I love sports.
There, I have confessed to my one real love. I’ve stood by them through thick and thin and they haven’t let me down yet. I love football and basketball, and soccer is a thing of beauty for me. I cannot wait for this summer’s World Cup. College hockey is grand, and you might occasionally find me watching tennis or golf, and I have even learned to enjoy the wide world of track, provided that my younger brother is involved. I have even wasted the better part of a summer afternoon in London watching a cricket match.
However, my enthusiasm and love of sports really does stop just short of the “American past time.”
MLB has never really entertained me. I have tried it over and over again. Maybe this would be different if I wasn’t from Wisconsin; maybe if I were from New York I would jump on the Yankee band-wagon, because, after all, everybody loves a winner.
Instead, I root for the Brewers; and trust me, it is awfully difficult to get excited about what is usually an awful team.
The scenario is painfully similar every season for the Brewers. They begin the season looking great, and new optimism is instilled in the old faithful Milwaukee fans. Without fail, they stay in the race for about the first month, making a cameo appearance in first place in late April or early May. Then the team falls apart and finishes next to last in the division.
Yet the fun for Brewers’ fans isn’t finished here; it is just getting started. The truly entertaining part of being a vested observer of the Brewers is the offseason. My favorite is that every year, without fail, the Brewers will get to trade their best players to contenders for future prospects (if they eventually become good, they will be awarded with a trade someday, too).
If you don’t believe me, think of former Brewers like Gary Sheffield, Greg Vaughn and Fernando Vina, for starters. Those guys are old news. The question is, what have the Brewers done lately? This last offseason, Jeromy Burnitz was traded in true Brewer form.
Come on, Burnitz even has a name that sounds like he should be on a team whose mascot is beer-maker named Bernie that slides into a giant mug of beer after a home run. If you can’t keep a guy like that, how can you ever really hope to win?
Yet, my lack of love for baseball certainly can’t be blamed on the lack of the Brewers wins. I have loved football all my life, despite the fact that the Packers and Badgers spent the better half of my life being terrible. This isn’t Minnesota; we don’t abandon our teams when they lose a few games. So what is really wrong with baseball?
The true problem is that baseball isn’t a sport that is fun to watch on television. The sport is too slow. Even Chris Berman, known for his NFL run-down — called the fastest three minutes in sports — during halftimes, can’t do anything to speed up baseball from his summer role as an ESPN commentator. Think I’m the only one that is annoyed by the slow pace of games? I’m not. League rules have been tinkered with to speed the game up, but somehow they drone on.
Perhaps length of games wouldn’t be a problem if there wasn’t so much of it to be played. The league crams simply too many games (162) into the months between April and October, and worse is that the games aren’t meaningful. By June, everyone can pretty well figure out who is going to be in the hopelessly small playoff field, and, for the most part, it is the usual suspects. So what is left to prove in the remaining three-plus months? Not much.
Thoughts soon turn to whichever player has a chance at breaking the ever-escalating home-run record. Not that that is boring, but it was more fun when it didn’t happen every year. Bonds hit two in his first game this season; I guess he is on pace to shatter the record in a big way.
Still worse is that with baseball comes the entire baseball infection. The media industry, having no other sports to feed off of, must turn to baseball. Time slots once reserved for entertaining shows like “NBA Tonight” or “College Basketball Tonight” are replaced by the worst show on any television channel in any time slot: “Baseball Tonight.” Peter Gammons droning on about the Red Sox being hopelessly destroyed by the Yankees in their 10th matchup of the year? No thanks; I think I’ll catch another episode of History’s Greatest Blunders.
However, the new season brings a new possibility that maybe I have gotten old enough to enjoy baseball. I’m thinking that maybe watching baseball works like watching the news; perhaps it is something you grow into. As a child, I hated when mom and dad would watch the evening news, but now I catch myself enjoying the evening broadcast with Peter Jennings.
If there is one way to enjoy baseball, it is certainly in person, and this Friday I intend to get in on one of the supposed great traditions of America: opening day at the home ball park. I am making the pilgrimage to Miller Park with a few associates. The weather should be great under the retractable roof; perhaps my eyes will be opened to this sport that at least a few people seem to enjoy. I mean, if I can handle a cricket match, then I can handle a baseball game.
If I can’t — well, I’ve been told they serve beer at Miller Park.
