham called “the Church of Baseball.” It won’t save you, but it can make you understand that you and all those little baseball men are worth saving, that we all bring something to the table, that every little man can make a difference and can have fun doing it even though it’s hard and fun at the same time and, at times, unfair. There seems to be something eternal about baseball…

I can still hear him calling me “Coach Teddy,” which is all he’s ever called me for the past 20 years. He is a memory that makes me smile.

Now you chunkin’.

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