Monday, October 03, 2005

Why I don’t watch baseball

This is an expansion on my comment made over at Something Old, Something New.

I don’t watch as much baseball - or as much of any other sport - as I used to. There are a variety of reasons for this. A large part of it is just lack of time - family, job, hobbies; I just don’t have as much free time as I once did. There’s something to be said as well for the oversaturation of sports on television. With regular cable I could watch a couple games a night most of the time or buy a package and have practically every game available. Throw in highlights, sports shows, explosion of sports radio, and I’m just numbed to it all. I’ll tune in they get to the playoffs, but even that can be spotty.

Having mentioned all that, looking back over the last decade or so, I can definitely highlight  two things that have killed much of my love of baseball.
  • Wild Card teams
  • Tim McCarver

Wild Card teams

I don’t care that more teams are involved in the postseason race. It is just wrong that after 162 games a runner up qualifies for the playoffs. I’m no purist (the DH is OK by me), but compared to other professional sports I always loved the loser go home aspect of major league baseball. Win 100 games and finish second? Sorry, you suck, go play golf.

Baskeball and hockey are a joke. They play 7 months to eliminate two teams, then have three months of playoffs. At least football I can understand. Only playing 16 games, the regular season is playing for a postseason seed.

But baseball? Win your league and beat the team from the other league. I’ll still tune in to the World Series, unless:

Tim McCarver

Tim McCarver has been ruining baseball for twenty years.

Discard all my bitching and moaning about the scheduling and MLB chasing ratings. I cannot watch a baseball game if Tim McCarver is involved. He’s irritating, condescending, and never has anything interesting or illuminating to say. It is worse than if someone hacked my arm off and used it to drag my own fingernails down a blackboard. Good to know I’m not alone.

The worst thing Deion Sanders ever did was not electrocuting McCarver.

1 Comments:

Blogger Ahistoricality said...

Steroids

Until the sport decides whether it's going to be human beings against human beings or medical miracles against medical miracles, there's a huge asterisk over the entire sport.

I used to live in a city with A-level baseball: I enjoyed that. I don't watch big leagues anymore, though I still follow the old home team(s) (yeah, I've moved around a bit) because the sports page is between the news and the comics....

10/04/2005 05:23:00 AM  

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