The Weaknesses of Baseball

It’s been about four months since I posted to this thing. I am still alive and still ready to keep posting, but I’ve been quite busy in the past while. I’ve thrown myself deep into Magic: The Gathering. I’ve recently been promoted, which means this upcoming summer is going to be very hectic. But none of these excuses hold weight. I will return, hopefully tonight. I’ve got a couple things percolating in my head. I need to discuss Comic Geek Speak’s Super Show 2010, which I attended last weekend. I’ve got about five pages of a new story down that I’d like to run out and see what’s going on. But what I’d like to do to mark my return is write about why I’ve completely lost all interest in baseball, considering I currently live in Boston, and the Red Sox begin their 2010 campaign against the hated Yankees in just over an hour. I couldn’t care less.

There are four major sports in America right now. People can argue what they want, but football, basketball, baseball, and ice hockey are the four major sports that people follow in this country. If I had to personally rank them by my interest, ice hockey would hold the top spot, followed by football. There would then be a pretty wide margin, at which point baseball still sneaks in much higher than basketball, which has taken up its spot in the sub basement of the sub basement of modern team sports. I should also mention that Mixed Martial Arts is currently in a knock down drag out fight with football for the overall number two spot, but I’m talking specifically about major team sports here, so we’ll leave that out of the conversation.

There have been two specific times in my life when I liked baseball. The first instance was when I was very young, surrounded by the madness that was the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies. They were crazy, with all kinds of characters like Lenny Dykstra and Darren Daulton. They made a run to the World Series, lost in a pretty agonizing way, and the anguish from my parents really turned me off the sport for a while. I came back to America’s pastime after I moved to Boston for college in 2002. When you first come to the city, the allure of the Red Sox is hard to deny. This is especially the case when you are living on-campus at Boston University, and you are practically living in the shadow of Fenway Park. Obviously, the championship runs in 2004 and 2007 made for very exciting times. And, to the benefit of baseball, the NHL had their lockout season during this period. But something was missing. It was exciting, but not too exciting. I’ve slowly realized that I know exactly what the issue is. Baseball has the same problem inherent in its current design that makes me hate professional basketball. All things being equal, the final moments of both of these games actively change the pace in a negative way.

Take a look at the last minutes of a close game of basketball. Let’s say that Team A currently has a three point lead. The soundest strategy at this point for Team B is to commit an intentional foul on a member of Team A, thus forcing them to earn their victory at the stripe shooting foul shots, and then hopefully make up the difference by aiming for three pointers. This is sound strategy, don’t get me wrong, and since the current rules of the NBA do not in any way discourage such actions, there’s nothing wrong with it being the predominant strategy for the end of close games in modern basketball. There is, however, a problem here. To watch this happen is incredibly boring.

Baseball does not have nearly as much of a problem here as basketball, because the overall tempo of baseball is slower than basketball. When the first 46 minutes of a basketball game move at a pretty brisk pace and the final two minutes take fifteen to complete, it just ruins everything about it. Obviously, this won’t be the case in a blowout game, but you could make the argument that a blowout game isn’t nearly as interesting to watch in the first place. With baseball, the slow down in a close game occurs thanks to the rise of the dreaded situational relief pitcher (cue the “back in my day, starters pitched the whole game! In the snow! And they liked it!” rant). Each team has their crazy sidewinder lefty or righty that is only there to pitch to other lefties or righties. And that’s it. So if you’re in a situation where it’s a close game in the seventh, eighth or ninth inning and you’re looking at a righty/lefty/righty split in the batting order, you might run into the situation where you start with a right-handed specialist, make a pitching change for a left-handed specialist for the second batter, and make another pitching change to bring in a set-up guy or closer or something. Each pitching change takes a good ten minutes to complete. Suddenly, this half inning takes forever to complete, even if it’s a 1-2-3 inning, let alone if the opponent puts anyone on base. When you’ve got one half inning that can last upwards of half an hour (and it’s not even because of something exciting like lots of runs being scored), you’ve completely ruined the flow of the game. It’s a sad state of affairs. I’ve always had marginal problems with the way baseball is set up in general (I have a completely different issue with the sport, in that it is the only major team sport where only one team can score points at any one given time, but that’s a different discussion), but this just exacerbates the problem.

