Minimal football noise today, so let's access that spleen and talk about how much another corrupt, shitty sport blows. No particular reason.
Full of shit, but will get you laid: Baudrillard.
We're big Jean Baudrillard fans, and not because we're some organic tea-sipping grad student getting wood to the concept of actually writing crap bollocks about art, meaning, and dissecting meaning without having to actually come up with any ourselves. You're out there, we know who you are, and we will refrain from making the Starbucks serve-us-our-latte professor joke, because many of you do indeed go on to do terrible things like teach Lacan and Derrida to smartstruck private school kids cowed by your ability to string together three sentences together and use the phrase "late-stage capitalism" without shitting yourself from shame.
Plus, when you can quote shit like this pants just fly off smart ladies not quite smart enough to realize just how full of shit you really are:
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
That's Baudrillard, who rules like Motorhead because he's totally quotable, completely full of shit, and sold tons of books in France despite the fact that he, himself, would remind anyone he was brimming with intellectual fecal matter. He insisted, in fact, on most everything being fake and shitty--simulacra--mere imitations of things that once existed, and that most culture was just growing like the fingernails and hair on a corpse.
Drop that at a cocktail party, and someone will probably either pose thoughtfully or call you a homosexual. Either way you're going for the bullshit gold, since it's English major bongwater primo stuff. However, it may rightfully describe the EDSBS official Most Despised Game, not a sport, but a game, the hypertrophied croquet match that is baseball, and the fact that old incontinent people care enough about it to waste an ex-Senator's time on whether or nor its players are taking illegal supplements.
(Let us clarify that we don't care whether baseball players are injecting mule piss into their veins or eating the live, still-beating hearts of polar bears in order to gain a competitive edge. This is because we don't care about baseball outside of a lingering affection for fat players like John Kruk from our youth and good hooker stories involving profligate man-whores like Mickey Mantle, who once answered an ex-Yankee survey with a rambling account of a blowjob he received under the bleachers. He concluded with this quote, paraphrased as best we can remember:
She asked me what to do with the come, and I said, "Don't ask me, I'm no cocksucker."
See? Baseball's not all bad! Except for the game, the management of the sport, and evidently the whole collection of cheating bastards who made up its elite players in the 1990s/2000s)
Things die, clothes fray, computers crash, and species extinctify, and sometimes, the nails growing on a corpse simulate life. In fact, this is what baseball's done, buffeted by four or five huge major franchises while dragging the whole bleeding cripple party of other franchises along with them. Record profits! Bullshit, as exemplified by the large franchises who skew the curve. Bentonville, Arkansas, the whole thing: a little town whose average income is swelled by the immense wealth of the handful of franchises raking money in hand over fist, millionaires surrounded by the squalor of their neighbors.
And the sport itself lurches along like a reanimated corpse. After three solid years of intense football watching, we went to a Braves game this past season, and we'd say the entire exercise was an extravagant waste of time if we hadn't had Lexus level access and thus a intravenous mainline of beer and popcorn. And even after 14 beers, the game was like watching at tribe of macaques pick nits off each other: stasis periodically interrupted when, at a gusty 25% of the time clip, someone hit a tiny ball a sniper could barely pick up at one of the bored, improbably huge macaques. Then everyone settled down and began drinking again and talking on their cell phones.
Even when completely drunk, it sucked with the force of ten thousand Reggie Balls rolling downhill in a big gremlin-ball of suck. No contact, no passion, no energy, and as much strategy as a game of horse-shoes. Wait, that's a disservice to horseshoes. None. If someone preens on one more time about the strategy involved in baseball, we will drop a safe on you from a great height, because there's simply nothing going on out there. At least the British admit the whole thing is a front for beer-drinking and lolling around outside for a few days. We'd like it if baseball games lasted three days like cricket test-matches, if only because the epic drunk you'd get on would likely get Viking war songs written about you, your friends, and the time you each drank a 24-pack before noon without dying.
