Baseball is a sport of the proletariat because it is (a) heavily unionized, (b) most commonly watched while skipping work, © dirt cheap to attend, and (d) affording you ample opportunity to radical your coworkers in between innings.
Football is a trash sport for trash people.
Counterpoint, baseball is boring as fuck to watch and sucks
Once you get into the pitching, baseball is at least as suspenseful as football from a play-by-play perspective. I’ll agree that extra-innings can get kinda rough. But, especially with the intro of the pitch clock, its pretty well paced and compelling.
As someone who was a baseball fan as a child but haven’t watched in years, I caught baseball fever again while witnessing Ohtani’s record breaking performance this past June. That was history in the making and he singlehandedly redeemed the sport.
Football is literally one of the most complex sports that exists in the world, where every play has basically 8-10 highly specialized things by professional athletes happening at once, including one of the most difficult singular sports position of all time (quarterback). You can literally spend a half hour breaking down each piece of a single football play because there is so much going on on the field.
I am not a huge fan of football culture, as the tendency in the past was to oversimplify the sport, and there isn’t really any excuse for how damaging it is to the players nor the pervasive ownership culture that exists within it, but football in theory is one of the coolest and most unique sports of all time, and I am absolutely looking forward to flag football in the Olympics.
Football is a sport for nerds who were shamed out of their other nerdy hobbies. There’s collectables, data and statistics, fantasy leagues, and like you said every game is back-to-back complex interplay of strategy and tactics. I prefer different nerd shit, but I respect those nerds.
bruh there’s 8 minutes of action in a 3.5 hour broadcast of an nfl game. no amount of complexity or amazing feats of athletics is gonna make up for that
Death to America
You could do the same math for a game of chess, or any other activity where you get some time to think about your next move.
Pausing to think about your next chess move: fun.
Watching someone else pause to think about their next move: most likely boring.
and none of those games/activities are hugely popular spectacles which form the cornerstone of people’s social lives. football is way, way more popular it should be based on pure entertainment value
Death to America
If you’re interested in football (or any similar activity where there are built-in pauses to strategieze), the pauses are largely entertaining, too. It really comes down to whether you understand/care about what’s going on.
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I’m not a TicTok kid
A few seconds to think “wonder what they’ll do here,” a few seconds to think “what does it look like they’ll do from the alignment,” and a few seconds to think “OK they’re moving some guys before the ball is snapped, what’s that going to mean?” are not boring if you are interested in the sport.
Most of the people saying “football is boring because there is too much downtime” would find an 8-minute condensed version of a game similarly boring. They just don’t like football.
How is this objectively any different than any other of the most popular sports, where the majority of the game is passing shit around with maybe 30 to 40 attempts on goal per game with maybe scores once every half hour. You’ll know a football game is bad when you wake up after an hour and nothing has happened, but that’s your average soccer game. Every second of those 8 minutes matter.
Unless you are talking about basketball where defense has essentially become a joke in the last decade. I like basket-ball alot though, they are just in a rough spot analyically for the game.
In the field sports model, rugby and hurling are superior games for the spectator, however, there is way less going on on the pitch for either of those sports during moments of play.
I am absolutely looking forward to flag football in the Olympics
Genuinely would like to see this,. Although with as many players moving as quickly as they are, I suspect we’re still going to see a lot of injuries. Hopefully far fewer TBIs, though.
baseball is also the only sport to have 10 cent beer night.
Also the only sport to have a Disco Demolition Night.
What country is this? Every sportsball game I’ve been to the beer was overpriced af.
An American baseball team sold beer for a dime and had predictable results.
It was in the 70s, but it was still cheap for the time
Less than a dollar per beer adjusting for inflation.
Counterpoint: the MLB’s disgusting efforts to facilitate the “defecting” of talented Cuban and Venezuelan baseball players.
Simple human trafficking. But not the kind you’ll ever find the western media complaining about.
I love baseball but MLB is getting harder to watch with the amount of ad creep I’ve noticed in the last season or two. It’s sounds strange but I’ve actually gotten into MLS in the last year since it feels like the least advertising-intensive sport right now. I actually dropped watching the NHL because covering the ice in ads started bugging me too much.
They put ads on the back of the pitcher’s mound for television audience. I yelled at the tv when I first saw that
Tell me about it. The oldest continually operating team in the league now has a big yellow sack of concrete on their shoulders.
MLB is getting harder to watch with the amount of ad creep I’ve noticed
That’s fair. Whenever I can get a pirated stream, I genuinely enjoy the big blue MLB logo and total silence where the ad-breaks are supposed to be.
