Charles Krauthammer is a Nationals fan

I'd be one too, if they weren't in the same division as the Phillies.

It's wonderful that baseball is back in the nation's capital, where it belongs, even if the Nats are about as good as the Senators typically were.

Krauthammer doesn't mind a bit:

You get there and the twilight's gleaming, the popcorn's popping, the kids're romping and everyone's happy. The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment...

No one's happy to lose, and the fans cheer lustily when the Nats win. But as starters blow up and base runners get picked off, there is none of the agitation, the angry, screaming, beer-spilling, red-faced ranting you get at football or basketball games.

Baseball, in other words, is a civilized sport for civilized people. In a violent culture, it's amazing that baseball's still as popular as it is. It's not a mere spectacle like football or basketball-it's an interesting, mind-expanding experience. The pace that so many criticize as slow is just right, actually-it lends itself to the talk between pitches among armchair experts that makes the game so much fun.

Baseball vs. football-an apples and oranges comparison

I never quite understand the people who dump on baseball by saying it's slow, and then turn and around and tell us that football is a fast, action-packed game. Here I demolish (haha) those arguments.

First, pro football isn't a "game" at all- it's a strikingly successful TV show. NFL teams no more compete with each other (due to the enormous, evenly-split pile of national network cash) than my blog competes with Elmore Leonard's books. Of course, they need to appear to compete. So you have the weekly TV "event."

That lack of actual competition is exactly why the NFL union has so little pull-why would an NFL team owner hike salaries, make the money guaranteed, etc., when an NFL franchise is a money-printing machine even if you go 0-16? The financial incentives just aren't there-and the people who run football are, believe me, all about the money.


It's interesting to note, by the by, just how many NFL teams still can't sell out consistently. Baseball fans pay money and go to games...including spring training games-the Phillies have sold out nearly every meaningless spring training game this year. Football fans, even if there are more of them, watch on TV. There's a big difference in intensity of interest, I'd say.

And I really wouldn't want to argue football is faster than baseball. Time an NFL game, and see how much of the three hours is actually consumed by play. It's about 15 minutes...of three yards and a cloud of dust, over and over again. Exciting plays are few and far between. But I guess it's like NASCAR-their fans will wait endlessly for a crash, football fans will wait endlessly for that five yard TD pass, to be followed by guys strutting around in their ridiculously over-tight unis as if they'd just cured cancer. A huge number of them are fat, too..especially linemen. Only football players, of any major sport's participants, die younger than the population, on average. Wonder why that is?

If you want a continuous action sport, flip on soccer and see how thrilling that is.

Yet another lazy reporter

Here's a story about by Adam Rubin in The New York Daily News about the Mets deciding to lower their CF wall from 16 feet to eight to increase homers (no other walls or dimensions will be changed, apparently.) The Mets only hit 95 HR io 2009, nearly a deadball-era (or Whitey Herzog with the Cardinals in the 80's) sort of total.


Rubin says:

...David Wright may not be as inclined to frustratingly fling his Great Gazoo helmet, or whatever protective wear he uses, during the upcoming season.

It really wouldn't have taken much research for Rubin to have seen that Wright's power outage in '09 (he hit only ten, after averaging 29 in the previous four years) had nothing to do with Citi Field. He hit five at home, five on the road. Rubin need only have gone to Baseball-Reference for this info. Lordy.