As for baseball, let’s be honest. It’s boring to watch and it’s even boring to play. Ordinary people who aren’t being paid to play baseball cannot endure it except by playing it co-ed with beer, which makes practically anything endurable including watching paint dry.
About 90% of baseball consists of the players standing around while touching their privates whenever the TV camera is pointed at them or sitting around the dugout pretending to watch the other team while touching their privates. They often spit.
Why do people pay to see millionaires lolling about in a park and hiding in a little concrete bomb shelter while spitting and touching their privates? I can get that from the vagrants who live in the park and under the viaduct. For free.
If you’re a baseball fan, your life is very small. There’s a reason this game hasn’t caught on in the rest of the world (except in Japan, a country that practically defines boredom).
By the way, this has nothing to do with the fact that I was cut from the 9th Grade baseball team in an unfair, cruel and incompetent decision from which I’ve fully recovered and about which I have no hard feelings.
How about football? I’ll admit that football is fun to watch. It’s something like the Roman circus but without the lions. You get to watch overweight men collide helmet-to-helmet at breakneck speed and sometimes break their necks. What’s not to like?
Well, there’s the business where they taunt spectators who’ve paid a full day’s pay for a ticket by kneeling when the National Anthem is played. And they complain that they get paid only a million dollars a year unless they perform well, in which case they get only ten times that. And they pretend not to hear a player’s ugly antisemitic, Hitlerian remarks.
And they plan to play something called the “Black National Anthem.” If there’s a “Black National Anthem” then doesn’t that mean there’s a black nation? And conversely a white nation?
Are they actually promoting racially segregated nations? Has anyone thought this through?
And they shout down anyone who disagrees with their politics, including their own teammates, since they’re all political and Constitutional Law experts except the ones that disagree with them who are all racists.
Then there’s basketball, a winter sport. They plan to resume their curtailed season sometime this summer with slogans of Black Lives Matter – an organization described by its cofounder as “trained Marxists.”
Such slogans include “Black Lives Matter,” “I Can’t Breathe” and “Group Economics.” The economics of this particular group includes average pay of $7 million a year but “$7 Million” is not one of the approved slogans for these $7 million dollar men.
Another unapproved slogan is “Black Wives Matter” because they apparently still don’t, at least not to NBA players.
And don’t you dare say that the lives of other races matter, because that’s racist now and if you say it, you’ll be cancelled or killed.
(Feel free to add to this rant in a comment. There’s more ground to cover on this topic than in center field of Minute Maid Park.)
People spend around 20,000 hours watching sports over the course of their lifetimes. That’s often more time than they spend with their children, and way more time than they spend on charitable activities, home improvement or actually participating in sports as opposed to watching others play.
Let’s be better than that. Let’s just say no to professional sports. Let’s get lives of our own.
(Subscribe with an email to theAspenbeat@gmail.com)
the Aspen beat 
I’ve been an NHL fan since I was a kid in the early sixties. As of today, August 1, 2020, I have resolved never to watch another game, having just discovered that the league has gone full SJW mode. I respect all people and deplore injustice of any kind. Having said that, I don’t need the NHL bigwigs preaching social justice to me and telling me I need to read “White Fragility”. The attitude of moral superiority—–and their perceived need to educate the great unwashed—–projected by the pro sports leagues these days has become insufferable. If they all disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t shed a tear. Truly sad it’s come to this.
Kenneth, I wish I had your strength and could boycott hockey for their dumb assery, but alas, I am too emotionally involved to just walk away. (sob)
My heart skips a beat when I hear a puck drop…and the ping when it hits the metal frame…and the whoosh as it skims the net. …dont judge me…I just cant.
Sorry, Glenn, but for my money, if you don’t like baseball the fault is in you, not the game. I don’t deny that for lovers of fast action, baseball doesn’t cut it. But for those who appreciate competition at the fine margins where the mental matters as much as or more than the physical, baseball’s your game.
It’s is more cerebral than other sports partly because of its slower pace. That’s mostly because of the contest between pitcher and hitter. Warren Spahn said, “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” With today’s cameras we see this better than fans ever could before – the change of speeds, the importance of location, the help of a savvy catcher, the crucial role of an umpire who really understands the strike zone and can follow a moving ball at high speeds.
Baseball is also perhaps more individual than any major sport but tennis. The action begins with the pitcher, alone, throwing the ball. Then the hitter, alone, hits the ball. The fielder, alone, makes the play. Errors can’t be hidden because of the overall one-guy-at-a-time, consecutive-action-over-concurrent-mob-action design of the game. It’s all out in the open. You made the play or you muffed it.
Again, if you’re not into thinking sports, baseball’s not your game. But if you are – oh, the beauty of a Greg Maddux 76-pitch, 9-inning complete game or a Whitey Ford 13-hit shutout or Rod Carew dropping an unplayable bunt or a wily outfielder decoying a runner or a perfectly thrown slider just nipping the corner low-and-away before falling completely out of the zone. These plays transfix the knowledgeable observer; they go right over the head of the guy who appreciates only fast action.
Oh, and there’s this: You don’t have to watch spoiled brat rich kids play. You can catch a good game at a local diamond. It does take some searching, though, to find the competitive leagues versus the ones where everybody gets to play and nobody’s feelings get hurt.
Baseball had its chance with me, and I got cut from the 9th grade team. I can never forgive baseball for that.
LOL. You highlanders can carry a grudge!
Pingback: Baseball is the sport for smart people - Siomni™
I totally agree with everything you said and I am done with professional sports nothing but overpaid cry babies.
No professional sports for me except for golf. Some people find that boring but I played the game for fifty years and I still find it interesting. Maybe it’s remembering the gazillion bad shots I played over those years and the few good ones that I managed to pull off. They also don’t seem to have become extremely woke and thus insufferable.