Baseball v. Football

If you are a regular visitor of the Hopper, you may have read a few of my posts about baseball. How this is the first season I regularly watched baseball since, oh, 1978 or so. Yeah, I watched a World Series game or two every now and then (I remember the 2000 Subway Series, somewhat). But prior to this past April 1 I hadn’t seen a baseball game in at least three or four years.

So, on a whim, I started watching. And I found out I enjoy it. I like the slow pace of the game (which in the past I hated). I also like the statistical aspect of it – AVG, OBP, Slugging percentage, pitching stats, Sabermetrics, etc. – it appeals to that unrealized mathematician stuck somewhere in my left brain. Throw in the strategy and the unpredictability of seeing a phenomenal play, well, I enjoyed it.

Over the season I watched maybe 40 games. Which is probably the same amount of football games I watch in a season. Now, football I’ve been watching pretty consistently since Super Bowl XXI, where the Giants completely dominated the Broncos and gave justification to the years of losing teams of my youth. Football appeals to me for its martial qualities – it’s the closest thing to war we have other than, say, some type of organized paintball / laser tag / game of war itself.

This past Sunday I watched the Jets and Giants play. And you know what? I was genuinely surprised observing myself during these games. How immediately tense I became, in a physical sense of the word. How emotionally uncontrollably invested I found myself, how the game itself overwhelmed me. I’m not exaggerating too much for effect here, either. And because the Jets are the Jets and the Giants can beat any team or lose to any team any given weekend, I became extremely negative and cynical.

Is this how I want to spend six or seven hours a weekend over the next five months?

I am shocked because this is not at all how I experience baseball. True, I’m not emotionally invested in the Mets or Yankees as much. True, I can throw and catch a football but can’t hit a baseball (or catch a high fly ball) for the life of me. And maybe that ritualized Sunday afternoon atmosphere has something to do with it (rush home from Church and make sure we have snacks for the game and get into my sweatpants and kids don’t bug me from 1 to 7:15!). But it really was an eye-opening experience.

Hope to catch a baseball game one night this week. Yes, I know any game since the fourth of July is basically meaningless for the Mets and the Yanks are blowing a chance at the wild card. But I don’t care, because I still enjoy watching it for the sake of watching it, if that makes sense.

Then I’ll compare my observations to Week 2 of the NFL.

Very interesting, no?