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Baseball (and Other Pointless Sports) |
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Monday, 13 October 2008 |
Being English, I have a problem with Baseball. It is incomprehensible.I have spent much time watching Baseball, trying to work out the rules, but to no avail. Sometimes the stickman hits the ball and runs around in circles, sometimes he hits the ball and stand still. Sometimes he hits the ball way out of the stadium and goes home for a cup of tea.
 Baseball - It Makes No Sense Whatsoever.
There are 9 innings, each with a top and a bottom, but the scores don't seem to add up and the team who looks like they should lose, jump up and down cheering.
Then there's the pretty sinister man who looks like he's got lost on his way home from an Ice Hockey game. He shouts a lot and waves his hands about in a strangely mesmerising fashion at the dancing man in the middle of the park who then twirls about until he achieves critical mass and a small round thing flies out in some physics-defying space-time bending warped curve at the man with the stick whose job is presumably to guard the mafia bloke man behind the Ice Hockey man. If Stickman stops the small planetoid from colliding with the mafia man then stickman can run away. If not, mafia man sends him home.
Like I said, it's incomprehensible. And it's not nearly violent enough.
 American Egg Chasing - That's not Proper Violence
An American friend of mine - who thinks football is played by men in suits of armour - once told me that "soccer defeats the purpose of evolution - if we have arms, why can't we use them?" He is missing the point. Arms are frequently used in football. What else do we have with which to elbow opponents in the face, push referees over, make obscene gestures at the crowd.... If arms are busy being used to catch eggs, then how are they going to perform their critical functions as tools of violence?
In American "Football", the violence is blatant. Any limb/joint can legitimately be used as a weapon. However in real football, there is an art involved. A dark art. A player is rated more fearsome by his ability to hide his physical indiscretions from the authorities. The better players can even do it out of camera shot.
 Vinnie Jones puts the Squeeze on Gazza. That's more like it.
There is then of course the additional level of theatre involved by the player who rolls around when indeed he hasn't been touched. Arguements over incidents like these can keep the various sets of fans at each others throats for an entire season and beyond.
Hand-in-hand come the songs and chants about '"this or that player's a dirty cheatin' bast*rd", or "this or that player's a diving cheatin' bast*rd", and other such football terrace classics.
All of this subtlety and showmanship is sadly missing from a game where heavily armoured players are allowed to run headlong into each other at speed in the not-too-subtle manner of battering rams
The Chicago Bears played the British rugby team Hull Kingston Rovers at American Egg Chasing a few years back. Unsurprisingly, the Bears won by miles. As a gesture, Hull offered a return match of Rugby. The Bears declined, citing their concern about the complete lack of body armour in rugby as a major problem. Poofs.
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