The Yankees won.

I used to absolutely love baseball – still have Bill James’ Baseball Prospectus from ‘83 on – but somewhere along the line, it all just slipped away from me. i haven’t watched a game in years now, can’t tell you who won the last couple of World Series, and don’t find that I miss it at all. And I’m not even sure why.

When I cared, I never found the game boring – it rewards knowledge, the more you know about the sport, the more compelling and interesting the game is. I think it was years of the baseball owners making it clear they’d have preferred to buy an NBA franchise instead, and that they barely understood their own game, or what made it special. I know that I have never been to a sporting event that was as exciting as being at Nolan’s fifth no-hitter, and that no sport has an equivalent to a really good pennant race for sustained passion/despair. But… I’ve found out that it only works if you actually care about the teams involved. If you’d told me that I’d feel this way twenty years ago, I’d have argued incessantly. Who knew….

I used to really love watching baseball. There were players I really cared about — Cal Ripken Jr., Mike Mussina, etc. It just seems today, the game is so tainted with steroids that it’s difficult to find players to root for.

The steroid era and the negative attention it brought upon the game and the players, the lack of compelling playoff series in recent years, and the rapid rise of Dominican players have led to a game that many Americans simply find unwatchable. Even former baseball players. That’s bad. We call this the American pass time, but I have trouble finding American players to root for. Not that I try very hard.

Check out the WBC USA roster if you don’t believe me. http://web.worldbaseballclassic.com/rosters/index.jsp?team=usa
Where are the American Super Stars of the 80’s and 90’s?

I’ve thought to myself about how a shorter regular season and more playoff teams could help the game, but that really hurts the “history” aspect of it since statistical records will no longer be even remotely within reach. The game is fundamentally broken and I don’t know how to fix it. I look forward to the next installment.

The little league thing is interesting and something I intend to look at, and I’ll do my best to look at TV deals, although Baseball is a bit schizophrenic, since the individual teams have their own deals and networks (NESN, and Heidi Watney’s exquisite, um, reporting.) And I have the internet skills of a mildly retarded vole.

I would note that Baseball was played widely during the Civil War by soldiers as a form of recreation, particularily on the Union Side, so it was likely played in the West during the Indian wars as well. Given that the vast bulk of the nation’s population was in the East, it’s not surprising that’s where the teams came from, although the first professional team was actually in Cincinnati. Plus, you’d be hard pressed to recognize organized professional baseball in the 1870’s by any standard we’d be used to. It existed, but I doubt the “Indian Killer Daily Standard” carried a lot of box scores.

I would note Football, the great god of Texas Sports, was clearly invented amongst New England Private colleges and formalized at Yale in the 1870’s by Walter Camp.

Tech – Tim
Shawn Williams – iPowers
Coolest guy on the planet – Clipper Cooper
Baseball – Jay