When I was little, I begged my Soviet parents to let me try baseball. In response, my dad would always tell me a joke about how baseball suddenly gained popularity in post-Soviet-Union Russia in the 1990s. He explained that one year, 300,000 or so baseball bats were purchased, along with five gloves and zero balls. Yeah… later my dad revealed that apparently the baseball bats were used by taxi drivers to beat the crap out of people who refused to pay up. You may also wonder what the five gloves were used for—I wouldn’t have an answer for that.
The message I’m trying to deliver here is that my parents never cared to learn about baseball, nor have they cared to introduce me to it. Well, I didn’t understand baseball back then, and I have to admit, it hasn’t gotten any easier since. Believe me: I tried, but I simply can’t wrap my head around the glorification of this sport, and it’s causing me to hate it. I will make it clear, though, that I don’t hate the players themselves. Though I may have certain opinions about them, I can’t take anything away from the fact that they are good at what they do. Pitchers especially have my utmost respect; pitching seems to be insanely difficult and taxing on the body. I am also not arguing that I could do better than any of those players if I was suddenly placed on the field; I’m simply going to make a case for my hatred of the sport.
To start off, I find the actual gameplay stupid. A player walks up to the plate, swings his bat a few times, sometimes he hits the ball, and sometimes he misses. If the pitcher throws the ball through the strike zone or the batter whiffs three times, the batter then goes back to the dugout to uselessly sit on his butt until it’s his turn to go again. Occasionally, the pitcher will walk the batter, automatically advancing him to the next base. So, I already covered two basic scenarios of what can happen to a batter during an at-bat. Neither of those scenarios requires a whole lot of effort, athleticism, or even a hit of the ball. The other basic scenario of what can happen at an at-bat, is that the batter actually advances to a base by hitting the ball. If that happens, he has to do a brutal 90-foot sprint to first base. Wow! That must be a sight to see, considering that the MLB’s league-wide batting average is something around .250. That means that the other three times a batter walks up to the base, he follows the first scenario and doesn’t advance.
Along the same lines, the gameplay always looks the same to me. Unlike soccer, football, basketball, and hockey, where the games are visual displays of creativity, every sequence of a baseball game feels the same to me. If a player hits the ball, it might pop up, and the defending team can calmly catch it. If it’s a better hit, imagine this scenario: the batter hits the ball into left field; either the 3rd baseman or outfielder scrambles over to the ball; the ball is launched across the diamond to the 1st baseman who has his foot on the base, and he either gets the baserunner out, or the runner is safe. At this point, I think that sequence is eternally burned into my mind from the millions of times I’ve seen it materialize. Kudos to the umpires, though -- it must be tough to differentiate between a safe and an out; it’s a game of inches. Even the home runs lack any sort of spice - they just drift over everyone’s gloves and land in the stands - whereas a goal in hockey, for example, can be scored in so many cool ways.
Since the games are so boring, I find them to be ridiculously long. There’s no way an average person can sit through a baseball game while not having a fun video game to play on their phone or someone to talk to. Even I have to admit that Game 3 of the 2018 World Series was one heck of a game, but what if a throw-away game in the middle of July under the blazing heat stretched on for, say, 11 innings? If I’m a fan in the stands, to me, that’s borderline unwatchable.
Going hand in hand with the lame gameplay, I hate that the players get paid millions of dollars. I do understand the reasons behind this, such as the TV deals, the 162-game schedule, and the extreme poor pay that goes to the minor leaguers in order to pay the major leaguers, but I just can’t seem to quantify why swinging at a ball once every half an hour equates to a lucrative contract. I think even $1 million a year is too much to pay for the skills that they offer. Basketball players get paid a lot too, but I can respect that because they get hit, they have to run (often sprint) the length of the court on every possession, and they actually have polished moves that are fun to watch. It’s not that I’m jealous – when someone earns that much money, it’s beyond my wildest imagination to even consider being jealous – it’s just that I wish sports like soccer and hockey received more attention so that their athletes would get paid those astronomical salaries.
Well, I know that I just talked a bunch of smack about baseball without having any sort of scientific basis or statistics. If you think I’m an idiot and these arguments are stupid, you might be right! Perhaps I’m misguided and don’t understand the essence of baseball, and that is indeed very possible. Maybe I’m underestimating the amount of strategy that goes into a baseball game. In any case, I know that baseball is a huge part of American culture, so I would certainly be open to learning about what truly makes baseball great. For now, however, I’ll stick to my fandom of the other main team sports.
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