With the Super Bowl fast approaching, it’s time to examine the critical question of which sport is superior – football or baseball. Since this is a significant matter, I’ve enlisted two experts to assist us in our deliberations.
First, Bill Maher will present his point of view.
Next, George Carlin will give us another perspective.
Now, it’s time for you to decide. Which do you prefer, football or baseball?
– the chaplain
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JohnEvo
February 1, 2012 at 2:45 pm
Anyone who still loves baseball, probably also enjoys lawn bowling, badminton and croquet.
The Vicar
February 1, 2012 at 2:58 pm
In the sense that baseball fans are less likely than football fans to do incredibly stupid and irresponsible things before, during, or after a game, baseball. But both are incredibly boring to watch, only marginally more interesting to play, and effectively responsible for huge blights on American culture.
Come to think of it, the world would be better off if we had no such thing as “spectator sports” period.
The Blog Fodder
February 1, 2012 at 3:17 pm
I am a baseball fan since a small child when there were far fewer teams and the Dodgers still played in Brooklyn. It is a thinking man’s game. The Bridge game of sports. The Yankees wer emy heros.
the chaplain
February 1, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Evo, Vicar & Blog Fodder:
Thanks for starting the conversation. I loved baseball and the Yankees when I was a child. I got out my gear every March 1 and played every day until school started again in September, which seemed to mark the beginning of football season in my neighborhood. Then, I’d play football with everyone else. I’d go to football games but didn’t like watching them on TV. In contrast, I watched Yankee games on WPIX nearly as often as I went to church. But, the 1994 strike turned me off the major leagues completely. I can’t remember the last time I went to a major league game. I go to minor league games occasionally, but it’s been several years since I’ve done even that. Now, I can’t stand watching baseball on TV, although I still enjoy watching it in person (when I bother doing so). I love watching football either in person or on TV. So, at this point in my life, it seems that I’ve de-converted from baseball and converted to football.
Re: the “spectator sports” remark, many Americans would do well to get off their obese asses and participate in sports rather than watching others play them.
The Vicar
February 1, 2012 at 4:32 pm
It isn’t just the lack of physical activity, or the way that American culture inevitably ties spectator sports events to excessive eating and public drunkenness, although those are powerful arguments against the idea. Consider:
1. Spectator sports have created a class of person which contributes essentially nothing useful to society and yet is among the highest-paid jobs: the professional athlete. These people, who are really nothing more than rather mediocre public entertainers and who often have severe personality defects, are even held up as role models for the young.
2. Spectator sports have terrible consequences for the economics of cities. Nearly every stadium constructed represents a substantial (and usually ongoing) transfer of public funds to private (and already wealthy) hands, to say nothing of the underhanded methods often employed to acquire the land.
3. Most major spectator sports these days are the regular cause of riots at the culmination of the season, and sometimes at ordinary games. (And the rest of the world can’t ridicule America over this. We may go crazy over football and basketball, but everyone else goes crazy over soccer.) Anyone who is in favor of public order should at least be dubious about major spectator sports.
4. Nearly every male — and, in my experience, female — has one or two subjects about which they obsess and learn all sorts of trivia. This is a phenomenon which has been noted for centuries. Spectator sports has a tendency to become the subject of this kind of obsession, but it is also quite possibly the single most useless such subject. Even obsessing about obsolete steam trains would probably be of more benefit to society than (for example) learning the batting averages of a baseball team, to say nothing of more obviously practical examples (like obsessing about botany or mathematics). In other words: there is an intellectual opportunity cost to society of the mere existence of spectator sports.
5. For that matter, the geographic ties which used to give spectator sports a patina of legitimacy are long since gone at the professional and even at the collegiate level. At one time, if (say) an Ohio team beat an Indiana team, it actually had some vague connection with Ohio and Indiana, because the teams were mostly — and occasionally even completely — composed of natives. For several decades, though, that has no longer been true. (Which makes it even stranger that people get so excited about the whole thing. Who cares if the local team wins the Super Bowl? None of them are locals anyway.)
The Vicar
February 1, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Actually, it occurred to me after posting that there is one common object for obsession which is even more useless than spectator sports: video games. (I do like them, but — just as an example — there is much more information stored in my head about the various Super Mario games than I would like. Had I the choice, I would trade it all for, say, being able to remember more geometry and trigonometry.)