I actually dropped watching the NHL because covering the ice in ads started bugging me too much.
Never got into NHL, but I’m down in Texas, so… I do feel like the live games are getting better entirely due to the relative lack of ads everywhere.
The lack of commercial breaks during a soccer game is why the sport was so unpopular in the US until recently. Well that, and the growing immigrant population that come from soccer-loving nations. But now with streaming and digitally inserted ads during the game broadcasters are willing to promote it now.
fwiw I don’t get any digitally inserted ads when I stream MLS
The pitch clock has definitely sped up games, ~but that time saved has been filled by more ads.~ Just make the pitchers suffer more so we can get more big hitters 🤑
that time saved has been filled by more ads
Surprisingly, no. Games are shorter end-to-end now, with the reduction coming during the actual broadcast.
They’re jamming more adds on jerseys, superimposed behind pitcher’s mounds, etc., but the whole game has been significantly condensed.
Oh shit you’re right!
I don’t know how I didn’t even realize the broadcasts were shorter. Maybe they still seem long to me because baseball is one of my only interactions with ads in general.
Football is a trash sport for trash people.
Wow I don’t see people who watch baseball tailgating in the parking lot getting blackout drunk and swinging on each other?
Nope. Never happened. Must have been a different sport.
American football is a device for giving all participants brain damage it should be banned completely
Almost certainly, but I’m gonna go against the grain and say I would rather watch football than baseball. Concussions are objectively more exciting than watching someone gradually destroy their rotator cuff.
They’re both boring as shit to watch
But they’re concussions with like a 15 minute break between them.
when i am made People’s Undersecretary for Sports and Culture, the PFL (People’s Football League) will be converted to flag football immediately and it will be a million times more fun to watch, skyrocketing my popularity with the masses and helping me secure the ultimate prize: the Ministry of the Interior
Death to America
At professional levels, the amount of risk workers are willing to take for money is a labor issue and should be mostly left to unions.
At amateur levels, all sports carry injury risk and many outdoor sports carry a real risk of death. I don’t think we should ban football any more than we should ban hiking, climbing, or surfing. There should be some safety regulations and participants should be well-informed of the risks.
College football gets tricky because some programs are hugely lucrative and others (especially at lower divisions) are truly amateur.
Brain damage in football is not a risk, it is a guarantee. All participants will inevitably suffer CTE.
College and even more so high school football should not only be banned, all people who have had a hand in promoting and promulgating them should be gulaged.
Brain damage in football is not a risk, it is a guarantee.
You really have to get specific to talk about this. What level? How long is a person participating? What degree of damage are we talking about? Someone who played a year or two of junior high football will not have the same outcome as a 10-year NFL veteran, and plenty of the latter will have damage of a type that is bad, but not debilitating. If people know what they’re getting into, there’s a real question about how different this is from having chronic knee or back or shoulder problems from playing other sports.
And while we’re comparing this to other injuries, the “a risk becomes a guarantee if you do it enough” logic probably applies to serious injuries in other sports, too, to say nothing of activities like drinking or smoking.
Get in the football gulag
That’s Green Bay
I’ve always sort of wondered the obsession and deep emotional connection some people have with sports.
The best I can come up with is its part tribalism, but more so I think it’s experiencing vicarious success. If you put in the emotional work to follow your team, especially with a displaced loyalty during losing seasons, their successes are your successes by proxy, but it also distances you from their failures.
Success irl is hard to come by and this is a chance to feel success without actually working very hard towards it, other than the emotional investment
Idk does anyone have any other thoughts why some people get so attached to their team?
There’s a ritual and tradition component to it as well; you inherit the fandom of your family etc
It’s the closest thing we have in the U.S. to native religion.
For me it’s the same as watching a ballet, but without the predetermined outcome of narrative theatre/dance. In the process of this, I need a protagonist I relate to. The easiest emotional connection I’m going to form is to my hometown teams given my mnemonic and experiential connection to it, especially having lived prior to the genera death of monocultural and regional identity in the US.
