Guess It’s Time To Watch Baseball Again
This is the worst time of the year. All we have left is baseball and …well I guess soccer but ya’ll know my opinion on that one. Actually I don’t even know if soccer is a thing right now, that’s how little attention I pay to it. It probably is, but I have no idea when the season runs from and to.
The worst part is baseball isn’t even interesting yet. We’re around the middle of the season. Teams have started to take shape, but so much could still change, and nothing truly compelling is going to start happening until after the all star break. Right now it’s just boring old baseball, every night, forever. If my team wins a game tomorrow, hooray…I guess? It just feels so worthless to watch or care about a single baseball game when so many happen.
It’s not like baseball can’t be compelling. Individual games can be great, but it’s the lack of scope or impact one game has that ruins it. Baseball gets truly interesting in September, when individual games start to actually feel like they matter. When the overall scope and narrative of the season commences into a cohesive, interesting series of events. This is of course one of the reasons why football works so well: every game has tremendous implications for the overarching narrative of a season.
What I really wanted to make this comic about though is about a fact that I hate, and it’s that Hockey and Basketball run parallel to each other. One of those needs to be offset. A perfect world will have every sport end right as another becomes interesting, and the basketball/hockey thing ruins it.
Baseball goes from April till October. October is when football really begins to take shape. The flukes and kinks of September are worked out, and the sport gets really good. Football’s primetime is January. Then football ends and we have basically the second half of basketball and hockey to go, and both have their primetimes in May. If I had full control, I would stagger these two. I hate watching them compete at the end because basketball will always win and hockey deserves some more attention. So I would move hockey up so that it ends in mid-May-ish (after March Madness), then stagger basketball to end in July. This way we never really go more than a month and a half without playoffs in a major sport. You could even end BBall at the end of June and put Soccer in there for August. Just imagine how wonderful this would be.
Playoff Baseball! Oh snap, now we get exciting, important football for 3 months! Then March Madness! Then Hockey finals! Then Basketball finals! Then Soccer or relevant baseball! The sports world would be perfect, because we’d always be getting the best parts of each year one after another. A never ending sports gasm! I’ve pretty much neglected Hockey as a fan because basketball is on at the same time and I’ve become more invested in that. But if I could just sort of ignore less important BBall while Hockey ramps up, I’d probably get into it, and I’d wager so would a lot more people.
I guess the ultimate thesis here is that of the big 4, hockey totally gets screwed. #SetHockeyFree
Now can someone tell me if the Orioles are doing good so I can pretend I watched them before this week? Go Birds
Discussion (58) ¬
“Now can someone tell me if the Orioles are doing good so I can pretend I watched them before this week? Go Birds”
Unfortunately it’s been a tale of two seasons so far. For the first part of the year everything was amazing, and in spite of some offensive inconsistency, the Orioles had the best record in the entire AL. In the second half of what’s played out so far, they’ve been abysmal. Starting pitching other than Bundy and sometimes Gausman is some of the worst in baseball, Tillman is clearly still playing injured, half the bullpen is injured, including Britton and O’Day, and the relievers who aren’t injured are overtaxed because nobody but Bundy regularly makes it to the sixth. Then to top everything off, Davis and Hardy are both out too, Manny’s been slumping all season and is hitting below .220, all of the catchers keep getting hurt, and it feels like we’re always missing one of our better batters because we have a logjam at the corner outfield spots, so only one of Rickard, Smith, and Kim gets to play on a given day, two if we DH Trumbo. That logjam gets even bigger when Davis is healthy too, Trey Mancini, one of our hottest bats, is covering for him at first but normally plays OF. As a result of this imperfect storm, the Orioles have gone from that AL-best record to a .500 record on the year. That said, it’s a long season and they showed some life this past weekend, so all isn’t lost. Nobody’s injury is season-ending, so they should all be back, and you have to figure Manny won’t be hitting .217 all year. The AL East always eats itself alive, so if one or two other starting pitchers put themselves back together, they could make a run.
