On baseball

My husband said he wants me to watch more baseball.

I said I want him to stand in a corner and poke his eye with his thumb till it bleeds;

same thing.

He doesn’t understand why I don’t get it and I swear to God I don’t understand WHAT he sees in the game. 

So I asked him.

“It’s the strategy” he tells me.

“Do you know those pitching coaches will watch one hitter from an opposing team for hundreds of hours,

HUNDREDS OF HOURS,

in order to properly coach their pitcher against the hitter.”

“Hmmm” I thought.

Now THERE’S a man who needs a life.

Some facts:

On August 22, 2007 the highest scoring modern game of baseball was played.  In game 1 of a double header the Texas Rangers beat the Baltimore Orioles at Baltimore by a score of 30-3!

The guy that posted that information on a site I visited recently then wrote

“My team may be ranked at the bottom this year, but they are AWESOME!”

That, my friends, is a man with very low aspirations.

He probably still lives with his parents and thinks HALO is real life warfare.

Okay-so a score of 30 is the highest.  Let’s see, each play takes about 20 seconds to complete, and frankly that’s if there’s an error and someone bobbles the ball. 

No, I’m not counting pitching as a “play.”  I know you purists are screaming.

COME ON!

It is ONE GUY MOVING HIS ARM.

To me that’s about as interesting as watching someone sitting on their porch waving at passing cars. 

There is NO sane woman in the world that will sit there and watch ONE GUY for five hours,

sit there and watch him move his arm,

 even if he moves it really, really fast,

 and think something cool is happening.

Let’s remember people.  You’re watching a game where a NO HITTER is one of the best things that can happen.

ABSOUTELY NO ONE MOVES…and people are screaming like they’ve hit the lottery.

Okay-so 20 seconds a play.  Let’s say each one of those 30 runs took 4 plays to make.  Probably an over the top exaggeration since at least one of those guys probably brought in a couple of runs when he actually connected with the ball. 

So that’s 120 plays, at 20 seconds each.  That means that over the course of a four or five hour game, something was actually happening,

I mean someone was moving more than his arm,

for about forty minutes.

FORTY MINUTES out of FIVE HOURS.

The rest of the time you’re basically eating hot dogs, drinking beer and yelling for some guy to throw you peanuts.

You’ve got to wonder about a sporting event where, as folklore has it,

the largest President ever in the history of the United States, William Taft, supposedly couldn’t stand it any longer and had to get up to stretch to wake up and everyone else said:

“hey THAT’s a good idea.”  so they stood up and stretched to wake up;

that moment speaks for itself.

Somebody must have recognized its value because they built it into the game.

I’ve said it before.

Watching baseball is like watching farming. 

Still, I have four boys so I understand that baseball is a part of my life.  We spend hours on the fields, hours practicing and hours talking about what went right and what went wrong.

The good news is after the game, I get to do the laundry. 

Now THAT’s exciting.

Parenting Tip of the Day:

Get your kids into sports.  It will teach them teamwork, leadership and how to deal with winning and losing.  If they join a team though, don’t let them quit.  It’s hard because honestly sometimes they will whine till the cows come home that they don’t’ want to get dressed or get ready.  But that’s all a part of it and they will learn that when they make a commitment, they have to live up to it.