Longball

Why, oh why, do we waste our time? why is opening day made into a huge spectacle. why do the talking heads build up the anticipation as if its the playoffs? why does anyone care about the first three months of baseball?

Baseball is always referred to as the only "12 month sport" because of all the hot stove reports and rumors in the off-season. baseball is constantly in the news, but truthfully its a 3 month sport (july september, october). we all love the spring rumors involving our favorite teams and players. but once peter gammons' fart dust settles and trades and signings are all done, the fun is over. the season starts and its a straight boring snooze-fest till july when the trade deadline, and all that comes with it, rumbles in. then there's september playoff races, then finally the playoffs. so what i cant wrap my head around is why do we need the 162 games? if you think about it a schedule similar to that of basketball or hockey would be adequate enough to determine the best teams. it really is a marathon and not a sprint to the finish line. then again what is a more popular event in the olympics, the marathon or the 100 meter dash. marathons are long, slow, dull, languid, mind-numbing, monotonous, uninspiring and any other synonyms for boring you can come up with ( or google). and that is only referring to the general season, if you wanna go even deeper and dissect the details and modern nuances of an actual game of baseball it becomes as exciting as the lady who collects books in a library. baseball, in and of itself is a great game, but many things in todays game, and some archaic traditions, have factored in to create our current version of AMERICAS PASTIME.

number one: tv commercials, 9 innings is a long time to play baseball ( see below) so throw in 8 min breaks in between each one and your just extending an already drawn-out drag-athon. thats approximately 64 minutes of time wasted on just changing sides, drinking amphetamine-laced gatorade, and scratching your jock. imagine all the runners in a marathon just stopped running so nbc can go to commercial break. wait, so this would make baseball worse than a marathon bec at least runners dont take breaks. corporate america ruined baseball.

number two: pitching changes, the strategy and managerial chess-games that occur are not the problem, its just that when you have so many games, starters cant go seven innings like they used to. most starters last about five to six innings, which leads to more pitching changes. there are also a more diverse group of players and specialists available which leads to more righty-lefty matchups and substitution maneuvering which, you guessed it, leads to just more pitching changes. and more pitching changes means more time off the clock. managers are doing what they can to win the game, so you cant blame them( im actually not blaming anyone im just doing what i like to call "free-style bitchin")

number three: the amount of innings. seriously why do you need nine innings to determine a winner. there is no reason other than that is how they did it the first time around, back in the 1600s. once they played the first game, the "baseball purist" was born and it became almost impossible to change any rule. follow me on this. one of the few core rules of baseball to ever be changed was the imposing 9-game-series. think about it. nine times of going at each other is totally unnecessary and way too much time needed to resolve a winner. more times than not the superior club wouldnt need the last few games. they switched to the more logical seven game series. but ironically, the reason i believe the originators chose a 9 game format (baseball being very numerically and statistically oriented) was bec a game has nine innings and a series was perceived as essentially one long game, thus the 9 games (one game for each frame). obviously the potential for a team to comeback from a 4 games to 3 defecit was there, but too often the last few games were irrelevant. to explain further once the board of baseball directors( i made that up) decided to reformat the world series it was way too late by then to change a game to seven innings, but they knew deep down it was still too long. its just that its gotten to a point in this attention defecit generation we live in, that if it dont grab me by the balls i'd rather sleep and dream about running a marathon.
so what does it all mean? it means i cant wait for kobe vs. lebron in the freaking finals.