Here’s the main thing I love about baseball: There are 162 games in the regular season.
This is an especially good thing to keep in mind right now as our beloved Milwaukee Brewers are going through a period of awfulness. (If the Chicago Cubs are your beloved team, I do not care about you.) As of Sunday evening, our guys had lost eight of their last nine games and players keep going on the disabled list with various strains and “tightness” of this or that.
But when you have just played game 102 you still have 60 more chances to win. Until it gets to be the end of September, there is always tomorrow.
Contrast that with football. I’ve given up football primarily because of the head injuries and the financial exploitation of the players especially at the big time college level.
But another fundamental problem with football is that there are only 16 regular season games in the NFL and fewer at the college level. I am not arguing for more games. Guys are getting battered enough as it is. But when there are so few games each one becomes a must-win, epic, do-or-die, there-is-no-tomorrow, existential battle for the future of humankind and the universe. Lots and lots of drama there. It just gets exhausting. And after awhile, you just think to yourself, oh for cryin’ out loud. It’s just a game, people. Lighten up.
Football is very marshal and Germanic. We will march through them to ultimate victory and crush our opponents! Baseball is kind of more Mediterranean. Ah, so we lost? You lose. You win. Sometimes it rains. Pass the chianti. In baseball, when our team loses, “it’s a shame” as the song goes. Losing a game is akin to burning the hot dogs on the grill, not a commentary on the validity of your life.
Not to overstate the case, but I think we’d be a better country if our national pastime really was baseball. Right now, football is more that national sport measured by the measure of all measures: money. Professional football teams take in about $13 billion a year compared to Major League Baseball’s $9.5 billion.
If football represents the national character, that indicates a lot of emotion, drama, lust for action and even violence, and short-run thinking. If it were baseball, we’d be more about the long-run, taking things in stride, making decisions based on averages, odds and cool analysis. And we’d be more humane. Guys play football with broken bones. Guys go on baseball’s 10-day disabled list with tightness in their right shoulder.
Again, that’s in part a function of the number of contests. If you miss 10 games in the NFL, you just missed over half of the entire season. Go on the 10-day disabled list in baseball and, well, you’ve still got probably more than 150 games to play.
So, if you’re a Brewers fan, take heart. Yes, our potent offense is wandering around the vast Miller Park parking lot someplace. It’ll find its way back onto the field. Yes our pitchers are going on the disabled list because of neck strains on account of watching fly balls zoom over their heads into the bleachers. They’ll return to form. Yes, as a first baseman, Ryan Braun is a great left fielder. Eric Thames will come off the disabled list to back up Jesus Aguilar and Braun will only see first base when he passes it on his way around the bases after another home run.
Have faith. It’s a long season.
