How would you rate baseball as a whole?

How would you rate baseball as a whole?

GOAT/10

The worst sport.

cheap as fuck. season tickets in the front row to my local meme team are 6 bucks a game

11/10

best sport

10/10

too slow for me I have ADD

Fun sport. I don't like how the pros have made games boring, though.

>Average length of a MLB game in 1955: 94 minutes
>Average length of a MLB game in 2016: 175 minutes

Come one. The umpires keep allowing pitchers to take like 45 seconds in between each pitch, let the batter get time every time he asks, it's ridiculous.

>living in bakersfield

Im so sorry

It's shit

Let's take a normal 25-year-old, born in 1989. He would have spent his formative years as a sports fan in the immediate aftermath of a canceled World Series, hearing that greedy players were destroying the game and that the dynastic Yankees team dominating the sport was such an affront to its competitive integrity that drastic measures had to be taken to give other teams any kind of chance at winning. He would have heard about the commissioner touring the country threatening to abolish various teams, some of them successful ones. He would have seen the league enthusiastically cooperating with a congressional investigation that all but treated many of its most famous players as criminals; the league touting an owner-written report claiming that those players were frauds, cheats, and liars; and the league and the government working together with small-time con men to destroy the very best of those players.

There's more

From the perspective of owners, all of this made sense. A majority of owners had an interest in (falsely) claiming that their teams just couldn't compete, because they wanted to rig a system where they would be all but guaranteed profits. They had an interest in depicting players as greedy, selfish cheats, both because it gave them back leverage they'd lost when they forced the cancellation of a World Series and because it appealed to the sensibilities of the well-off older people who were filling their stadiums. They had an interest in telling an entire generation not to think of any ballplayer as any kind of hero. The only problem, really, is that everyone listened.

Takes the least amount of attention to follow of all games.

And more..

There's no obvious reason why a 25-year-old would be an especially big baseball fan; there's no reason, having seen baseball ruin rather than protect the reputations of its best players, why the marketing companies that make great athletes transcendent stars would want to be involved in promoting Mike Trout or Clayton Kershaw as something more than exceptional ballplayers; and there's no mystery in what's wrong here. The people running baseball told everyone that the game was broken and that the players—who weren't doing anything their peers in other sports weren't doing—were frauds. Meanwhile, rivals took a somewhat more sensible approach. Now the game has to deal with the consequences of people more or less buying the political line adopted by its management class, which involved depicting the very thing they were selling as not worth buying. The real question is whether they learned their lesson.

It's the worst sport.

If they want to try and attract younger viewers, who in turn, become life long fans...they should start with how they have ruined October baseball with 9pm EST start times, with games often 4 hours long. I know it helps the western audiences, but with kids very impatient with their time and attention spans, trying to address how to maximize younger viewers during the best and most important part of the season would be a start.

Also, get rid of players stepping out of the box, or at least put a time limit on it. I understand every pitch is important and players need to re-focus, or whatever, but taking 10 seconds in between pitches to re-do your batting gloves adds up over a 300 pitch game. And on the flip-side, you can limit the time pitchers have in between pitches.

Instant replay has also made things worse. Just get the call right but don't stop the game for 10 min to see whether or not a player tagged up from 3rd base too early. And they made this much worse by changing the catcher's rule. It's absurd the way that's enforced now.

It's the most patrician major sport.

The only good sport is MMA. Everything else is for men with low testosterone.

3/10

As a 24 year old, the scenario described is basically right on. I watched and played baseball growing up, back when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Ken Griffey and Barry Bonds and Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson on and on actually were treated as icons and heroes and appealed to little kids who wanted to be big and strong hitters or amazing pitchers. I remember the late 90s Marlins, Edgar Rentaria and Jeff Conine and Gary Sheffield and Livan Hernandez - that was my hometown team.

But then we found out a lot of those guys were juiced - they're largely pariahs now and will never see the Hall of Fame. Then I found out the Marlins weren't interested in cultivating long-term success - the World Series was basically a get-rich-quick scheme. Then I found out baseball wasn't interested in being cool and wasn't interested in anything except destroying the icons I'd grown up with. I stopped caring about baseball when baseball stopped caring about anything except its own self-interest.

I used to love it, but I prefer soccer now, substantially.

