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As your run-of-the-mill patriot, I’m pretty pro-America in a lot of ways. However, in the tradition of our freedom of speech, and in the American ideal of social disagreement, I think it’s only fair I point out a few things that, while we all may love, are inherently absurd at their core.
Christmas
Jim Gaffigan has gone over a lot of the fine points of the Christmas tree absurdity, so I won’t steal any of his thunder. There’s plenty of weirdness to go around as far as the end-of-year holidays go. First, we have this fat, bearded dude in a red suit, who, at any other time of year, would be the kind of guy parents would escort their children away from. But during the holidays, he’s not only the symbol of the season, he’s the guy the kids are not only allowed, but encouraged, to sit on. Just right on his lap, like it’s no big deal. And what’s with the mythology around this guy? He has a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer? Like, if it weren’t for Santa, would we even know that reindeer were a thing? And why did he pick them? I mean, why not pick an animal that can, I don’t know, actually fly? Like a fucking Christmas dragon or something? That’d be way cooler than some wimpy deer. Deer are stupid.
High-Fives
Handshakes are sort of odd, but their development at least makes sense. They were allegedly developed as a show of respect that doubled as a move that allowed you to show you weren’t secretly holding any weapons in your hand/up your sleeve. Same with hugs. Or at least that’s what I read somewhere on the internet, followed by no real research to follow up. So those types of greetings at least once had some sort of tangible purpose. High-fives are just nonsense. “Hey man, I’m happy to see you, and I’m going to express it by slapping your palm with my palm midair!” What? And that’s just the simple, 1970s five. Where it’s gone since then is just asinine. For decades now, we’ve developed secret handshakes, where the people who are in the private, two-member club exchange a strange combination of palm slaps, all culminating in…well, nothing really. It don’t make no sense.
Baseball
Look, I love baseball as much as the next guy who grew up playing it, but you have to admit that out of all of the major sports, baseball is the least logical. It’s allegedly a team sport, and yet it reduces the matchup to essentially two people on most “plays,” in the sense that the majority of the action only occurs between the pitcher and the batter on any given at-bat. What that means is that most of the guys on the field will often go an entire inning without seeing any action in their area whatsoever. Hell, unless your batters are just rolling, most of your bench isn’t going to step up to the plate in a given inning, either. So, basically, you have a bunch of dudes standing around watching one dude throw shit at another dude, who’s trying to hit that shit all the way out of the stadium that they’re all standing around in. And then you have a whole bunch more people sitting down, getting drunk, and watching the dudes who are standing around watching the two dudes. It’s weird, man.
Going To Dinner On A First Date
Who started this shit? I mean, it’s not like modern dating has been around for very long, so we can’t exactly blame it on strange, archaic traditions with unclear backgrounds. People started dating the way we know it less than 100 years ago. So some enterprising, young genius in the twentieth century decided that he was going to take the state of young, romantically inclined couples into his own hands, and his decision was fucking dinner? I mean, really, what could possibly be worse for your first official romantic encounter than witnessing the other person shove food into his or her mouth? I’m not a sloppy eater, but when I’m already in a state of nervousness, the last thing I want to do is also have to monitor food and drink going in my mouth (and hopefully not out). I have enough on my plate without food on it, thank you very much..
Respond
Baseball is the ultimate team sport. To quote Bob Costas’s great line from Ken Burn’s Baseball: “Babe Ruth only got to bat once.” Then the rest of the lineup has to try and bring him around to score. In football, you can have Aaron Rodgers throw it everytime or Emmitt Smith run the ball every down. In basketball, Michael Jordan can take every shot. But your best hitter only gets about 4 chances a game and still needs the rest of the team to get a run.
Your comment is irrelevant. Aaron Rodgers and Emmitt Smith are nothing without their team mates protecting them. They have to work as a team to win a game. MJ could win a game by himself, but if he was all a team had, wouldn’t you just triple team him every time? Where is he going then?
Whereas in baseball, sure, your star hitter will only be at bat 4 times, but that could be 4 HRs and they can win 4-3. Really, the majority of the team does nothing for an entire game. There is no way to spin it.
The star hitter isn’t going to pitch most likely. And he certainly isn’t going to pitch, then field the ball, then tag the runner out. And even if he’s able to do that once, he can’t do that another 26 times.
And in the roughly 150 years of professional baseball, a player has only hit 4 home runs in a game 15 times. Two of those 15 times that player’s team still lost.
And MJ was at least double teamed most the time and would still score 50+ points.
MJ’s average PPG was 30.1 over his entire career. Take into the fact he can’t defend everyone on the court, and it becomes pretty obvious he can’t win games entirely by myself. I don’t mean you can in baseball either. My point was, out of all team sports, when an average game is taken as the base point, baseball is the least team oriented sport out of all the team sports.
It is still a team sport, because you obviously need more than one player to win, but there is absolutely no way it is the ultimate team sport. It wouldn’t even crack the top 5 sports (or top 10 in my opinion).
I understand your point, and I get why people say that baseball isn’t a team sport. But it still frustrates me because people who closely follow it and play know that that isn’t really the case because they can see all the influences the other players make
Yeah, plus in baseball, the defense is the side who has the ball. Tell me how much sense that makes, Abner Doubleday.
Clearly somebody didn’t watch the insightful movie, Just Friends. Dinner is for dates, lunch is for friends.
A high five after a first date dinner means welcome to the friend zone, right?
#5: because Americans are fat and love to eat. So what.