Also Schoop’s been really weird. His defense has gone downhill, but he’s hitting near .300 and has 13 home runs, so on the one hand you want to see someone else at second because you hate watching hits get away from him, but you can’t take your best bat out of the lineup.
Dear Dave:
To get an idea of where the Orioles are right now, last night’s game was a matchup between their ace and the Indians’ ace in Camden Yards. Kluber had a three hit shutout. Bundy gave up 6 runs in less than five innings and the guy they brought in to relieve him gave up five more before getting out of the fifth, including a home run that landed on Eutaw Street. The Indians won 12-0.
Also, the Orioles managed to go from 12 games over .500 and first place to .500 and fourth place in less than three weeks. Sorry.
Love,
A Dedicated Indians Fan
To be fair, that game wasn’t really representative of how well Bundy’s pitched for most of the year. That game was only the third time all year he’s given up more than three earned runs, and only the third time he’s posted less than six innings. Yeah he’s not on the same level as a guy who won Cy Young in the last three years, but for a guy who’s made less than 30 major-league starts, I really like what I see.
This is a great year to be a Rockies fan! Especially after Nolan Arenado’s cycle-completing walk-off home run the other night 🙂
If hockey was moved up to end in April, the World Championships would start right after the Stanley Cup Finals ended. I’m not a big hockey fan, but I cannot for the life of me understand why they insist on running the World Championships at the same time as the playoffs of the biggest hockey league in the world.
I think putting basketball at the end of august with it starting on Christmas would make for great marketing for the NBA and would be great fun.
I’ve often thought that they should just make Christmas Day the big kick-off day for the season. I mean, it kinda is-it’s when the league’s marketing and attention goes high-order-it’s just not officially.
I love baseball so I’m not in any distress, plus I have various forms of motorsports to watch (NASCAR, IndyCar, F1)
Sounds like someone needs to get into lacrosse or American Ninja Warrior
Yep, that’s one of my big gripes with MLB, (there are many others but this is just one). In MLB there are soo many games it really makes most of them not really feel all that important or pivotal until the last couple weeks of the season (when teams are trying to fight for playoff spots.)
There’s still the CFL… As long as you can get it down there.
The game of the week used to appear on Versus on Friday nights, but I’m not sure if Versus even exists anymore.
NBC Sports is Versus. I agree they should have never changed the name.
Versus became NBCSN about 5 years ago. ESPN has aired CFL games for the past couple of years and will do so again this year, I believe.
Last year ESPN had games available for streaming on their website if you had a cable login. I’ll have to check it out this year.
Mets are 31-38 🙁
For the life of me, I cannot understand how someone can like basketball, the game where only the last five minutes are relevant, and still complain about midsession baseball.
At least in Basketball even the less relevant parts of games something is always happening, there are always sweet dunks and stuff
Baseball is just a lot of standing around between pitches
The difference is that in baseball the next pitch could swing the outcome of the game. For all the jumping and shooting and scoring that happens in basketball, it’s all pointless until it’s the waning minutes of the fourth quarter. Why should I get excited about the same move I’ve seen countless times in the 82 game season? It doesn’t mean anything. I may as well just watch a jumping competition.
Even if the next pitch does change the outcome of a game, it’s one game in 162, it doesn’t matter at all. Not to mention that 95+ % of pitches don’t change the game, and waiting around for the one that might gets dull. Much less so in the playoffs.
I felt the same way about basketball for a long time until I started actually watching it with regularity and appreciating how things work. Watching teams go on runs, watching individuals take over. Once I got past that mental block of “Well everyone is scoring so why care” and started appreciating how those scores happened within the flow of the entire game, basketball clicked. Baseball I already get, and as time goes on what used to be fun anticipation turned into boring realization at how much energy I waste waiting for something to happen. At least on TV. Baseball live is still great, because there is much to distract you.