Soccer is capturing viewership from baseball as a new generation of 80s and 90s kids who grew up playing soccer are spreading their passion for the sport. I always hated old baseball curmudgeons telling me how boring soccer is, then putting on a baseball game 130 where both teams were out of the playoffs.

I'm a 29-year-old that was a fan of baseball up until the strike robbed me of a summer of stuff to watch, and I lost all of my fickle 9-year-old interest in it. I'm still a fan (a good AAA game is fantastic) but only really dig my heels in if something's going on with my team.

2/10, basketball is better

It doesn't help that MLB has done everything it could to minimize "stars" within its world — we're still dealing with the fallout of the Maoist self-criticism era that followed the PED scandals. All our childhood heroes are cheaters and liars — except Frank Thomas and a pitcher who wore dad glasses, and we're terrified to find new stars because they'll turn out to be cheaters and liars too (e.g. Ryan Braun). Our biggest stars today are Mike Trout — who looks like a deputy mall cop — and, uh... Joey Bats? Andrew McCutchen (who proposed to his girlfriend on The Ellen Degeneres Show, to give some idea of his cool-factor)? The most exciting/biggest personality players — people like Carlos Gomez or Yasiel Puig (and I'm a Giants fan, so it kills me to say that) — are treated like criminals by the faction of the baseball journalist/fan culture that Wants It To Be Like the Old Days and by Play It The Right Way assholes like Ferguson Police Spokesman Brian McCann. If you can't flip your bat without some walking hemorrhoid having a violent aneurysm about it, then what's the fucking point? If Jordan had been any good at baseball, he would've flipped the bat nightly. Showmanship is part of the deal.

Cultivate a culture of "stardom" — find a Michael Jordan and then try recasting new players in his light. Who's the next Jordan? Who's the next Magic? Could Duncan's Spurs have beaten Bill Russell's Celtics? Is Damien Lillard a star or not? That's how you survive as a sport in America when (unlike football) not every game is a major event.

MMA is a bunch of grown men chimping out, and there're no subtle game-changing variations of the same small basic moveset, which is makes most other fighting sports patrician. Maybe 20-30 years from now MMA will have evolved into something worth watching, but right now it's an ugly mess.

How old were you lads when you completely gave up on handegg, apehoop, and furpuck, and embraced baseball as the one true patrician sport?

27 here.

2/10

I legitimately have no idea how people watch that garbage. Maybe it was entertaining back in 1911 when people still had attention spans, but even that's a stretch

Pretty fun to play depending on your teammates but terribly boring to watch

I'd give it 8.5/10 if its on a sunny day and you're at the ballpark.

Comfy/10

It's a very soothing sport to follow on balmy summer evenings.
But I understand why foreigners might find it boring.

>I'm a Giants fan
explains everything about your post and attitude

8/10 it's a comfy sport once you understand stats, and my team has cheap tickets

boxing's most anticipated fight is Chris Brown vs Soulja Boy

shit

GOAT sport.

Why does he have a katana on a golf course

Fuck off

Boring, unathletic, and unnecessarily long.

GOAT sport.

Most fun sport to play as well. The golden years of playing baseball as a kid/teen were pure fucking magic, wouldn't trade it for anything.

Thank you my hue friends.

10/10

MMA is fucking shit go watch boxing you pathetic faggot.

delet this

>boreball

shit version of cricket

THE best sport America has to offer. H8ers just don't get it

>implying anyone is interested in reading that much shit to understand your shit tier opinion.

it been shit since they got rid of steroids

Pure autism

Didn't even read btw

Comfyness/10

As patrician as it gets.

9/10 comfy

extremely comfy

probably my favorite american sport

Baseball is GOAT comfy sports

it was more interesting during the roid era

why dont they use a computer/system to make all the calls? it would undeniably make the game better and more consistent.
>muh traditionalism
they get at least 5 calls wrong per game and it just makes the game last longer because the managers come out to argue about it
that jim joyce retard literally ruined a perfect game with a call that a computer would have gotten right.

>Let's take a normal 25-year-old, born in 1989.

Either update your pasta or figure out how to form original thoughts, memer retard.
People born in 1989 are turning 28 this year. Holy fuck you are stupid.

Best sport to take a nap during.