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Baseball > Soccer
Jun. 15th, 2010 04:29 pmJust to start fights, there's a growing meme in World Cup related sports writing by puzzled American journalists stuck providing 'related coverage' and venting their spleens about how soccer/football and the World Cup somehow represent a large number of non-American values that other traditionally supported sports here do. This is not one of those, since I support traditional Canadian values, like drinking too much, having sex as a means to keep warm, and mocking Americans. None of which are easily summed up as an analogy with any sport, except perhaps curling.
Anyhow, obviously the comparisons come out to baseball, the cherished national pastime of the United States. Most of them are, to be blunt, pointless. They talk about the pace and energy of the games being similar, missing the fact that to a baseball fan, soccer is a mindnumbing succession of sameness once and awhile punctuated by a faked injury, and to the football fan, baseball is a bonecrushingly boring tableau of a guy with a stick waiting for another guy to chuck something at him. It's a non-starter of an argument.
No, the key to why baseball is different and thus better than soccer can be summed up without injurying national pride, calling one country or another a bunch of pansies, or trying to identify the excerpts of 'The Communist Manifesto' or 'Atlas Shrugged' that are supposed to be hidden in the rule books.
1. Clocks - soccer has a clock. At some point, it is entirely possible to play entirely defensively to minimize the chances of the other team scoring in order to win by waiting them out. In baseball, there is no clock. Games go on until one team is beaten by another team. You have to give them their 27 outs; you have to get the third out in the inning; you have to be winning at the bottom or end of the inning for victory. Actually, this leads nicely into my second point;
2. The Tie Game/The Nil Game - in soccer, teams will rack up tie games over their season. Some of these will be 0-0 as a final score, providing the same net result as if both teams simply shook hands before the whistle and went to the pub for three hours instead. Games in baseball are won or lost; save for one very embarassing All-Star Game, but All-Star Games suck anyway.
3. 162 Games - on average (and this is based on wiki research, so it could be wrong), most football leagues play somewhere between 34-46 games in an average season. Looks like about 2-3 games per week. Baseball is played between April and September, with 162 games played in that duration. Which means about 21 days off during the season; 3.5 days per month. Not only does it make baseball as much about conditioning, endurance and pacing as it does about raw talent and skill, but adds to that a much larger statistical basis in which to judge the ability of a team. In many sports, one hot month can be enough to cinch a playoff spot, but in baseball sheer volume of games, the value of the hot month is weighted differently; if you win 12 of your last 15 games in a 38 game season, you're looking at 40% of your total games with an .800 winning percentage. In baseball, those same 12 of 15 games represents 9% of your total games. In short, it's a lot harder to get lucky or ride a hot hand over 162 games and make the playoffs.
In short, games should be won, they should only be won by beating the other team without the advantage of time as a deciding factor, and teams should be judged by their aggregate performance over a long enough timeline to limit the chances of luck being the major factor to reaching the playoffs. That's baseball.
PS: Even'Sweet Caroline' sung by a bunch of drunken Massholes fails to be more obnoxious than the fucking vuvuzelas
Anyhow, obviously the comparisons come out to baseball, the cherished national pastime of the United States. Most of them are, to be blunt, pointless. They talk about the pace and energy of the games being similar, missing the fact that to a baseball fan, soccer is a mindnumbing succession of sameness once and awhile punctuated by a faked injury, and to the football fan, baseball is a bonecrushingly boring tableau of a guy with a stick waiting for another guy to chuck something at him. It's a non-starter of an argument.
No, the key to why baseball is different and thus better than soccer can be summed up without injurying national pride, calling one country or another a bunch of pansies, or trying to identify the excerpts of 'The Communist Manifesto' or 'Atlas Shrugged' that are supposed to be hidden in the rule books.
1. Clocks - soccer has a clock. At some point, it is entirely possible to play entirely defensively to minimize the chances of the other team scoring in order to win by waiting them out. In baseball, there is no clock. Games go on until one team is beaten by another team. You have to give them their 27 outs; you have to get the third out in the inning; you have to be winning at the bottom or end of the inning for victory. Actually, this leads nicely into my second point;
2. The Tie Game/The Nil Game - in soccer, teams will rack up tie games over their season. Some of these will be 0-0 as a final score, providing the same net result as if both teams simply shook hands before the whistle and went to the pub for three hours instead. Games in baseball are won or lost; save for one very embarassing All-Star Game, but All-Star Games suck anyway.
3. 162 Games - on average (and this is based on wiki research, so it could be wrong), most football leagues play somewhere between 34-46 games in an average season. Looks like about 2-3 games per week. Baseball is played between April and September, with 162 games played in that duration. Which means about 21 days off during the season; 3.5 days per month. Not only does it make baseball as much about conditioning, endurance and pacing as it does about raw talent and skill, but adds to that a much larger statistical basis in which to judge the ability of a team. In many sports, one hot month can be enough to cinch a playoff spot, but in baseball sheer volume of games, the value of the hot month is weighted differently; if you win 12 of your last 15 games in a 38 game season, you're looking at 40% of your total games with an .800 winning percentage. In baseball, those same 12 of 15 games represents 9% of your total games. In short, it's a lot harder to get lucky or ride a hot hand over 162 games and make the playoffs.
In short, games should be won, they should only be won by beating the other team without the advantage of time as a deciding factor, and teams should be judged by their aggregate performance over a long enough timeline to limit the chances of luck being the major factor to reaching the playoffs. That's baseball.
PS: Even'Sweet Caroline' sung by a bunch of drunken Massholes fails to be more obnoxious than the fucking vuvuzelas
