The Blasphemy of Hating Baseball

I hate baseball.  Thank God it’s over.  

I know, it’s terribly un-American of me.  You can go ahead and call me all kinds of names, shake your heads in disbelief, wonder what kind of upbringing I had, if I have a genetic mutation, etc.  Sorry, I’ve tried.  I just can’t get on board. 

Maybe it’s just me, but is it not endless?  I mean both the games themselves and then the sheer number of them.  A “season” of sports to me means a couple of months, tops — not, say, seven.  When you have taken up more than half of the year, I call your “season” a fraud.

Admittedly, I know little about baseball in a factual sense, so I did some quick digging just to check my sanity.

• A regular NFL season is 16 games.  A regular MLB season is 162 games.  Ten times more.  I think we can agree that, at least in sheer numbers, this is not comparable.
• The entire MLB combined plays 2,430 games in a regular season. Now we’re onto something.  It is, in fact, endless.

I am sure I’ve unknowingly made an apples-to-oranges comparison here between the MLB and the NFL for a variety of reasons that sports fans will quickly point out.  I’m just saying, on the surface, this begins to explain my visceral reaction against America’s Favorite Pastime. 

If you love baseball, I envy you.  It must be fabulous to have access to something you want to see over 2,000 times per year.  How cool is that.  If only Lost had adopted this schedule (though my head may have physically imploded — there would be more Dharma backstory and possibly a second rescue effort, but I digress)…

Anyway, I kind of have no business writing about sports.  It’s not my thing, overall.  But, to add some shred of credibility, I like football.  I like that it has a distinct seasonality to it — that when the end of summer rolls around, we’re ready for it.  And when the awfulness of January wraps up, we’re figuring out where to watch the Super Bowl.  And that’s it.  Those 16 weeks of regular season play make it a distinct timeline.  And it’s a treat, right?  Sundays and Mondays.  An event.  So when it’s over, you’ve got some wistfulness. 

Baseball, you have it all the time.  Five nights a week.  Seven months.  Where’s the specialness in that?  Well, unless you’re a fan — then it’s probably fantastic.

As for the rest of us, thanks, San Francisco, for finishing it off in five games. 

Now we have, what, three weeks, until spring training starts?