I am constantly astonished at how pervasive Pokemon has become among people who are now around 20 or so (and younger). Not only because it’s such a useless thing to memorize (no worse than Super Mario stuff, though) but because I tried playing Pokemon myself once and found it to be monumentally boring — like the most dull parts of all the Final Fantasy games put together, minus any of the interesting stuff that makes the boring parts worth sitting through.
JW
February 1, 2012 at 5:57 pm
football – but the one where you actually use your feet. i dont know whats in the water in the USA but the rest of the world knows what real sports are.
the chaplain
February 9, 2012 at 10:38 am
I don’t know what’s in the water here either, and I probably don’t want to know.
The Blog Fodder
February 1, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Disagree about the uselessness of spectator sports. Saskatchewan Roughriders football club is publicly owned and belongs to the whole province of 1 million people. The team loses a lot and wins sometimes but fans are devoted. You may not live there anymore but you still cheer the Green and White. It is called pride in one’s community. Something of value that cannot be measured, especially in difficult times. As to publicly funded stadiums, I would guess the economic activity generated in a city of 200,000 people every game day (plus other uses for the stadium) more than pay the cost.
It is like bitching about the cost of decorating the city for Christmas or the Legislative Building. Some things have a value beyond money.
The Vicar
February 2, 2012 at 4:23 am
An unfortunately common scenario is that the stadium is paid for by the city but owned by the team owners (who are already rich), with tickets priced far beyond what most people can afford for casual entertainment. At least, that’s how things work in the U.S.
As to economic activity: once you subtract the costs of cleanup, traffic direction, extra police duty, and of course the devastation which spreads away from the stadium in the event of a riot over some idiot team winning or losing, the city seldom turns a profit and often makes a loss instead. It’s like the old joke about political conventions: “not only did they not spend any money in town, but several of them went on walks looking for spare change to pick up.”
If your area has a purely local professional sports team, that’s good — or at least slightly less stupid than usual — but you must understand that this is a rare thing.
Brian M
February 8, 2012 at 3:14 pm
Much of the money “earned” by professional sports is recrational discretionary spending. Said discretionary spending would go to restaurants, bars, or local venues instead of The Team. Absent big events like the Stupor Bowl, the Team does not really increase the total amount of economic activity in any significant way.
Kagehi Kohn
February 2, 2012 at 1:18 am
Hmm. Pick between two overpaid groups of people, with some minor, generally limited length, carriers, based on having spent both a fair amount of time practicing, but mostly because, for that limited span, their genetics give them some slight advantage at it that others do not… Yeah, I can think of quite a few other things, including one that would get me labelled as a male chauvinist, which I would much rather see people doing, based on a short window of exceptional skill, that otherwise provides ***no benefit*** what so ever to society.
Or, shorter version: Do I pick which one I find the least useless, or is this a trick question?
Kagehi Kohn
February 2, 2012 at 2:33 am
Sigh.. Did a quick google, and other than someone running a nude olympics, never mind coed… There just isn’t anything I would *pay* as much for as the crap they put on TV all the time, to watch, at all. lol
Seriously though, did I mention overpaid?
PhillyChief
February 4, 2012 at 11:52 am
First off, BRILLIANT piece by Maher. I’ve been saying for years how the NFL has the only fair sports model but failed to see the full picture like that. Awesome!
Next, to the Vicar. What I find useless is ignorantly condemning items, activities, and those who are involved with them as being useless. We get it, you don’t care much for sports or video games. Why can’t you just say that instead of being a complete ass and condemning things and the people who not just enjoy them but actually benefit from them? What a self absorbed prick!
Brian M
February 8, 2012 at 3:19 pm
It was brilliant indeed.
Except for one very, very important point:
The Democratic Party basically supports the exact same policies, the same philsophy (exemplified by Obama’s professed admiration for Reagan and his policies rewarding bank fraud and gambling) They just couch their betrayals a little more sneakily. Clinton killed welfare. Obama passed a mandatory insurance requirement and is mouthing platitudes about getting rid of Social Security.
the Democrats are not “socialists” in any way. Just slightly, and I mean slightly, less rapacious and insane. That may be enough for you or Bill Maher. But at least let’s be honest about them.
the chaplain
February 8, 2012 at 3:37 pm
The USA needs a viable third party. This alleged two-party system in which the only two parties that matter are barely distinct from one another is ridiculous.
