Baseball sewks.

[elno lewis]

because it does.

[W0lv3r1n3]

I agree, pretty boring most of the time IMO. College is still better than the pro's.

Foul balls anyone?

[tpilews]

A lot of people don't like baseball, but there are tons of people that love it. I for one love it. I was fortunate enough to get my college paid for while I was playing. There's just so much to the game that the average person misses.

The hardest thing to do in all of sports is hit a baseball. It's a sport where if you fail 7 times out of 10, you are a hall of famer.

[editor]

While baseball doesn't have the visceral, adrenaline excitement of football, it does have something else just as valuable: suspense

Alfred Hitchcock once described the difference as this (I paraphrase liberally):

Imagine a movie with a man sitting in a room. All of a sudden, a bomb goes off.

That, he said is a "horror movie" and I would argue, is the visceral excitement from football.

Now, Hitchcock said, imagine a movie with a man sitting in a room. The camera pans down to the bottom of his chair where we see a briefcase. Then the camera shows us the inside of the briefcase, where a clock is ticking. We watch, knowing that the bomb is there, but not knowing if the man will discover it -- or leave the room -- before the bomb goes off.

That, he said is suspense.

So for me, the appeal of baseball is the tension; the suspense of every pitch. It's not exciting in the sense that spectators get an adrenaline rush. It's more of a hold-your-breath thing. It's not gym class, it's physics lab. It's not physical, it's intellectual. And both to me are equally valuable and interesting.

That, and there is a lot more to see in a baseball game than most spectators are able to observe (because they haven't' learned the game) -- the positioning of the players, the one-on-one duel between pitcher and batter (and that occurs with every pitch, not just on the strikeouts or where the batter gets a hit), where each pitch sets up the next. And then there's the unfolding drama from inning to inning as each sets up the next.

In football, you can observe one play and gain some enjoyment. In baseball, you need context. You need to know what came before and what came after. A highlight clip on ESPN showing a strikeout is to me meaningless, because to appreciate it, you need to know how the pitcher moved the batter into the spot where he misjudged the pitch so badly.

Casual fans love the walk-off home run so much, I think, because they can enjoy that particular event a bit without having really paid attention to the rest of the game.

I'd argue that the same holds true with golf. Many think it "boring." But that's because those observers don't truly understand the inner struggle that's going on with the players on the screen.

Like baseball, golf is not visceral. It's more intellectual.

[TNTWolverine]

My only problem with baseball is the length of the season. I went to 3 Tigers games last year and they won them all. Look at their overall record and you can see how little of an effect that had on their overall season. Compare that to say football, which has 12-16 games. The room for error is much less, which I think adds to the pressure/excitement the most. People always like to say baseball is a marathon, not a sprint. It's fun to watch the start and finish but in the middle it can get pretty boring.

[Mike Furley]

my 3 beefs w/ baseball (and i loved the game as a kid):

1st beef - at bats take too damn long. batters stepping out of the box to adjust their cup, spit on the their hands take preactice swings, etc. Jim Thome is the worst offender. Then to, the pitcher has to fart around on the mound too.

2nd beef - too many pitching changes and meetings at the mound. c'mon already. maybe they need to give pitchers or catchers a crib sheet they can wear on their wrist like quarterbacks do.

3rd beef - steroids/hgh. i much prefer the nuance of hitting behind the runner, stolen bases, bunting, etc to a game of strikeouts and home runs.

eliminate these three things and I'll come back to watch the game.

[Wolvrin704]

I agree Mike, they need to speed the game up. They did put some rules into affect a couple of years ago that helped but haven't gone far enough. Living here in Cincy it used to drive me nuts whenever Adam Dunn would bat because between every pitch he would have to step out to adjust his gloves.

As for UM baseball it is nice to see that they will be retiring Jim Abbott's jersey.

[tpilews]

Baseball is just a different game altogether. That's what so many people love about the game. It has its own quirks.

I guess I could say the same thing about football. They should speed the game up. They take too long in between plays. They should only have 15 seconds instead of 25. Hell, Oklahoma, i think it was, was always hiking the ball with 15 seconds left on the play clock.