Baseball makes you stupid

First off let me just say this: I hate baseball. Not playing it, but watching it. It is the most boring, insidiously irritating waste of time ever created. And yes, I am factoring in televised golf, bowling, curling and all Fox network programming as well.

Watching baseball on TV is essentially like watching one of your friends play Final Fantasy VIII for 4 hours straight. The same repetitive turn-based action over and over until during an arbitrary point in the game (not subject to any sort of time limitation like civilized competitions) the game is stopped.

But what makes baseball so horrible, beyond the excruciatingly slow pace and inescapably poor design of the game, is the fact that it never ever ends. Ever. Major League Baseball starts in early spring with the beloved "spring training" and then rumbles through an absurd 162 game regular season. First of all, does it really take 162 games to determine the top tier teams in the nation? Football can hammer it out in a mere 16.

Then, after we have sat through six months of the most vapid and overextended series of pointless regular season games, eight out of the 30 MLB teams are selected for the playoffs. EIGHT. So if you watch your team all season long and they finish a half game back out of the "wildcard" slot you just wasted half a year of your worthless life digesting 162 mind-numbingly dull exhibitions.

So with the length of the season you would figure that these eight teams should play at least a best of 19 to determine the top team... or say even the conventional best of 7. Wrong. The first round is a best of 5. Three losses is all it takes to send your 100+ win team packing. This seems to be TV ratings suicide. The early rounds of tournaments are typically the most exciting, i.e. NFL wildcard playoffs, the first round of the NHL playoffs, and need I even mention the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament- the holy grail of sports competitions.

However, for MLB it seems the best plan is to build up hopes, excitement and expectations for six months heading into what should be a playoff fervor, only to have the first round wrapped up in less than a week and the entire playoff series done within three... Which reminds me of that scene in American Pie where Nadia is doing the strip tease in Jim's room. And just as Jim's wildest dreams are about to come true... he blows his cool, so to speak.

But it doesn't end there. After the shame of the premature happy ending that is the World Series, you would think MLB would pull up its pants and sneak quietly away until next spring. Wrong. One day after the World Series was over ESPN.com was flooded with articles of free agency, trade rumors, new/potential signings... and this onslaught has continued and will continue unhindered throughout the glory-months of sports that is the NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA football, NCAA basketball.

And most dishearteningly, here in New York, the loudmouthed guy at the bar who thinks he's Mr. Hot Shit Yankee's fan, will verbally lambaste the management decisions and ramble on about how Jeter was robbed for the MVP in his loud arrogant drunken voice night after night until only the thoughtless stupor of another 162 game season will silence him.