Brian M
February 8, 2012 at 4:02 pm
well…that is not going to happen, sadly.
I’m not even sure THAT is the answer. The United States has always been a warlike nation devoted to capitalism red in tooth and claw. We are not Denmark or New Zealand or even modern Germany (which learned its lesson, overall, about toxic nationalism as a particularly unpleasant “religion). How will a third party address underlying belief systems and fundamentals of culture? A third party which came to power would still have a strong belief, a religion if one will, that the United States is special and has the right to do what it wants around the world. The United States would still have the world’s largest military spending program, hundreds of bases spread around the world, special forces ops in more than half the world countries, large multinationals that “need” protection for expansion and market share…and, given resource wars and peak oil, is there an easy solution?
the chaplain
February 9, 2012 at 10:21 am
No.
Kagehi Kohn
February 9, 2012 at 2:25 pm
Yeah, but anything you would call it would either become a contradiction, as soon as someone in it proved to have their own special sort of crazy, or would end up being another damn Tea Party (or Libertarians). The only way to do it would be to vet your representatives to a degree that would make the Republican purge of anyone remotely sane, as seen recently, look like Woodstock, and I don’t mean the corporate greed, super lame/tame, BS copy cat one they tried to do. lol
Kagehi Kohn
February 9, 2012 at 2:21 pm
tommykey
February 4, 2012 at 12:48 pm
I favor whichever sport leads to the most abortions. (That’s for fetus fetisher John, if he’s reading this thread.)
the chaplain
February 9, 2012 at 10:37 am
That sport usually takes place in the bedroom and I don’t think referees are allowed…Unless the players are into kinky stuff. In those cases, referees (and French maids and Catholic school girls, etc.) are often required.
ubi dubium
February 7, 2012 at 9:35 am
If i have to sit and watch a game, I pick baseball over football, and I pick minor league baseball over major leage baseball. (And I pick taking a nap in the car over either basketball or hockey.) But, if I am going to pay money to sit in an uncomfortable seat and watch a group of people doing something that’s meant to be entertaining, I’ll pick live theater.
Team sports just don’t do it for me. I’m much more likely to be interested in an individual athlete than I am in a group with a supposed geographic affiliation, but a shifting membership of whoever they hired or traded for. That’s probably why I find watching the Olympics more interesting than any professional team sport.
the chaplain
February 9, 2012 at 10:33 am
In the old days, players rarely moved around much, so it was easy to have a favorite team and a favorite player on that team. In fact, in the old days, teams rarely moved around much. These days, teams follow the markets nearly as often as the players do. It may have begun when the Dodgers left Brooklyn (I think some Brooklynites are still pissed off about that) and the Giants left New York. Or maybe when the Athletics left Philadelphia and moved to Kansas City, then Oakland. Or when the Braves left Boston and moved to Milwaukee, then Atlanta. Who the hell knows?
I was pissed off when the Winnipeg Jets moved to Phoenix in 1996. Phoenix! Who the hell plays ice hockey in Phoenix? It must cost them a fortune to make ice every night! Justice has prevailed, however, and the Atlanta Thrashers recently moved to – you guessed it – Winnipeg and revived the Jets. The gods of ice hockey have spoken and decreed that the NHL must have a team in Winnipeg. It’s the right thing to do.
Tommykey
February 9, 2012 at 10:41 am
I hadn’t followed the NFL for a few years until this past season and I was like “The Houston Texans? What happened to the Oilers?”
the chaplain
February 9, 2012 at 2:01 pm
The Houston Oilers moved and became the Tennessee Titans.
tommykey
February 11, 2012 at 1:20 pm
I hate that name, the Houston Texans. A little redundant. Like calling a team the Miami Floridians or the Oakland Californians. It’s like they couldn’t think of anything catchy.
JohnEvo
February 11, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Texans are pretty arrogant. They think it’s a wonderful comment on an individual’s value that they were simply squeezed out of their mom’s vagina while within the borders of Texas. Most states don’t view themselves with such unwarranted pride.