The Lutheran Zephyr

Why Baseball is Superior to Football

I watched the Super Bowl and enjoyed it.  After three slow quarters of play, the fourth quarter was exciting and suspenseful.  It was a very good game.

However, even in the rare event of a competitive and entertaining Super Bowl game we can see how football is inferior to baseball.  Two plays in particular demonstrated that football, despite its physical nature and on-the-field execution, is a game where mind-boggling technicalities can be just as important as a touchdown or missed tackle, and usually break the flow of the game.

(Just over a year ago I wrote that baseball is superior to football because it has no clock.  In football you have two teams and a clock, and the competition is just as much about beating the clock as it is about beating the other team.  Call me silly, but I'd rather see teams compete with each other than with a clock.)

In the third quarter New England coach Bill Belicheck successfully challenged that New York had too many players on the field, granting the Patriots five yards on the NY penalty and thus a first down in a situation that seemed crucial at the moment.  On replay you saw, however, that a NY player was running to the sidelines, trying to get off the field before the ball was snapped.  This is not an example of a rule violation that would give the Giants an advantage on the field (in the way that a hold might keep a play alive).  This violation is simply a technicality, one that has no impact on the way a down was played.  It's ridiculous to have to watch a slow-motion replay of a single player running toward the sideline - far from the ball or any other player - for a possible penalty.  Is that what head-to-head, physical competition is all about?

And then at the end of the fourth quarter, after New England was unsuccessful at converting a fourth down, a single second remained on the clock.  NFL rules required that the Giants take the field and resume play.  What logical reason was there to do this?  Oh yes, the clock.  Even though the game was all but over, and the coaches, media and players had already stormed the field, the players had to line up and snap the ball to get that one second off the clock.  At that moment the game was being "played" not for the sake of competition, but for the sake of a rulebook and the Almighty Clock.  Boring!

In baseball we don't have such silly technicalities.  Each team gets nine innings, or 27 outs, to defeat the other team.  Because it is a simple head-to-head game (ie, there is no clock), there are no meaningless plays in baseball - baseball doesn't run the home team to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning if it is already winning.  But that's precisely what happens in football every week - minutes of meaningless football are played, simply so that they can run out the clock.  Yawn.

I do like football, and I really enjoyed the Super Bowl this year.  But football doesn't compare to baseball, where technical rules are few and teams compete without a clock.  Free from the burden of technicalities and Timex, all baseball offers is some good old fashioned head-to-head competition.

Is it Spring Training yet?

Imus and "Cute" Tenessee Women

Missing among the outraged voices in the scandal surrounding Don Imus and his incredibly stupid comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team is any statement from the University of Tennessee women's basketball program.  I haven't scoured the entire web for their response, but a look through their team website finds no statement responding to Imus' racist and sexist comments about the Rutgers team (the Rutgers site, however, has links to several articles and statements on the controversy).  This is disappointing.  I would hope that the Lady Vols would join in solidarity with their fellow student-athletes over at Rutgers and reject Imus' racist and sexist statements.

But if they wouldn't join cause with the women from Rutgers, perhaps they would simply stand up for themselves.  After all, (appropriately) less noticed in Imus' comments are his sexually objectifying words about the Tennessee team - "And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute."  These student-athletes just won the national championship, and all Imus can say about them is that they are "cute"?  Of course, these comments pale in comparison with what he said about the mostly African-American Rutgers team, but I would hope that someone in a Lady Vols uniform would speak up - in defense of the women from Rutgers, or at least  in defense of themselves as women student-athletes.  But then again, we are talking about the Lady Vols, and perhaps "speaking up" is just not Lady-like.  Whatever the reason, their silence is deafening.

The Lady Vols may have won the championship, but the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, in resisting the brutal forces of sexism and racism, have won the day.

March Madness: The NCAA's Monopoly on Sports

Last week I read this story about Michael Bowers, a former high school kid whose standing as a special education student may have cost him a chance at playing college football (many details of the case are disputed, which is winding its way through the courts).  Of course, if an athlete is ineligible to play in the NCAA, his chances of playing in the NFL are next to nil.  Which got me to thinking about the NCAA's stranglehold on athletic talent, particularly mens basketball and football players. 

If I want a chance to play in the NBA or NFL, the only real path to these leagues runs through the NCAA.  However, if I want to play professional baseball or ice hockey, I can either attend college to play in the NCAA, or I can play in the minor leagues of these sports.  In two of the four major professional sports (baseball and hockey - is hockey still a major sport?) the athlete has a choice between professional minor leagues and college sports.  In football and basketball, he does not - the NCAA is the only option.

This is too bad.  Whereas I thoroughly and completely believe in education and think that many young people can (and should!) use athletic ability as a ticket to college, the lack of options creates a system that places too many burdens on athletes who, for whatever reason, have little interest (or ability) to pursue a college education.  And though I am not an advocate for paying NCAA athletes, I do think young athletes should have an option to compete for a paid position on a professional minor league team upon graduation from high school.  Young baseball and hockey players get to choose between college sports and the professional minor leagues.  Why not football and basketball players, too?

Swedes & Finns Work Together!

This breaking news is not about two struggling Lutheran churches deciding to work together, but about another struggling enterprise - the Philadelphia Flyers.  The last place Flyers will now have a Swede (Peter Forsberg) and a Finn (Sami Kapanen) playing together on the team's top line.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.

No word yet on how local Lutheran congregations - most of which have German origins - are responding to this breaking news, though a few are said to have responded to the ethnic cooperation with a mixture of confusion and curiosity.  "We've never done it this way before," said Hans, a Lutheran layman, scratching his head.