Boring

“Baseball is so boring.” You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, and I get it. I get that some folks find the time between pitches, throws over to first, balls fouled off, or a lazy fly ball to shallow center about as excited as counting cigarette butts in the gutter during a traffic jam. But when someone finds out I like baseball and moans out those four little words, they are positively aghast when I reply, “Not to me, to me basketball is boring.”

“Basketball! Are you insane? Basketball is the most exciting game out there,” they sputter and spit. They go on to explain how in basketball the players are always moving and there is more scoring.

“That’s the boring part to me,” I lamely explain. “How can I get charged up when a basketball player makes a basket, garnering two points, in the first quarter when his team will probably score nearly 100 points by the end of the game?” But I’m not out to find the most boring sport, because we are not limited to enjoying one sport over another. I remember once when I was sitting on the couch at the home of a couple who I just met, the husband, after a few minutes of awkward silence, turned to me and broke the ice, “I just love the fall; baseball is going into the playoffs and football is just getting started.”

Yes, I get that people find baseball boring. There is little scoring and to the un-invested, those moments when nothing seems to be happening are minutes that add up to hours which become days that are lost to them forever. But to me, those moments are tension filled and grind against my constitution like great tectonic plates. Will the pitcher throw a strike, will the runner go, and will the aging short stop on my team who is batting at a sub Mendoza Line level get just one lousy hit when the lightning fast rookie is vibrating out on second? Tension and release, tension and release, tension and release; it builds muscles, makes music more interesting, provides laughs in comedy, and makes me a large supporter of the McNeil Corporation, the maker of Rolaids.

The best way I can describe the cadence of baseball is; baseball is a novel. Baseball is long, will have interesting twists and turns, later something that seemed small early on will loom large, and baseball will end when the story is told, not because a clock ran out. The players come in all different sizes, with different skills, and are placed like chess pieces.

Football is an action movie. Football starts out with an explosion at the kickoff. The players are mostly the same size, large, are very athletic across the board, and violence is a matter of course. Just like war, football is over when one side has run out of resources. One resource being points but the most valuable resource being time.

Basketball is a music video. It’s bright, colorful, flashy, popular, and full of movements that the average person couldn’t duplicate in a million years of evolution, and its best when it’s loud.

Hockey is a Bjork music video. There are some things you recognize from the real world and some things you don’t, it’s icy, and people randomly shed some clothing (throw down) and start dancing (fighting).

Soccer is a Catholic Mass. It starts out pretty slow, not a lot happens that is different from the last time, a lot of people cross themselves or drop to their knees, and often ends without a resolution. The stands are full of zealots on the edge of madness, who are sure rooting for their team will earn them a spot in heaven, and rooting for your team will damn you to hell.

Golf is a coffee table book. It’s pretty, there are a lot of trees and grass, people move with the slow tempo of beach strollers, you can enter it at any point and not be lost, and when you’ve set it down you wonder how people got paid for doing it.