Baseball's Sporting Supremacy

by Jeff Siegel

Yes, it’s a cliché. And yes, it doesn’t mean nearly as much as it used to (and, frankly, that’s one reason why the country is in such a mess). But there are still tens of millions of us who understand the deep, almost metaphysical, significance of this sentence: Pitchers and catchers report today.

Which will be happening throughout Florida and Arizona as baseball’s spring training begins this week. It’s not the event it once was, when baseball was still the national pastime. But even cynical ex-newspapermen who hardly believe in anything any more still get a bit of a rush from the first newspaper stories about players who really, truly are going to be better this year, and TV interviews with managers who aren’t yet beaten down by their team’s ineptitude. Even fans of the Chicago Cubs know their team isn’t out of it yet.

It’s too bad that more of us don’t appreciate the joys of baseball, which is truly a game fit for what this country is supposed to be: democratic, open, and bottom up instead of top down. Baseball is a team game played by individuals, not the corporate sort of flow chart that gives every NFL team the personality of a Microsoft subsidiary. NFL teams have not one, but two coaches in charge of – and I still can’t believe this -- quality control. In fact, most NFL teams have as many coaches as baseball teams have players.

In this, the NFL is just like the real world – run by middle-aged white men, more bosses than you can imagine, and underpaid and unappreciated employees. NFL players have a salary cap, their contracts aren’t guaranteed, and the average career lasts 3 ½ seasons. Sounds just like working for Amalgamated Widgets, where at least you don’t get the crap kicked out of you every week.

Ah, but the NFL is not as deadly dull as baseball, where nothing happens for three hours, say its proponents. That may be, but as someone who was once paid to watch football, I’ll take baseball every time. There’s a rhythm to the game instead of TV timeouts so rich guys who own the teams can get even richer. And I won’t apologize for preferring to see Ichiro Suzuki go from first to third on an infield out or Orlando Hudson turn a double play to watching a bunch of fat guys fall over each other, get up, walk back to the huddle, fall over each other again, repeat the process, repeat it again, and then run off the field so another bunch of fat guys can come on.

And finally, here’s an argument that not even the most devoted NFL fan can counter. The best baseball movie of all time had Susan Sarandon in it. The best football movie (and it may be the only good football movie) had Burt Reynolds and a whole bunch of guys in prison. Which really sounds Republican to me.

(Photo of Ichiro Suzuki by Rick Dikeman discovered through Yotophoto and used through a GNU Free Documentation License.)

baseball
sports
Spring Training
Add to Technorati Favorites


Subscribe in a reader