Monday, April 05, 2010

Yankees and Mets Opening Day-Hardball is Back! (So are 4-hour Games)

 Any excitement over opening night was quickly dulled by the grinding gears of another 4-hour Yankee-Red Sox slugfest. Time moves like oatmeal through Wilford Brimley's mustache during a Yankee-Red Sox game. Of course, it's always jarring to go from watching hoops to baseball, no matter who is playing. Basketball gives you action with no context. Baseball gives you the context of a nice daily rhythm but with no action.

Or as my pal B-Town says, basketball is about tempo. Baseball is about tension. And in a Yanks-Bosawx game there is no tension. Only the kind of drunk punch-counterpunch that comes from two fighters who know each other far too well. You don't need Mushnick to tell you that a 9-inning game should not last nearly 4 hours. All the worse that it's on a Sunday school-night.

There are plenty of common-sense ways to reduce the length of games, which hurt tv ratings and general attention to the sport. But long games are great for owners because it means the fans actually attending the game have more time to stuff their face with sausages and t-shirts to cover their corpulent frames. Owners have always been reluctant to trade short-term cheese for the longer-term health of the game.

Today's Met game didn't do much better, clocking in at 3+hours for a fairly straightforward game. Not much to get excited about, the Mets always do well on Opening Day. Grrman does a nice job rounding up just how transitory and sad today's starting lineup is.

One thing watching all this baseball does do is make a man FIEND for sticks. But alas, 5 days till the freakin weekend.

3 comments:

Bryan said...

Pavlovian reaction to word "sticks:" my shoulder burns.

coachie said...

pavlovian reaction to watching baseball:hot dog.
i went to the dodgers-angels tilt on saturday afternoon and had a hot dog. it was my first hot dog since whenever the last time i saw a ballgame was. dodger dog=delicious. hot dog in any other context=disgusting.

coachie said...

as regards stickball pain, i believe the great American poet John Cougar Mellencamp wrote a song about it, "Hurts So Good."