No, not British Petroleum.

Or blood pressure.

To me, BP always means one thing, first and foremost: batting practice.

Even now, at age 47, given the time I could pretty much hit all day.

Unless you’ve read this blog fewer than about three times, you’ve likely figured out that baseball is a big deal to me. It’s something I’ve always been involved in, it’s permanently situated in my soul, and except for actual games — which I still play in, just wrapping up season No. 17 in the Men’s Senior league — taking batting practice is my favorite aspect of the sport.

There’s just something about taking swing after swing after swing that I find really soothing and satisfying. Ted Williams talked about taking BP “until the blisters bleed,” and I would do that were it not for the fact that I’ve taken so much BP over the course of my lifetime that I have permanent callouses in the various spots blisters might otherwise appear.

When I was a young kid, it was with some regularity that my two big brothers — 10 and 12 years older than I — would go with me over to Riverside Grade School a couple blocks away and pitch to me. Every such trip to the field was an enormous treat for me, and my only real regret is that I did not take their advice and try to become a switch-hitter; a natural left-handed batter, I should’ve taken advantage of brother Duane’s left-handed pitching to develop a right-handed stroke, but alas I never did.

An aside: Several times while practicing during my men’s league career I have dabbled in hitting right-handed, but invariably two things always happen: It feels really awkward, and I end up hitting a foul ball that bounces off the ground and into my groin — not exactly positive reinforcement.

While my brothers were often amenable to pitching to me when they were around, as they got older and left home I had to beg friends to pitch to me if I was going to get anywhere close to the amount of BP I wanted. Sometimes I begged with success, often I did not. The best days were when I could not only talk someone into pitching to me (I would pitch to them too, of course, if they wanted to hit), but also get them to go with me to my favorite BP location, Concord Grade School, maybe a mile away. I liked Concord because, if I really tagged one, I could hit it over the right-field fence and feel just like Mickey Mantle or Reggie Jackson.

Following my final American Legion season (1982), I didn’t play organized baseball again until turning 30 and becoming eligible for the men’s league. Still, during the years in between, I continued my quest for BP pitchers, even persuading my wife Roberta to pitch wiffle balls to me in our front yard in Springfield; we lived in a very dumpy rental house there, but its yard could not have been set up any better for wiffle ball home run derby. Roberta had no prior pitching experience; however, to her credit she figured out quickly how to groove the BP meatballs that I deposited beyond what passed for the right-field fence (I have always been basically a dead pull hitter).

A decade later, I had spent several years salivating over the Jugs pitching machine offered in the Baseball Express catalog that showed up at my house all the time, but the price — roughly $2,000 for the machine and an automatic feeder — was prohibitive for a working stiff with two little kids, so I resigned myself to just salivating.

But one day my father-in-law, Bob Sager, walked up to me as I stared at the machine in the catalog for like the 100th time and said, “Just order it. I’ll pay for it.” Bob, who died in 2000, was a truly generous and thoroughly considerate human being, and I knew it would mean a lot to him to make me the happy owner of a pitching machine, so I decided to accept his offer. That was a dozen years ago, and in the years hence, I have taken at least 100,000 swings, likely more, in the “batting cage” we set up in our barn.

Bob used to come out occasionally to watch me hit, and his satisfaction was obvious. He truly was a terrific person.

I do most of my practicing during the summer, but I basically hit year-round, just because I love to. You’d think that with all the practice, I’d be absolutely tearing it up in the league, but just as I was before having the machine, I’m a solid, above-average hitter, nothing more.

Still, owning the machine has been a dream come true for me. On days like today, when I’m on vacation, I really can hit all day if I so choose — no begging required.