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We don’t like baseball very much. But they insist on continuing the sport every year, and so we’ll have no choice but to go out of our way to ignore it.
But we recognize that a lot of you follow the game that used to be America’s pastime, and that you play fantasy baseball in order to make it more interesting (or, as the case may be, less uninteresting).
So if you will be participating in fantasy baseball, you’ll need some help — primarily since part of your time will be devoted to satisfying your jones for information about America’s real pastime. And you can get that help from our friends at Rotoworld.com, who power the PFT Fantasy Mill.
It’s the Rotoworld.com Fantasy Draft Guide. Buy it through this link and you’ll be helping us get a little more money to help justify all the time we spend working on the site.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I listen to guy talk about how boring baseball was and then starting talking about golf…yeah right. I love baseball. NO clock, so you ALWAYS have a chance to comeback. People who dont like baseball, dont truely understand the “Chess match” part of the game. I tell my kids if they got 3 out of 10 questions right; they would fail. In baseball your a success. Hockey,soccer,etc. have their dull moments also, but fans still love it. Plus its play every day during the season. No week wait for redemption. Take me out to the ball game…oh yeah, I love football also….
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March 18th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Yes, baseball is boring, stultifyingly boring.
Most of the time, here’s what happens in a typical baseball game: The pitcher is scratching his genitals, or adjusting his pants, or shrugging his shoulder, or shaking his head at the catcher, or digging a hole in the dirt, or going through any number of inane and tiresome pre-pitch rituals. The catcher is squatting behind the plate giving hand signals from his crotch. The batter is meandering around home plate, or, if he actually stays put, he spends most of his time waving the bat around or kicking his own hole in the dirt. The in- and out-fielders are just standing there, looking around, waiting for something to happen. The dugouts are full of players and coaches with their eyes glazed-over from the boredom, eating sunflower seeds, or chewing tobacco, or spitting, or talking about the stock market or anything but baseball.
That happens, during the course of a baseball game, over 90% of the time. So, if the typical baseball game lasts 2.5 hours, there’s only about 7 to 12 minutes of so-called “action”.
Why do you think baseball players can play some 180+ games per year? It’s because they don’t really do much in a game. In fact, they usually only break a sweat if it’s hot outside. Playing a game of baseball is about as strenuous as spending 3 minutes jogging.
Can you imagine if basketball or football or hockey or soccer players had to play that many games each year? You’d end up burying 95% of the players before the season ends.
Unlike basketball or football or hockey or soccer players, who have to have strength, endurance, quickness, agility, technique, etc. — that is, ATHLETIC skills — most baseball players are over-weight and out-of-shape. Just take a look at David Wells, a pitcher who, until recently, was one of the top players in the game. Have you seen the gut on the guy? Wells (who would be trailer trash if he couldn’t throw a baseball) lives on beer and junk food (and it shows), but why shouldn’t he? He doesn’t really need to do anything that requires any true athletic conditioning or skill.
Baseball fans and commentators spend most of their time marveling or waxing poetic about the pitcher and how the pitcher’s fastball, curveball, slider, etc. fools batters. They re-play, over and over again, how the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand and follows some errant flight path to home plate. If they find that exciting, they should just open some physics textbook and read about aerodynamics. That would be just as “exciting” as watching a pitcher pitch.
Others talk about skillful batters. Most of the time, as I said, the batter is doing next to nothing. When the pitcher actually throws the ball at him, the batter usually either watches it go by, or flails away futilely at it. If the batter actually hits the ball, it’s usually a foul ball, or, if not, some dinky little shot to the infielder who throws him out.
On occasion, a batter will actually hit a home run. The fans usually get pretty excited when that happens, but I’m convinced it’s because they were dozing-off up to that point and the noise just woke them up.
Other fans and commentators marvel at the “strategy” of the game. I’ve got news for them. Mowing the lawn takes more strategy than a baseball game. If strategy is what they’re looking for, they’d find oodles of strategy in a game of chess (which has a tempo only slightly slower than a baseball game).
That is why there’s so much emphasis on baseball statistics — to distract the fans from the ho-hum events on the field. One baseball fan might ask another: “Which switch-hitter had the most doubles in August during a strike-shortened season in replacement of the regular third baseman when hitting left-handed in night games?” I have a better, and more important, question: Who cares?
Lastly, to make matters even worse, the exhorbitant salaries being paid to players have made them more disinterested than ever, and that makes the game even more tiresome. But who can blame the players? Who would want to spend an afternoon playing a boring game of baseball when, with another $100,000 in the bank for that game, they could be self-indulging themselves with liquor, drugs and women, popping steroids and pumping iron at the gym, acting like arrogant a**holes to fans, walking around as if they peed eau de cologne, or otherwise behaving badly?
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March 18th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Crap that was long Tor!
A wise man once told me “It can’t be good if you can take a nap while playing a sport and yet not miss a thing”. Yeah, that sums up baseball for me. However, I think baseball is the perfect Sportscenter sport since:
1)It’s so stats oriented they can just slap those on the screen and you can understand most of what happened in the game.
2)What you can’t get from the stats, you get from the three to five highlights of the only important parts (i.e. turning points) of the game.
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March 20th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Baseball doesn’t bother me until I’m trying to catch football news on ESPN and have to wait through endless baseball highlights; made worse by the constant teasers telling you that the football story you are interested in is “coming up next” only to see another round of baseball stuff.
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