Just Don’t watch the Mets is all
They get injured more often than the NY Giants do
Poor mets. Pretty much traded places with the NY Giants in the span of 2 seasons. Their season isn’t necessarily over, but if they don’t shape up by the end of June then they’re out of the picture
Boxing’s kinda interesting right now.
Not in good ways, since we’re being forced to pay attention the farce that is Mayweather-McGregor, but it’s interesting, at least.
I can’t be the only person rooting for McGregor forgetting he’s in a boxing match and kicking Mayweather in the face, can I?
That is the only reason *anyone* is tuning in to this one. I want a muaythai knee-to-the-nosebone, but whatever makes that POS mayweather bleed will work for me.
A lot of people want that. It’s just that there would be severe penalties if he actually did so (see story in my name above).
Im a Hawaii local, so seeing a Holloway-McGregor match would be awesome. He already said that he wanted to fight McGregor, no less in Hawaii. Thing is we have nowhere to host it
“Soccer” – aka the biggest leagues of European football – actually run from August to late May. There’s international matches over the summer, and every few years you get the World Cup or Euros, but on odd numbered years like 2017 there’s less to pay attention to in June-July. The MLS – American soccer – is weird and goes from March to October, but outside where you live in the Northwest it’s paid attention to by much less of the country.
As a season ticket holder for Minnesota United, I can definitely say that soccer is a thing. And after wasting an afternoon at Target Field watching the Twins flail around ineffectively, I’ll take soccer over baseball any day. If I’m going to watch a poor team lose badly, I may as well watch a sport where the action is more or less continuous.
Where the flopping is more or less continuous.
Boy you must really hate basketball and football and all other contact-penalized sports then.
It’s been a rough weekend for me, how the Yankees blew that series against Oakland I’ll never know. At least we’re not the Mets.
With that said, after looking at the comments section filled with Lebrontards, it made me glad the Cavs lost more than ever. Just imagine how much worse it could have been had they won? *shudder*
Thank you Kevin Durant.
Yeah, people are so busy hating on the Warriors and Durant joining an already great team that they ignore the fact that the LeBron-led Cavs make the Eastern Conference just as uninteresting as the GSW’s do the Western Conference. In the DC area, the Wizards have improved remarkably, and it’s all for nothing because despite having homegrown stars and a pretty solidly-built team, everyone knew they wouldn’t make it past the Cavs even if they had made it to the finals (as it is, they didn’t, but still).
I don’t have anything against the NBA in general, but it’s really hard to get excited when there’s so little parity between the best teams and everyone else.
Dave, I’m curious as to why you favor basketball over hockey (nothing accusatory there, just curious, since I take the opposite tack). I personally find that the NBA has a parity problem; even leaving this year’s “superteams” aside, there’s a bigger gap between the best teams in the NBA versus everyone else than there seems to be in almost any other sport, and for me personally, that robs the NBA regular season of a fair amount of its intrigue.
You mean all of the intrigue. We knew that the gsw were going to kill the cavs in the finals.
Well, I’d argue we didn’t *know* that (weirder upsets have happened), but yeah, it was pretty clear that GSW were the favorites. But I was mostly referring to the way that both the GSW and the Cavs dominated their respective conferences; the Wizards are my hometown team, and they had a pretty solid year, but even with fan-goggles on, it was clear that even if they’d made it to the conference finals, they weren’t getting past the Cavs.
Mostly because I live in a basketball town and therefore end up seeing it on TV all the time, and it’s always easy to root and get invested in the hometown team. I don’t have a hockey team and I don’t live in a hockey area, so to watch hockey I have to actively seek it out.
Also I think Basketball is slightly better on TV than Hockey.
That makes sense. I think part of why I went the other way is because when I was getting actually interested in sports, the Capitals were the only DC/Bmore-area team besides the Ravens that wasn’t either a perpetual disaster or wildly inconsistent (and the Wizards were the worst of a bad lot).
