There has been six columns about baseball lately and frankly, it is getting annoying. Us international readers don’t give a flying u-know-what about the most boring game since cricket and curling. The game seems to be based on rules and exeptions undoubtly making the game so slow that they can sell enough hot-dogs and to air enough commercials. I know that since it is an old sport in US standards there are a lot of not so clear definitions and concepts that has evolved over the years. But it still doesn’t make it interesting. I tried to watch a baseball game once and got thru half an hour before i fell a sleep. I get it, nothing is happening and you need to give the commentators something to talk about so let’s make rules and definitions enough to fill good six volumes of encyclopedia out of, what is basically, the most simplest game ever.
I hope not to see another line of text of someone hitting a ball with a bat.
No one’s forcing you to read it. In case you hadn’t noticed, The Straight Dope is written for a general American audience. It is based in Chicago, which is near the middle of the North American continent, where baseball is very popular. The baseball season just began, so the editors apparently took the opportunity to run some old baseball columns. It happens; get over it.
Powers &8^]
Whoever it is that decides what “classic” columns to run in between the new ones very often clusters several together with a similar subject or theme.
So this particular theme is one you’re not personally interested in. Big Deal. We’ll be on to something new soon, I’m sure.
Meanwhile, click on “Read a random Straight Dope column” and take a chill pill.
(ETA: CreamKr, I notice you registered here specifically to post this complaint. Welcome, and I hope you’ll stick around to voice your opinions on other stuff too.)
Well, mate, one of the great joys of baseball is musing through arcane scenarios. It is perhaps a necessary characteristic of a game largely composed of, as one commentator put it, “pondering inaction”. As such, questions about the US’ National Pastime are natural fodder for an engine like the Straight Dope, and a run like the one we are having is not only forgivable–it is largely desirable.
I should expect a clusters of columns about sex or flatulence at some point.
Explaining the strategies, game situations and nuances of baseball to an outsider, most likely who grew up on soccer or basketball or hockey, is like trying to explain Einstein’s Theories of Relativity to a kid that just learned the multiplication tables. I’m pretty sure that kid would fall asleep pretty quickly too.
True true. If you look at the time when the big @$£%^&@£ kicked off about naughty language on the board, most of the dope colums were about rather… intiimate subjects.
Thanks for replys, didn’t think there would come so many… Indeed, i can’t watch baseball live but only thru the tv-screen and it just seems like nothings happening. And of course i enjoy the free content here and can appreciate that. But enough is enough. Usually the articles here are very interesting and every time they are well written, the latter which seem not to be the norm around the interweb…
I just raised my opinion of the amount of space this subject has been getting lately. And since internet is very much international the concentration on one nations favorite past time is, well , little narrowminded. USA is not the whole world… But that’s my opinion only, don’t take it too serious. I still read every column that comes here. I wouldn’t like to read articles about one subject, whether it’s sport, politics, religion all the time. Sites that concentreate on one subject only are a plenty and you can find the information you’re interested there.
Everybody’s right and nobody’s wrong… or was it the other way around?
These columns were also originally written for, and reprinted from, an actual hardcopy newspaper that is sold in a major American city (Chicago). They were not originally written for the Internet — the dates on many of them should make that much obvious. Cecil was not writing with an international audience in mind, he was writing for Chicago newspaper readers.
The Chicago Reader is not sold at all - it’s a free paper.
/end shitty little nitpick/
I continue to be mortified that I have to pay for a paper here in Atlanta that’s nowhere near as quality journalism as the paper I read for free when I lived in Chicago.
Since you’ve made this point twice, I’d remind you that baseball is also popular in many other countries besides the U.S. It’s extremely popular in Japan, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic and is played throughout North America from Canada to Venezuela.
ETA: Not that the Straight Dope gets many page views in Cuba or Venezuela. I’m just saying …
