In case you were living in a coma or watching hours of ESPN’s riveting bowling coverage this weekend, you no doubt know that the “greatest rivalry in sports” was this weekend. That’s right. Yankees/Red Sox. Two of the most insufferable fan bases in all of sports trying to figure out which is more obnoxious (Red Sox fans by the way — by a longshot). Meanwhile on the field.. well, I don’t exactly know what happened BECAUSE I WASN’T WATCHING.
With the NFL draft looming and the NHL playoffs heating up (that’s right, I watch hockey — great Calgary/Detroit series by the way. Go Sabres!), I’ve decided to compile a list of the top 4 reasons why I hate major league baseball and if all the teams were eradicated by some sort of disasterous plauge — or a holdout — my life would be completeled unaltered.
1. One number — 162. There are 162 games. There was nothing consequential about this weekend’s Red Sox/Yankees tilt as much as the Worldwide Leader would try to convince you otherwise. You can’t convince me that there’s anything meaningful about a game played in April in a season that has 162 games.
2. Major League Baseball, more than any other league, relies on tradition to help establish its fan base. It lives in the past. There is nothing new or exciting about baseball. It’s the same game that they’ve been playing since the early 1900’s, only now the players are slightly genetically modified. There is something warm and fuzzy about baseball. About tossing the ball around in the yard or about walking out of the tunnel and seeing the field sprawled out in front of you but that doesn’t mean that I care about a May 19th game between the Royals and Devil Rays.
3. No competitive balance. Like it or not, the NFL owns the market when it comes to competitive balance. They’ve got it figured out. They know that the possibility of every team (minus the Oakland Raiders) having a chance to win the Super Bowl at the onset of any given season is good for everyone. The time when the NFLPA finally grows a pair and demands the league abolish the salary cap is when football starts getting terrible. In baseball, after 162 games, you look at the teams that are in the playoffs and they are the exact same teams that you thought would be there in April. You just wasted six months of your life watching something unfold that you already knew the ending too. Would you watch a six month long movie if you already knew the ending? Neither would I and that’s why I don’t watch baseball. Of course, there are always exceptions, the Tigers of last year were a surprise but teams like that are the exception, not the rule. And you can’t just blame the Yankees. Because it’s not just the Yankees. It’s the Red Sox. The White Sox. The Astros. The Cardinals. The Cubs. The Angels, Giants and Dodgers. You can’t lay all of the blame for the lack of competitive balance in baseball squarely at the feet of the Empire.
4. Steroids. This isn’t to say that other sports don’t have athletes that are chemically enhanced but no sport has so blatantly looked the other way to ignore what was going on. It’s a shame that someone like Hank Aaron, who by all accounts has been a class act, is going to have his records broken by a guy like Barry Bonds, who by all accounts is not a class act. Granted that Bonds, and his massive, genetically altered dome, is going to be surpassed by A-Rod. But the reality is that major league baseball earned this. They deserve to have something like this happen to the game. After the strike, they looked the other way despite the fact that they knew McGwire and Sosa were both on ‘roids but they looked the other way, and so did the press, to embrace the home run chase of ’98. And now we have no idea who’s clean and who isn’t and its a shame that guys like Ryan Howard and Albert Pujols, who I believe are genuinely great players, will always be viewed with skepticism because major league baseball, and the players union, fumbled this one so badly.
Leave a Reply