House? Why would you want to watch other people produce scripted drama? Wouldn’t you rather just produce it yourself?
Hal, you’re fucking dreaming if you think Fat Man and the Rabid Anklebiter will ever talk about Giants football. After the World Series, for the rest of the football season you’ll get 4 hours of “hot stove” talk, one segment on the Jets and Giants combined, an hour on the Cowboys, and the rest of the show on golf, tennis, and horse racing. They suck balls bigtime.
But I agree that it’s annoying in general. Even Mike & Mike In the Morning is being overrun by baseball. But that’s not the biggest crime.
No, the biggest crime is that NFL Live and PTI are both basically on hiatus during the playoffs, or so it seems.
One question about the baseball playoffs: why is it so fucking long? NFL playoffs take SIX DAYS. That’s about as long as any playoffs should take. Baseball, basketball, and hockey playoffs are so goddamn bloated with meaningless games. Every single time I hear about how great a game 5 or game 7 will be because it’s an all-or-nothing game, I want to scream and bash people over the head with a clue-stick. You’re choices are either a) end up with the exciting single-elimination game 7, or b) a lopsided affair that was never a contest. Why not just skip the possibility of b) and go straight to a) with a single-elimination tournament format? (This is an actual question.)
The whole point of baseball is that the best team doesn’t always necessarily win. Sometimes, even a heavy underdog can find a way to push enough runs across to win a game. Compare that to the NFL, where a team that’s even slightly overmatched will get thumped by 21.
That’s why you need a series. If you want the best teams playing for the championship, you need multiple games to find who they are.
I disagree. One game, winner take all, both teams using their best (and fully rested) pitcher with a fresh bullpen, IMO, is the better way to get a team’s best effort and gauge their true measure. Have each round be confined to weekends, so that everyone is fully rested. Then every game has the drama of Game 7, the “best two words in sport”.
Is the fear of an underdog winning really the reason for the extended series? Or is it in service to the almighty advertising dollar? If it’s the former, then I don’t understand the logic of a play-in game tiebreaker system that depletes a team’s rotation immediately before potentially playing a lower seeded team.
Baseball is about consistency, the long haul, and series. The whole season is set up in series. The point is that you don’t win a season by having one monster pitcher, or having one lucky day. You have to be there, day in, day out. It’s a team, so it has to be built so that more than one player matters.
I agree with jsgodess. Even with more divisions and a wildcard, baseball only sends 8 teams to the playoffs. I love hockey, but their season doesn’t even start until the playoffs (unless you are an Islanders fan and you wait anxiously to determine if you’ll even make the playoffs).
Football plays fewer playoff games because teams only play one game a week. Baseball teams play 6 games a week (5 in the playoffs). Can you imagine a best-of-3 Superbowl?
I don’t like a winner takes all series. I want the better team to win as often as possible, and it usually happens in baseball (last year being an exception - damn Red Sox). Unlike football, baseball isn’t about a single pitcher. It’s about the entire pitching rotation. You can’t measure that in one game.
PTI is down to Mondays only, and that sucks. I see no reason why they can’t show it on ESPN2, even on Thursdays and Fridays because nobody cares about the first two rounds of a golf tournament.
There are ten times as many games in a MLB season than a NFL season. One game proves nothing. You need multiple games to establish which is the better team. The post season is a reflection of the regular season, which is nothing more than a long string of mini-series between teams.
Baseball and football are fundamentally different. What works for one won’t work for the other.
If baseball playoffs were one-game-and-done format, it could very possibly be a contest as to who had the best single pitcher. With the current format, you need at least 3 starting pitchers plus an adequate bullpen to advance, not to mention at least 12 good position players. Playoff series are much more indicative of the better team than single game playoffs, at least for baseball. Football is a different animal, you take a week to prep for one game vs one opponent, you only have 1 starting quarterback and the whole sport is more suited to single game playoffs.
That, and there’s also fielding: a player might be a great fielder, or a mediocre one; but in a single game, he might not ever get a ball hit toward him that gives him a chance to show what he can do.
The maximum # of games to get through the playoffs is 4 (wild card, division, conference, SB) The entire season takes 16 games. So the playoffs take 25% of the time the entire season takes to play, 4 vs 16.
The baseball playoffs take a maximum of 19 games (5+7+7) vs a 162 game season, a paltry 11.7%.
Football playoffs also take 5 weeks, with that stupid week delay before the SB. I don’t think baseball playoffs take any longer than that.