I stopped caring a long time ago what team won or lost any particular Major League Baseball game or seasonal championship. In the Willie Mays, Juan Marichal early 1960s and the Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford early 2010s I was a Giants fan, but I can’t keep track of the changing rosters of big-league teams anymore, so what team anyone plays for or how many millions they signed for or who got traded where or what free agent held out for more hundreds of millions or who set what record — all such baseball fandom is lost on me.

Throw in all the new rules and techno-advances and stadium sensationalism — the pitch clocks, the umpire correctors, the visual and aural spectacle accelerators — and the game for me is worlds removed from the dreamy unplugged fields of my boyhood. I still enjoy watching a few innings on a screen above the bar at happy hour, but I have no TV at home so I need to be in a public place to catch a balletic double play or an extra-base-hit-robbing catch or a smoking line drive or perfectly laid down bunt. (The home run is overrated.)

Until I was 12 and my Little League team could only have two 12-year-old pitchers — and hard-throwing Buddy Somers and Bob Alschuler were far more overpowering on the mound than me — I was a reliever who could reliably throw strikes and tie batters in knots with my medium-slow fastball, my slower-and-sinking sidearm crossfire and my even-unbelievably-slower changeup. But I had a good enough arm to play third base, so that’s where I spent most of my 12-year-old year.

My engagement with baseball began early with televised games from the East Coast on black-and-white TV and Pacific Coast League games of the Hollywood Stars at Gilmore Field and backyard games with my big brothers in the early 1950s. An equally mythic contributor to my imagination of the game was my Aunt Mary Merport in Seattle, who was friends with some of the Seattle Rainiers of the PCL and once, when I was up there visiting, got me admitted for an inning to the home team’s third-base dugout. My primal memory of that experience — I was about 8 — is of a brownish stream of tobacco juice spit right in front of me by one of the players as if to say, “You have no business being in here, kid.”

Mary, my mother’s sister, was by her own account and according to family legend the inventor and master of a secret pitch, the snakeball, which was virtually unhittable. I was too little to learn to throw it, but I figured she would teach me someday. Eventually she moved to San Francisco, evolved from a left-wing New Deal Democrat to right-wing Reagan Republican and lived to be 99, but she never did teach me how to throw a snakeball.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it’s baseball season and despite my disillusionment with the speeded-up, tech-spectacular, big-money modernization of the game, it remains for me by far the most civilized, elegantly skilled, intellectually interesting, absurdly American sport with its arcane rules and occult strategies; its leisurely rhythm affords relief from the agitated pace of our age. My late friend the poet Pierre Joris, whom I wrote about last month, was utterly befuddled by baseball when he first arrived in the States from Europe, but he learned colloquial American English by listening to baseball broadcasters and eventually became an avid fan of the New York Mets.

Now that the Warriors, after just a few years, are a local institution with positive economic repercussions and a happy-to-be-distracted fan base, maybe it’s time for Santa Cruz to adopt a minor-league baseball team — let’s call them the Surfers — and set them up in Harvey West Park for starters; then we can build them a stadium as a hub for the next phase of downtown redevelopment and high-end urbanization. Baseball at its best has transcendent grace, and we need all the grace we can get.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.