Wednesday, April 07, 2004

It's Baseball Season! Ack!

The NCAA basketball championships always mark a sad time for me for two reasons - the end of college basketball for a few months (duh) and the beginning of baseball. I hate baseball. I just heard Lex's head explode! Okay, I do enjoy going to minor league baseball games but it's really for the cheap beer, between-inning silliness, cheap beer, Flying Burrito burritos and cheap beer. And, oh yeah, there's a baseball game going on somewhere out there. But watching baseball on television is about as exciting as watching artificial turf grow. ESPN's SportsCenter is all I need to know about baseball - an entire game reduced to a 20-second highlight reel (and sometimes they have to stretch it to make it that long). This morning I think I finally realized why - in what other team sport do you have the majority of each team that is actually considered in the game either standing around doing nothing or sitting around on their asses? Okay, so it happens way too often in pro basketball these days (note that I'm not spending a lot of time watching the NBA either) but that's not the way it's intended to be played - unlike baseball. In football, soccer, hockey (okay, technically hockey is not a sport, but we'll cover that later), everyone that is in the game has some role to play at all times and things are happening more often than they're not happening. In baseball, if someone actually gets a hit, how many people actually have a role to play? Let's see - the pitcher threw the ball, the catcher leaned over to one side just in case he had to catch the ball, the shortstop moved three feet to his right, picked up the ball and threw it to the first baseman, who had to move all of two feet back to the bag. And the hitter hit the ball and ran a few dozen feet towards first base before being thrown out. So out of eighteen guys, five of 'em really did anything (ok, maybe the third baseman moved over a foot to his left before realizing that the shortstop had it covered). My, how exciting! And that was likely a bloody highlight! Boring. Boring, boring, boring. I don't mind low scoring - I'll more than happily watch a 2-1 soccer match if it's well-played and not one of those "sit back on defense and try not to fsck up" sorts of games. And anyone that tries to convince me of the $#%$$@ "poetry" of baseball is barking up the wrong tree - there's more poetry in a Rashad McCants tomahawk dunk than in five baseball games. And oh yeah, where are the damn cheerleaders?!?!!? How can you have a freakin' sport without cheerleaders? Nearly nekkid dance squads? Noooo-o-o-o, we've got a cheesy organist and the $%$%$#% San Diego Chicken!! Okay, my head just exploded...

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