NHL > NBA
Hockey < Basketball
The number of games is one of the things I love about baseball. I don’t watch most of the other horseshit shows on TV, so baseball is a much better alternative for me. Also, if your team loses today, you get another shot tomorrow. Last year, the Panthers and Braves were both pretty awful, but the Braves were a lot easier to watch because there were a few winning streaks, the occasional blowout win, and a chance to see the future of the franchise take shape. The Panthers would be awful, get their asses kicked, and I have a whole damn week to stew in it.
Why are your hands so small? Also, the hockey stick is great!
oh ffs bawwww play, speak for yourself
my dark time is between february when football officially wraps up and april when baseball starts. hockey always somehow seems beyond whatever uber-basic cable package i have, and basketball flat-out sucks ass
baseball is great precisely because of the huge individual variance: every team wins 60 games, every team loses 60 games, but it’s what you do with the remaining games that make all the difference. and you never know which of the 162 games are the ones that really matter; it makes them all so compelling, especially as you watch certain players come into their own, managers experiment with different positions and lineups and strategies, and see the team gel (or not)
i’d go as far as to say baseball > football for me, but of course i wouldn’t dream of making that an objective point like SOME PEOPLE
Bro, March Madness
don’t like basketball, as noted in the op
Tell that to a European soccer and Basketball fans .. All leagues start and end at the same time.. All become interesting at the same time.. And those are the only sports we have..
Luckily we have Football and NBA to watch (and NHL) next to all that
Dave, you know what I’m going to say.
#AfreeaTheArena
The good Australian sports are in season (rugby league, AFL, cricket) if you can find them.
Aussie Football is the only foreign sport I watch, but I don’t do so all that regularly. It’s pretty damned entertaining, but I’m not always up at 2AM.
Here in Canada, I’m a football fan surrounded by hockey fans. I like to call September “Football’s month to shine” because it is the one month that football is on and hockey isn’t. I like the idea of staggering hockey and basketball better, but if it means starting hockey earlier, I’m out. If we could start basketball sooner and hockey later, I’d be in.
One of your best alt-texts.
Soccer is hard to follow because there are so, so many leagues and tournaments. UEFA is an all star cast to watch, and MLS is slowly getting better, but the commenting is what makes it hard. I watch in spanish. Pretty much all English commentators are like Joe Buck.
Once you learn the basics, it becomes so much better to watch. And the stadium atmosphere at a game is twice as good as the best football game you’ll ever attend. Better even than college football.
Soccer, bar none, is the best sport to watch in person at the stadium. No commentators and the fan atmosphere is insane, even for a so-so team. Plus we have scarves!
Imfind it funny that you hate baseball’s lack of intensity.
I actually like that.
In football, with the season being so short, every loss is excruciating.
I still remember Dallas’ 2015 season. It sucked because after 5 or so games, it was clear that the season was already over. WTF! All that waiting for one month of meaningful footbal?
I don’t see much baseball anymore, but not for that reason. I would like it to be able to watch sports on Sunday night without worrying about it ruining Monday morning and the whole week afterwards.
Different strokes for different folks. I enjoy the few number of games for football. It makes an NFL season almost like a season of your favorite TV show. Sixteen episodes, possibly up to twenty depending on how things go. One a week, leading to a pretty good balance of anticipation and fulfillment. You can easily remember each game from the season and the outcome and significance. Yes, if your team sucks, sometimes it’s pretty much over by October, but that’s your cross to carry as a fan. It’s a lot more feasible to keep track of and pay attention to 256 games as opposed to 2,430.
Are you implying you actually ENJOYED the past two months of the NBA? It was the most boring post season in history!
These thoughts go through my head every year at the beginning of June. Why do I have to switch back and forth between the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup every few days? Give each championship series its own time period to be on. Let the attention be devoted to one sport at a time instead of splitting it.
The problem with putting playoffs during the summer is that every even year, they have to compete with either the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup.