Professional Sports:
Here are a few, of the hundreds of thousands of things that annoy me about professional sports…
Why is there still an umpire calling balls and strikes in baseball? We have had the “pitch tracker” technology for nearly a decade. A computer can easily call balls and strikes with perfect accuracy, on every pitch, based on the real dimensions of the strike zone. Instead, in 2011, we choose to still have fat, middle-aged men literally humping the catchers back, arbitrarily calling balls and strikes from what is probably the worst point of view in the entire park to do so. Our pitchers are forced to adjust their game to whatever blue-haired clown they have behind the plate on any given night. Half of them take 3 or 4 seconds to make the difficult decision of ball or strike which prolongs what is already a ridiculously time consuming game that is professional baseball. The guy can still be back there to call people safe or out at home, but take away their ball/strike calling power already.
Why is there not a “pitch clock” in baseball? In basketball, you have 24 seconds to hit the rim with a shot. In football you have 40 seconds to run your next play. In baseball, the pitcher can literally go to the dentist in between pitches. I watch a lot of professional baseball and at least 3 or 4 times per game, I find myself yelling “throw the god damned pitch!” at my television. I don’t want to be that guy anymore, I just don’t. Just impose a time limit in between pitches. If they fail to throw a pitch in that time limit, then you add a ball to the batters count, it’s that simple.
Let the referee in the booth, at the game, handle the reviews: I think that NFL reviews have their place in the game now. It is impossible for these old, white guys to keep up and be in good enough position to make every call correctly, on a field that size, surrounded by world class athletes. However, do we need these guys to have to run to the sidelines and stick their head in a box for 5 minutes every time they have to review a play? Why can’t we just have the “upstairs” referee, who is already at every game, watch it on a monitor and then make the call?
If you aren’t going to have a salary cap in baseball, then why have so many teams/games? Over the years, I have watched baseball dissolve its fan base in the smaller markets to the point where it is about as popular as cricket in most of this country. The lack of a salary cap in baseball has created this environment. Larger market teams get larger sums of money from their TV contracts, allowing them to buy all of the A+ baseball talent. Baseball has a revenue sharing system, but when players’ salaries and operational costs go up by an average of 10% every year and you keep getting the same amount of revenue sharing money, it is useless. Team this with teams that can’t get more than a couple thousand fans to come to each game and you basically just have the XFL in those cities. However, as apathetic as most baseball fans have become, other larger markets are still extremely passionate about it. The NBA is quickly getting to this point as well. To me, it would make good business sense for MLB to contract, a lot of the smaller market teams and just keep having baseball in the larger markets where people actually care about it and go to the games. This would also allow them to not have to play 162 regular season games as they would not need to play so many teams. If you have to play 162 regular season games just to figure out which 8 teams make the playoffs, then your system is broken.
Why does any professional athlete get paid, while injured? NFL Football is the only league that has figured this out. In the NFL, your contract is written in such a way, that if you don’t play and produce, you don’t make as much money. In the NBA and the MLB your money is considered “guaranteed”. This means, the NBA’s Greg Oden is still going to make all of the money he inked on his rookie contract despite playing 82 out of 328 possible games, when this season ends. Professional Sport Teams are the only business model in the world that would allow its employees to honor less then ¼ of their contractual agreements while still paying the entirety of the money. The blame can be put on both sides. The owners are dumb for allowing these sorts of contracts to even be written let alone signed by someone. And the players and their unions are guilty for demanding and taking advantage of such agreements. In many cases, the player doesn’t even have to be injured, he just has to be pissed off, or in jail, or under some kind of league investigation etc, but he still gets paid, millions, in most cases. It is completely insane.
Could there possibly be any more propaganda around Professional Sports? While watching an NFL game, it is increasingly difficult to tell where the game ends and the beer commercials begin. It’s just the same Coors, Miller or Budweiser commercial, making the average football watching guy look like some sort of brain-damaged, alcoholic, who gets so excited over terrible beer that he can barely keep his pants on. I have met some less then reputable characters in my life, by I have never seen a man, or group of men, even get mildly excited over a refrigerator full of Miller Light. If anything I would feel sorry for my friend(s) for having such poor taste and an obvious lack of money and nutritional diversification.
