America's Pastime

You might say that I am not that big of a sports fan. I would say I'm a medium to average follower of all major sports, excluding squash. Fuckin' squash. Anyway, I know the teams and the major players for most of said teams in the big sports, and if there's one sport that I would have to name as a "favorite", I would probably say it was baseball. After all, my lifetime of athleticism began with an extended stint in little league baseball, where I played left field. That's right, left field! In little league, that's one step up from the worst position, which as we all know, is right field.

So, I have some experience playing baseball in an organized setting, and am familiar with the most common rules. The other day I was watching a baseball game with my family, and my dad makes some comment about the third base coach. Now, when I was in little league, we had first and third base coaches because we didn't know what the hell we were doing out there. We had no real hand-eye coordination, no depth perception, and no way to tell if we would actually make it to second base, so we had to have a guy standing there telling us to KEEP GOING or to STAY ON FIRST. I thought to myself, surely you must be joking, father. These players make at minimum, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Even the guy who sits on the bench all season makes more money than I'm hoping to in the near future. These guys must know by now whether they can run or if they should stay. But apparantly, I was wrong, my friends. These people who are being paid millions of dollars to hit a ball and run around a diamond cannot even decide for themselves whether it's safe to run to second base or to run home. They still need someone's dad in way-too-short baseball shorts to stand there at first and third base and yell at them to RUN HOME.

Baseball's never been the same since the strike.