Our Long National Nap: Baseball as America’s Most Boring Sport
A few college-football-themed blogs celebrated a minor holiday recently. Wednesday, May 23rd, marked 100 days until the 2012 college football season kicks off.
Understandably, in the estimation of sites like EveryDayShouldBeSaturday.com and its ilk this was a momentous occasion. For the madly faithful, like the men who run those sites, such a date is akin to the solstice celebrations of early civilizations around the world. It marked a moment of passage and equanimity, wherein the previous year’s toil and effort was handed off to memory and the anticipation for what lay ahead could begin in earnest.
Being a die-hard college football partisan (Go Blue!), I must say that I understood this celebration entirely too well. I have a way of viewing summer holidays not as celebrations of leisure and nature’s fertility, but as the stepping stones towards that marvelous autumn festival of pads and pageantry that is football season. Memorial Day is around the time that the season preview magazines are released, the 4th of July means I can start talking about it with friends, and the dog days of summer in late July and early August are when training camps open and I can devote myself wholeheartedly to reading tweets about the progress of this senior wide receiver or that incoming freshman at linebacker.
This is a celebration of being able to talk about football without feeling weird about it.
Summer is, of course, packed with all the excitement of sporting the Major League Baseball season. Why not put off my football obsession until pads are actually being put on? My answer: baseball is boring as fuck and increasingly irrelevant to American life. These are bold words, and I expect a rebuttal from at least one of my colleagues on the Addison Recorder, but I stand by them.