Compare this to the last minutes of a one or two goal hockey game. Complete and total insanity. There is nothing more exciting than the pulled goalie in the last minutes of a game. You’ve got a power play situation, most likely six attackers on five defenders, with the added tension of having a wide open net on the other side of the ice in a game where points are incredibly hard to score. Craziness ensues. People are flying around trying to throw as many instances of the puck on the net as possible on a rapidly dwindling clock, knowing that one mistake will most likely cost the game. This is extremely high stakes on an extremely short clock, which leads to the most excitement possible. It’s good stuff. I’m reminded, of course, of Boston University’s National Championship win last year, where a two goal deficit against Miami of Ohio led to BU pulling the goalie with three minutes left, and eventually scoring the first goal with 57 seconds left and the game tying goal with 14 seconds left, leading to the eventual overtime win. That’s good sports right there. You don’t get situations like that in baseball. It’s too slow. You don’t have explosive situations taking place over the course of seconds. This is one of the many reasons why I will always consider hockey the superior sport.

Football’s also got an interesting tempo, because you’ve got the back and forth between the speed of the no huddle after the two minute warning matched with the possibility of time outs, spiked balls and running out of bounds to stop the clock. It’s not as madcap as hockey can get, because you have a tendency to move in fits and starts. But that rush to get everyone on the line so you can start your next play or spike the ball is always entertaining to watch. Hockey obviously takes the cake because the clock is much more of an issue and stops less often, but the tension that gets so bogged down in baseball and basketball is still there (and believe me, as a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, whose two minute offense has been inept for years, it’s quite tense indeed). What this really points out is the elegance of the way hockey is set up as a sport, and it’s a shame it’s been relegated to the position that it’s currently in, fighting for exposure with a national television contract on a marginal network while the best young players we’ve seen in two decades are strapping on skates and doing wondrous things on the ice.

This turned into an article a little more focused on hockey than I intended, but the point remains clear. The Sox game started an hour ago, and all I’ve seen are short glimpses as I walked through the living room to get to the kitchen. I’m really over the whole sport at this point. It’s amazing what a couple years will do to you.

This post was written to the tune of Local H’s Here Comes the Zoo

Brown Vs. Faber II: The Growth of an MMA Fan

Mixed Martial Arts is an odd duck of the sporting world. It seems to be the case often that people who watch (or watched) pro wrestling have a tendency in this day and age to make the switch over to enjoying Mixed Martial Arts. One would assume that this is because the nature and kind of action found in MMA is similar to that of pro wrestling, in that you’re basically looking at amateur wrestling combined with stand-up striking. It’s obviously a hell of a lot more complicated than that, and is really one of the most intricate combat sports (and sports in general, really) on the planet. But it’s real, and it has the strong possibility of being really exciting, thanks to the way that these fights can end, taking anywhere from 8 seconds to 25 minutes (both of which were seen on the same show at World Extreme Cagefighting’s Faber vs. Brown II card Sunday night).

I have a tendency, when I begin to enjoy a new hobby, to learn every possible thing I could ever know about whatever it is in the shortest time possible. This happened when I got into baseball in the early 2000’s, and comics in 2006. And it’s starting to happen with MMA in 2009. A lot of the things you need to learn about MMA lie in the ground grapple game and the different types of guards, transitions, mounts and so on. Once you understand the differences between full guard, half guard, side control, north/south, full mount and so on, and what it means to pass guard or posture up, and what submissions can be attempted from what positions, you get a much better idea about the way these fights flow (or don’t flow in some painfully slow ways) on the ground. Oddly enough, what helped me the most in understanding how these grappling parts of the fight work was the X-Box 360 game UFC 2009 Undisputed, which has fantastic dynamic commentary during the matches from Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg who explain exactly what’s happening and what positions the fighters are going for. I’ve seen a couple of MMA cards now; I caught a recent Spike TV Fight Night, as well as UFC 91 on DVD and some WEC and Strikeforce shows. I’ll be ordering UFC 100, and I am quite excited about the prospect of seeing the Brock Lesnar Frank Mir world heavyweight title unification (re)match, as well as Georges St. Pierre’s next defense and the Dan Henderson Michael Bisping match.

