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Stop obsessing about yourself and mint chocolate ice cream.

The Major League Playoffs are not about you. They are about America, the Stars and Stripes, Lady Liberty, Tojam Football and Walrus GumBoot.

You must conform and come together, right now, over me.

Our country demands that its citizens follow orders. You must watch these five-hour baseball games, two hours of which are TV commercials. Do your civic duty by subjecting yourself to American capitalism and opportunism. This is our nation's secular religion: baseball. Advertising is our mortal sin.

Shut up and watch the ads. This is not about you. It's about author Terrance Mann, cornfield owner Kevin Costner and an Iowa baseball field filled with 1920s baseball players long since deceased.

"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball," says Mann. "America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come."

Get sappy. Feel nostalgia. Believe all could be good again even if you're skeptical. Wipe your moist eyes with a handkerchief. Cry yourself to sleep.

This is the time of year when the air chills like a Coke can in ice water, and the players wear undershirts with long sleeves to keep their arms warm on those autumn nights. This is the time of year when football games distract us from baseball games. Yet as the playoffs progress, we start spending more of our time watching baseball. We wait and see if someone will crack a home run. We all want to see a home run. It is the heart and soul of baseball.

There is nothing more interesting and important about baseball than home runs.

You need to get over your pro-football, anti-baseball bias. Be glad Fantasy Baseball doesn't exist so you don't have to read a Sammy Sportface blog about how those fantasies ruined baseball and we should, therefore, shut down baseball from sea to shining sea.

Baseball is a bore most of the time.

This is not that time.

These are the playoffs. And after this comes the World Series.

Just imagine: In this country 100 years ago people were eager to track the World Series, which was also played then during this same foreboding time of year that signals the end of leaves on trees and another four months into the Ice Age hiding in our igloos.

For those who don't understand baseball, it has to be as dull as cardboard. For those who have watched hundreds of innings the game, it is an intellectual treasure chest, a game of Chess, Checkers and Chutes and Ladders compounded by the uncertainties of human error and hand-eye coordination that varies imperceptibly but importantly among all the players.

Those who have it, have it. Those who don't, can't hit.

Watching a baseball game is like walking into a library and seeing all those books and thinking about all the thought that has gone into writing those books.

Here's my final tip: sit down, eat a hot dog covered with mustard, and watch Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon teach you about life.

There is no one in sports with a personality more colorful and fascinating as his. Joe Mad doesn't believe in thinking or living conventionally. He does what he feels like doing and coaches the way he feels like coaching. His players love him for that. Original people are loved.

Joe will lead the Cubs to their first World Series since the Romans dominated the world.

Then you will appreciate baseball more than you ever have.

- Charles Hartley

Charles Hartley is a freelance writer who has had more than 1,000 articles published in a wide range of media outlets focused on humor, sports, business, technology and consumers. He has earned master's degrees in journalism and business administration and a bachelor's degree in English and communications.