You can’t even hear yourself think at an NBA game anymore with all of the sound effects and Hip Hop/80’s Metal/Pop music playing, dancing strippers at half court, people shooting off tee-shirt guns into the stands, shit on parachutes failing from the ceiling, midgets on stilts, people dancing in the aisles and begging for people to throw them wadded up, garbage quality tee-shirts and somewhere in between this extravaganza, is a basketball game. Someone had a seizure in my section the last time I went to an NBA game and I can’t blame them. They have pigs pushing shopping carts around the court at halftime, guys trying to fit their bodies inside of balloons, people jumping dirt bikes, teams of people break dancing, people giving away pizzas and taco-bell products, people trying to get you to fill out credit card applications, dancing robots in the concourse, contests for huge sections of fans, the always safe, indoor explosions and fireworks displays, all wrapped around what is usually a really shitty basketball game.
To me, baseball does a decent job of limiting the propaganda within the park. You can still sit and watch the game you came to see without being bombarded with distractions and propaganda. The NHL also does a great job.
Do we really need to force athletes to go to college? Who does this really benefit? Sure it keeps some college teams able to compete while forcing the best players to play on those teams however, these people are also forced into GOING TO COLLEGE. And let’s face facts; the average, professional athletic prospect is not college material. Colleges also get screwed, having to create classes and programs to put the athletes into, that they can grasp mentally so as to keep their athletes eligible. This is time, money, resources that could be put towards, I don’t know, educating people, who want to better the Earth. So while these kids may benefit a sports program, they waste a lot of people’s time and money and smarter well deserving kids opportunities by being there for one or two years and then going pro. Just let them go pro out of high school and let the people who know how to read things other than defensive schemes go to the colleges.
Professional Athletes Calling themselves “Business Men” and referring to the sport as “A Business” and getting away with crimes: Is there anything more insulting then listening to a professional athlete refer to himself as a “business man”? It must be really insulting if you were a real business man. Why doesn’t anyone ever try to refute them? Technically these men are about as much of a business man as, the guy who cleans the urinals or the lady selling popcorn for the same company. I think players should be fined when they make statements that make themselves and their collective leagues sound even dumber than they are. They could site “language detrimental to the league” as the reason for the fines.
Or how about the taste you get in your mouth when, you hear a professional athlete say something like… “I understand that the sport is a business, I am just trying to do what’s best for me and my family.” Well thank god for you being so smart! Your, dumbass, dysfunctional family can finally be comfortable by you being such a savvy business man. You making 120 million instead of 118 million is really what your family needed to bring it all together. Again, professional athletes saying things like this should be met with fines.
Ben Roethlisberger raped two women, that we know of, Ray Lewis was directly linked to a man’s murder, Jamal Lewis sold a shitload of cocaine out of Colombia, everyone in baseball who hit a home run in the late 90’s, early 2000’s was involved with trafficking steroids, Michael Vick killed a ton of dogs and funded a massive dog fighting ring. Yet, very few of them ever get in any sort of real trouble or jail time. Why is this? If I were to be in any way involved with any of these things, I would be in prison for 20+ years. If anything, professional athletes should go to jail for longer than everyone else, for being dumb enough to risk such an awesome lifestyle.
Stop letting ESPN and other media outlets influence professional sports: ESPN and other media institutions, thanks to their 24/7/365 format, have to fill a ton of time, without much news. For this reason, and because they are on TV, it makes sense for ESPN to go after the largest markets, after all, more TV’s, more money for ESPN. This is why, the network, uses every influence it can to produce good teams in the major markets. After all, good teams in those markets create more reasons to have them on TV which will get ESPN on the most TV’s possible, in the largest markets, making them the most money. So handing the big market teams, the biggest checks, from having them on TV the most, completes the circular farce that is the relationship of large market professional sports and ESPN. You can tell this is a culture within ESPN as every employee will not miss an opportunity to bash or bad mouth an entire American City over something that one of its sports teams has done. Of course the athletes hear this which makes them want to go to the places where ESPN won’t bad mouth them, which makes the larger market teams even stronger, which gives ESPN more reasons to broadcast their games, which puts ESPN on more TV’s, in the largest markets, making ESPN more money.
Ask yourself, is this collusion? Sure it is. But it is such a broad systemic failure within the system, that it is tough to do anything about. Teams would have to no longer be allowed to accept any sort of kick backs from television networks. Teams should also have a choice of which media outlets are covering their teams. If a team doesn’t want ESPN covering them, they should be allowed to request this. I don’t know exactly what you do about any of this, it would require a lot of terrible, greedy people to all have to accept some kind of a deal, that included less money for them, for the betterment of a sport.... Good luck.
I love professional sports. Until, all professional sports teams can again compete for championships, I don't have to listen to 40 something, talking heads on ESPN, bad mouthing vast regions of my country, professional athletes are no longer allowed to speak in public, and we stop treating one of the dumbest demographics of people as gods, and some of the more common sense rules are cleaned up, I will love professional sports a little less every day.
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