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In reply to the discussion: Anyone here NOT like sports? [View all]longship
(40,416 posts)Baseball is best live at the stadium. I grew up attending Tiger games in Detroit. I would spend the money I earned delivering The Detroit News to take the bus (with friends) to Tiger Stadium to take in a game, or two if it was a double header.
The good thing about baseball is that it is kind of a Zen sport. It ends when it ends. It's not timed. One must just go with the flow, settle down, relax, and eat your hot dogs (called Red Hots at Tiger Stadium, with only freshly chopped onions and/or mustard, nothing else -- yummy!). Red Hots here. Get yer Red Hots!
The Zen element -- all I know about Zen I learned reading Gödel, Escher, Bach -- I suppose is like the suicide squeeze play, or I'd like to think it is.
It works like this. Your team is either tied, or behind by one run. You have runner on third, other runners are irrelevant. It's best played with one out, but few managers use it that way. How it works is that you give the batter the bunt sign and the runner at third base the steal home sign. On the pitch, the third base runner breaks for home and the batter attempts a bunt. If the batter succeeds, it is nearly impossible to keep the runner from scoring. The catcher is pulled off the plate to field the bunt. Surprise!!!
Baseball is full of such elements. And it takes time to observe them, especially those rarely used, like the suicide squeeze. At Tiger Stadium of my youth, opponent runners never tagged up at third base on a right field fly ball. Why? Because the Tiger right fielder was Al Kaline who could fire a strike at home plate from the right field wall and the Tigers have had a long history of great fielding catchers. The Zen master might very well recite a koan against tagging from third on the Tigers of the day.
The other sport I like is Australian Rules Football, which has everything all the rest of the world calls football does not. No way to describe it. Those Aussies -- love them! -- can be weird.
Here's a little taste:
A bit longer introduction:
There's nothing Zen about Aussie Rules Football. It is one of the most bizarre team sports I have ever seen. And yup, there are a whole lot of dudes on a very large field, and yes, they rarely stop running for long. The scores often climb into the stratosphere. Oh, they can kick the fucking football like nobody else. They're no wimps. No padding; no helmets; just a simple mouth guard. They wear shorts. The ball is always in play when it's in bounds and play proceeds until a score or out of bounds. It's played on a cricket grounds, which is freaking huge. There are no scrimmage lines; whoever has possession of the ball at the moment is the team in possession. That changes quickly.