What I really want to talk about is the hell of a night of fights that World Extreme Cagefighting put on Sunday night. WEC is the sister promotion of UFC that focuses on smaller weight classes. The main event was the big rematch between former featherweight champ Urijah Faber and the man that took the title from him, Mike Brown at 145 pounds. The show was on VS, and I’ve been watching a lot of VS recently because of the NHL playoffs, and they’ve been hyping this fight up like crazy as the greatest featherweight fight in the history of the sport. And you know what? There’s a good chance that they were right. The crowd was so insanely behind Faber, which isn’t really shocking considering that the show was in Sacramento and his nickname is “The California Kid.” Even better, the guy’s entrance music is “California Love,” which just made the entire place come unglued cheering their hometown hero trying to regain his belt. And then Mike Brown comes out to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” being booed out of the building and not having nearly the cockiness of his challenger, because like the song says, he’s a simple kind of man. And I’m not trying to say that Faber was overly cocky or a dickish person; it’s quite the opposite, really. It’s just when you compare the two entrances specifically and think of things in pro wrestling terms, Mike Brown would be a lot closer to the babyface and Faber closer to the heel.

And I haven’t even discussed the match itself, which was a five round war of attrition that had so many great moments and storylines that it beats just about anything pro wrestling has done in years. You’ve got the quicker man with the unique striking in Faber compared to the stronger and more traditional Brown, and Faber wins the first round with some great strikes and the crowd’s going crazy. And then the fight keeps going, and you start to notice that Faber is throwing these lunging right elbows instead of jabs and hooks, and he’s shaking his hand from time to time and not holding it up, and then during the third round you realize that he broke his hand in the first round on a straight right that hit Brown on the top of his head, and after the third round ends they show a replay of Faber walking to his corner after the first round, pointing to his right hand and making a small cutting gesture against his neck as if to say “my right hand’s gone, man.” And yet this man, broken hand and all, just keeps fighting all five rounds. Hell, he even hurt his left hand (though not nearly as severely) later on in the fight, to the point that in the fifth and final round, all he’s got left are kicks, right elbows, and open hand slaps with his left, and he’s still hanging in there and getting some nice shots in periodically. And he’s getting taken down but he’s valiantly trying to grab submissions that he can’t finish because his hand is broken and he can’t get his chokes locked in deep enough. And he comes the closest to getting a guillotine with about a minute thirty left in the final round and Brown drops to the ground and you think he’s managed to lock it in and the crowd’s going nuts, but then Brown slips out of it and you can tell that Faber’s just not going to get it done no matter how hard he tries.

Then the fight ends and Brown wins unanimously with two 49-46’s and one 48-47, and Brown puts over Faber as a warrior and Faber puts Brown over as the best. Faber adds that he couldn’t do much with two ruined hands, but he tried his darndest and he will be back and he will get another shot and make good on it and so on, and this whole time his cornermen are icing his gigantic swelled right hand, and he’s obviously in a ton of pain, but it doesn’t matter because the belt wasn’t around his waist. And that’s what’s beautiful about Mixed Martial Arts. It’s really at its core the fusion of boxing and pro wrestling, so you have this real sport where anything can happen at any time, and you’ve also got the personalities and the pre and post fight promos and characters of folks like Brock Lesnar and Kenny Florian and Urijah Faber. You see the pure fun and joy in the eyes of Jose Aldo after he popped Cub Swanson in the head with a flying double knee strike and knocked him out in eight seconds. This is a guy who’s doing a victory dance ten seconds after he shook hands with his opponent to start the match. And I mean that literally. The guy did a victory dance. And it was awesome. It’ll be interesting to see how I react to actually paying for a UFC event, and even though the UFC 100 card is stacked and should be a full night of good fights, there always remains the chance that unscripted real fighting can be really damned boring in quick fashion. Luckily, the entire card for WEC 41 was not boring at all, and I enjoyed every second of it.

This post was written to the tune of The Talking Heads’ Fear of Music