Baseball has never really made much sense to me. I mean, every time I watch it I always wonder (more than during any other sport) “How in the world did anyone come up with this game?”. Not to say Baseball isn’t a great sport or that it isn’t fun to watch or play, I’m just saying that all the rules, restrictions and obligations involved in the sport are just plain weird. I mean how lazy and out of shape do you have to be to recommend during the invention of a sport that instead of forcing a player to run after he has reached base, we should allow him to come back to the bench and sit on his ass while a pinch runner runs the bases for him? In honor of Baseball’s idiocies (no offense) and the new year (why not), I found this collection of top ten reasons Baseball is a weird sport and thought it was pretty funny so here it is.
[1] If a batter fails two-thirds of the time, they’re still considered an excellent batter. It’s too bad this standard isn’t applied to everything else in life.
[2] It is legal to “steal” in this game. This is, perhaps, a questionable example for children.
[3] If you aren’t such a good hitter, you can have a pinch hitter bat for you. If you aren’t such a fast runner, you can have someone–a pinch runner–come in and run for you. At what point, you might wonder, is a team entirely comprised of “pinch” players?
[4] There’s a rule preventing pitchers from spitting on the ball. They can spit anywhere else they like, apparently.
[5] If a batter walks with the bases loaded, he is credited with an RBI (Run Batted In). That’s right: even though he didn’t hit the ball.
[6] The game is played on dirt and grass, but if the ball gets dirty, it is replaced with a new clean ball.
[7] If a batter accidentally hits the catcher when swinging, it’s the catcher’s fault, even if the catcher gets injured. The batter is awarded a base. The catcher gets an apology, if he’s lucky.
[8] The coaches and managers wear the same uniforms as the players.
[9] When a pitcher walks a batter, the batter jogs to first base. Incongruous, but it is a nice show of effort.
[10] The 7th-inning stretch makes baseball the only sport where spectators must take part in calisthenics.
The makings of the war for complete sports video game supremacy has been in the works for a long time. EA has had a serious stranglehold over the market for a very long time but with the rise of 2K and the slow but obvious decline of EA, the war is finally here. 2K seems to have finally ammassed a large enough market share of the sports video game industry to make their first real push into EA’s territory. So the question is, who will win?
