A baseball fan? Why? Why not lawn bowling? It’s not Taylor Swift, is it?
Let’s get all existential this AM, shall we?
I was recently asked, “Why do you like Baseball? Baseball’s boring!” This was a young person at work. Ye Olde Salt Mines is LITTERED with young people. More than a few of them born in the 2000s, too! I don’t think even one of these young whippersnappers watch baseball. Some don’t even know who The Yankees are. It’s genuinely sad.
I countered her questions with a question, an easy tactic when speaking to young people. I asked her, “What sports do you watch?” She replied, “Football! But only The Chiefs.”
Uh huh. She watched football to see Taylor Swift. Fine. I left it at that and did not shame her for knowing nothing about The NFL, football in general, or even her home team, The Buccaneers. She did start me thinking, though. I used to watch football, but don’t anymore. I only watch baseball.
Why?
Because, I realized, the esoterica associated with the game make it a judgement call so often that there’s almost no way to predict what’s going to happen next. It’s men in striped shirts arbitrarily tossing flags around and chatting to each other and then deciding if points are awarded and how many of them. There is A LOT of that.
Baseball winds up being much more set, by comparison. The arbitrary nature of balls and strikes exercises us all so much that we want some sort of call assistance to get that right and within the rules. Still, those are called correctly 90% (or greater) of the time. Otherwise, the players play within the rules and the outcome is the outcome. There mainly isn’t some “away from the play” shenanigans going on.
In baseball there’s one way to score. Only one. You get one point. Only one.
In football? Does anyone even know? Scoring seems so arbitrary and ill defined that it’s like they’re making it up, a la Calvinball. Football officials huddle to decide scoring so many times/game that you can be lead to believe THAT’S THE POINT OF THE ENTERPRISE: make the striped shirt guys get in a group and talk.
This is then boiled down to who can waste enough time such that the outcome is based on clock management. Have we tuned in to watch a tubby guy on the sidelines waste time? Well, it seems so for a lot of people, so yes. I guess so,
I got so irritated by this I gave up on football over 15 years ago. From the little I’ve seen of it, it’s not gotten any better. That’s why I watch baseball. They have a ruleset that makes sense, the ballplayers largely decide the game, and they try to get it right based on metrics or measurements if they’re unsure. Wasting time is actually against the rules, too.
Then there’s injuries. Notable football injuries are of two kinds: often gruesome and part of the nature of the game or subtle and manifest away from the game and are irreversible. They confer life long devastating injury upon otherwise healthy young people.
Baseball injuries are not so common and are outside normal play. They rarely confer lifelong affliction upon the young people playing the sport, least of all such that their very cognitive ability is impaired.
Anyhow, that’s me. That’s how I come to watch baseball and not Calvinball Football. I enjoy knowing that the actual game itself being played decides the outcome. Most games don’t involve anyone getting injured at all in any way. Every play isn’t resulting in micro concussions left and right.
What brings the rest of you here? Sick of tubby men managing clocks? Uninterested in watching zebra men huddle and chat?
Maybe you don’t mind that stuff and watch both? Why? Is it Taylor Swift?