You could have just written “You big stupid rednecks are just too dumb to appreciate baseball”; you’d have been equally mistaken, but I wouldn’t have lost a minute or so of my life to a very silly freshman-year persuasive writing exercise.

Anti-intellectualism is rampant in today’s society, and its critical mass seems to be southern football fans – the people who claim anything they do not understand must be “for Yankees and queers”. Don’t get me wrong, football is great – so is baseball, hockey, tennis, basketball, and curling – if you want to devote the brain power to pay attention. My point here is simple: if one chooses, it takes virtually no cerebral power to enjoy a football game. I know this. I have done it hundreds of times. If one chooses to use his brain, football does provide opportunities to crawl deeper inside the game, but let’s face it – football is about crashing into each other, throwing / kicking / running the ball, and cheerleaders. Simple. That is why I like it. It is similar to the way I enjoy pornography. It (football) is masculine; it is primal; it is all the things that people who do not use all of their brains love.

“But what about Madden, Bellecheck, Lombardi, Walsh, and the other football geniuses?” I do not wish to take anything away from these guys; they are masterminds at football like McArthur and Eisenhower were masterminds at warfare. These guys are geniuses, as football can produce, and they are completely aside from the point I wish to make: you do not need your brain to enjoy football.

Many football fans want to make baseball fans and the game that we love out to be ridiculous, irrelevant, and for some reason, offensive. Anti-intellectualism is the reason. The short of wit, regardless of sport of choice, will look down at those who have the ability to do what they cannot: thinking abstractly, understanding nuance, pronouncing “often” without the “t”, writing in parallel structure, and understanding the beauty and strategy of baseball.

We understand why baseball is boring to the football-only. Football-only fans do not want to take the time to understand the difference in strategy in a 2-1 count, a 2-1 count with a runner on base, or a 2-2 count because no matter the count, the positions of the fielders, the runners on base, the right/left pitcher/batter match up, nobody is getting tackled; nobody is going to do a stupid little dance to draw individual attention in a team sport; and there is no chance of a “do-over”. We understand you don’t get the whole nuance thing, and we don’t care. So why to football-only fans spend so much of their energy hating on baseball? Anti-intellectualism.

Baseball is an endangered sport. Most of the energy previously spent recruiting and developing players has been shifted from the American inner-city to the Caribbean. There is not as much reason for inner-city kids to be as excited about baseball as there is to be about football or basketball, which has reduced baseball to an elitist sport in many people’s (outside the Caribbean) eyes. Baseball focuses on records, many of which are becoming irrelevant because of drug use, but many of these records could be irrelevant because of segregation, a “dead ball” that was used for the earliest decades of the organized game, the change to mostly night games, the lowering of the mound and the bringing-in of the outfield wall, and countless other reasons that go beyond the football-only fan’s level of cerebral ability.

Everybody knows baseball has its problems, and one of the worst is its image as being targeted at old men in tweed jackets. Baseball fans realize our game is not enjoyable for everyone, but what we don’t do is bash every other sport because it is not baseball. We are not good at that thing anyway, we are far too busy trying to calculate Ty Cobb’s numbers if he ever had to face Bob Gibson. Oh, nevermind.

Also, don’t a few big time high school players cash in on $ million signing bonuses to go develop in the minors? So there are a few who get big $$ up front.

There are also a lot of NFL players making league minimum and the top end NFL salaries are not close to A-rod money.

Finally, Jamarcuss Russell and every other NFL draftee has risked crippling injury playing college ball for, what, a $50 K public college education – call it $100 K when you factor in room and board. An education is great, but no gurantee of success. And after all, can you put a price on your ability to walk?

MOST players spend anywhere from 3-12 years scrapping around in the minors, making jack shit cash, despite being signed to a particular organization. Even then, most rookies have to prove their consistency and adjust to the MLB for another 2-4 years before even thinking about sniffing a big-money contract.

Football is way more egregious in this sense…Jamarcus Russell made 28 million WITHOUT TAKING A SNAP in the NFL. If that isn’t ridiculous I don’t know what is.

My Little League comment was simply intended as half-joking speculation, but your explanation is both appreciated and fascinating. Thanks.

Before college, I was a big fan of several pro sports–NFL, NBA, MLB–but now, while I spend an unbelievable amount of time engaged in following college sports, MLB is the only pro team sport I still regularly enjoy watching. Interestingly, I have grown sick of the NFL and NBA for many of the same reasons you say Orson fell away from baseball–and I agree there are major problems with MLB–but for some reason (maybe because I have been a fan of my hometown Twins–the quintessential small market team–since kindergarten, or that I spent a lot of time as a toddler watching my dad play softball) the problems with baseball have not been enough to keep me from coming back every April. Going to college in Evanston, which provided me the fortunate opportunity to spend several sunny late-spring and early-fall afternoons in and around Wrigley Field probably sealed the deal. Plus, one of my great-grandfathers was the catcher on the 1909 National Champion semi-pro team from Deadwood! (If you ever visit the No. 10 Saloon in Deadwood–where Wild Bill Hickock died–look for an old frame with photos of the team members. If you find it, you’ll see my great-grandpa Henry.

Orson’s experience does sound sad, as you say. Maybe there’s hope for the future, though. I’m still teaching my kindergarten-aged son and two younger daughters to catch, throw, and swing, just in case.

1. David and Goliath matchups. I always tune in when a scrappy Marlins team is trying to take down the Yankees, for example.

2. The zen of being able to actually hit a baseball, or become a dominant pitcher. Zen-type stuff is big in practical shooting, golf, etc. and it’s really interesting to read about how guys suddenly lose it or get their mojo back. Of course, this has nothing to do with actually watching a game.