Instead, in baseball, you get this alleged psychodrama between batter and pitcher, who in the minds of most everyone are fighting a mental swordfight while tiptoeing on water like the assassins in Hero. In reality, baseball players are among the stupidest athletes we've ever seen--at least football players, big, lummoxy football players, may have been to college. Baseball players are recruited straight from high school, meaning they dive straight from being a high-school manchild to being million-dollar bonus babies at the age of nineteen, meaning that like the horde of Genghis Khan, the future inhabitants of the world may be by percentage all related to some baseball player, since rich nineteen year olds are only interested in pillaging the Hooters and strip clubs of this nation. Unlike you, though, they don't wear condoms and have the money to do the whole thing properly, which explains how even white bread Steve Garvey ended up spurting out a whole flock of milquetoast lustspawn intent on making him a merely affluent man.
Really, batter and pitcher are just trading ones and zeros, and doing so poorly in most instances in between all the jock-adjusting, spitting, and stepping out of the box to twitch and scope trim in the stands. (Read Ball Four. We're not making this up.) The rest of the time, everyone else just....stands around scoping trim in the stands.
Oh, but the romance! The history! It's our national pastime, hearkening back to a SAHAHAKEREEGGHGHHKKKFJDmakdfadfkjg. Apologies. That noise was us garroting George Will, W.P. Kinsella, and any of the other bullshit geysers who've built up the myth that for some reason, merely because it's very old and has been around a long time, that there's some kind of moral or cultural onus to like baseball. (God, that felt good.) No one's better at pulling a phantom peanut of sublimity from steaming turd of reality than a writer, and in baseball they've had a whole open sewer to browse in their quest to make shinola from shit. (Do you even know what shinola is? It's shoe polish, which normal people use to shine shoes, and baseball players try to eat spread on crackers before spitting it out and saying "BOOO YUCKY" and impregnating a stripper.)
There's a whole heap of turdulent literature just collecting flies out there, all of it devoted to baseball. Most of it should be burned and scattered to the winds, excepting Ball Four, which is about what rat bastard life as a player is really like, and that awesome book about how the 1986 Mets were all on cocaine, because books about people doing cocaine in the 1980s are the highest form of literature and fuck your mother if you don't agree.
The sport should have been dead for years, and if the Mitchell report surprises anyone, then you, anyone, should be relegated to the salt mines along with people who like Family Guy and those who don't use their turn signals in traffic. OMG, people are suddenly just so much bigger now in like a year! If this shocked anyone after years of stats and norms being established with interminable death-march 162 game seasons...we mean, it would have marked a spurt not just in baseball's evolution, but humanity's. Sammy Sosa should have had Waterworld gills. Mark McGwire should have been telekinetic, and Albert Pujols should have had the ability to levitate (over the border! To Mexico! For illegal steroids!).
In conclusion, we were going to say die, baseball, die, but considering it's been dead for decades anyway, there's no reason to send a duplicate death certificate around. Instead: Baudrillard, fingernails, corpse. There's your snapshot there. No one mourns the moa, no one misses the Edsel, and when we're eighty or so, no one will really mourn football since by then it'll all be flying robots with chainsaws farting balls out of their shiny titanium rectums and sodomizing each other after whatever constitutes a goal occurs while the crowd roars for Beef Supreme to enter the arena. (Personally, we can't wait for this. If brains in jars are involved, we're already looking forward to it, and it doesn't even exist yet.)
Cricket's huge in India we hear. Going offshore may be the best decision, especially with all those lax overseas pharma rules. You'll be able to inject whatever you want, and the only real threat to the sport will be nuclear war between Pakistan and India. And with that much nandralone coursing through your system, players might just breathe deep and exhale fire without harm in the face of it all.
Postscript: Yeah? But what about football problems steroids corruption blah blah blah. Ooooh, diversion! Someone graduated from the Playskool Institute of Fucktard rhetoric! Let us restate: this is about baseball, which we hate for all of the reasons stated above. Not about football, a sport crippled in its own special way. We're not arguing about which one's better. That's obvious: football, which trounces pantywaisted baseball in a street fight and smashes its face into a bus stop sign with ease. Even pro football's better than baseball. Dammit, we'll go there: Golf's better than baseball, because there's a chance we can listen to David Feherty and marvel at John Daly's ability to not die and have the DTs on air. We'd rather tie our balls to a 747 and give the clearance from the tower ourselves than watch golf, but that's the truth.