In the case of my alma mater and college sports, I tend to relate it as imagine your local sporting club association football team, but attach it to an entity that plays a gigantic part in educating you, housing you for your first time alone (in a walkable community no less), feeding you, facilitating your first experiences as a young adult away from home, setting up your professional network and several adult friendships — and in my case — hooks up your first big-boy job, licenses and the high pay that follows. So yeah, I’ll buy the sweatshirt and hoot like a doofus for my alma maters’ bottom-wrung Big Ten and PAC 12 teams every January and March. Hell, I’ll wear the free suits they gave me every quarter while I’m at it.
educating you, housing you for your first time alone (in a walkable community no less), feeding you, facilitating your first experiences as a young adult away from home, setting up your professional network and several adult friendships — and in my case — hooks up your first big-boy job, licenses and the high pay
I never got a single one of those things in my life, so sports can eat my ass
i’m a huge sports fan so i’ve thought a lot about this and imo it comes down to alienation. being a fan of a team gives you a “we” to be part of that i (and probably a lot of other people) don’t have and desperately need
Death to America
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Through hex bear dot net I will educate the lumpen proletariat that they’re actually morons for enjoying sportsball
Sorry but american football is ridiculous and it’s a billion dollar industry that uses and abuses thousands of people and leaves the participants with permanent brain damage, and it is actually okay to point out that the end result of all of this hooplah is an enterprise that’s barely worth watching. The sports watchers are not a minority you need to ensure we’re not speaking over, they’re an incredibly huge part of culture and nobody is going to be hurt by somebody expressing their dislike for american football
I do, in fact, hate sportsball. The equivalent time you spend watching football is objectively better spent yelling at a liberal on Twitter
lol if you think getting drunk regularly wouldn’t be normalized without trash sports
And yet, there is a reason AB sponsors their local team and named its stadium.
Yeah, to make sure people get drunk on AB and not on something that actually tastes good~
unironically yes. football is so fucking boring. america deserves such a dogshit spectacle as it’s national pastime
Death to America
Living in a European city with three rival soccer teams for my entire life, I feel I can say:
No. Sports is not where America’s problem is. The US is absurdly evil and violent when it comes to pretty much anything else, but at sporting events you actually look restrained and pretty chill. You get a bit tipsy and maybe if you’re feeling particularly rowdy someone throws a punch. This is not what the rest of the world means by violence.
No. Sports is not where America’s problem is. The US is absurdly evil and violent when it comes to pretty much anything else, but at sporting events you actually look restrained and pretty chill.
Nah lol. Americans will not only flip cars and set shit on fire when their team loses the superbowl, but the same people who do that kind of shit will complain when BLM does the same shit because the cops murdered someone. And setting aside fan rowdiness, American sports are incredibly exploitative of the players, cheerleaders, workers etc. Stadiums are huge drains on the public funds of the cities that build them. I could go on. American professional sports are a torment nexus.
Yeah, America may not be shit when it comes to praxis, but that means that the football games are about the same. I live in the most hardcore football city in the entire US, but can firmly say that other nations (UK and Brazil are the two nations I think of) make us look like babies during sporting events. Even during the messy matches where there’s a massive upsetting loss, the worst that happens is some cars get torched in America. Whereas other nations will literally prevent you from bringing newspaper into the games because of how commonly it’s used as a serious weapon in the right hands.
Midwest emo was an inside job
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The fact that Americans invented a sport with inbuilt ad breaks is genius, and the fact that they took a sport and cut out all the bits where people aren’t breaking their skull and somehow it’s still boring is a different kind of genius.
I think there’s a great opportunity for an in-depth Marxist analysis of how sports have gone from being a fairly minor aspect of social life in the US 100 years ago (even 50 years ago, really) to becoming one the of most important thing in the lives of tens of millions of Americans.
Also baseball is awesome and exciting if you take the time to follow the pitch-by-pitch strategy.
If anything the fandom has become more generalized, commercialized and less intensive. My grandfather and his friends used to literally bellow at the TV on Sundays as if he was there live and they could hear them, and they literally wouldn’t give you time of day if you were a Bears fan, because basically everyone who watched football had also played it at some point in their life.
Now, because of gambling, even lazy nerds are able to get in on it, but their amount of individual dedication to any given team, or even a single sport itself is not there. Sports may be the most important aspect of people’s lives, but people have never been more adjacent (as opposed to participants) in sports.
The only thing exciting about baseball is statistics and hotdogs.
I can see straight through your pro-hoopball propaganda. Bait harder baskie (actually don’t bother, everybody knows you’re just flopping).
Hell yeah I’m a baskie
baskie
Death to America
Baseball
Ameican Football
You are lik little babby watch this turns on cricket test match
This tracks with the op hypothesis, the British are the biggest drinkers in the world and have a sport that you drink to that lasts 5 days.
I’ve been following Shohei Ohtani since the last world cup, dude is amazing and his passion/ethic is highly admirable. but damn it true, baseball so boring
