The Chris Moeller Archives

All sports are not created equal

Baseball has always marched to the beat of its own drummer, a dazzling masterpiece of original invention in a world of homogenized athletic competition. Football, basketball, hockey, and soccer-- even polo, dry and wet-- are all variations of a game I like to call "defend the goal," each with its own rigidly drawn dimensions and each complete with its own version of an "offsides" penalty born of necessity. With these inferior and shockingly-similar sports, you've got your "defend the goal" played only with feet, the one exclusive to giants, the one played on ice, and the one where the competitors dress up like gladiators and give each other brain-killing headaches. Baseball does its own thing. It's characteristics entirely unique, the dimensions of its action, to the spectators, only as limited as the strength and talent of its participants.

Baseball, also distinctive by its "home and away" rule differences and the tradition of a mid-game sing-along by the fans, lays claim to the superiority of its weather as well. In the United States, the professional seasons of football, basketball, and hockey end at absurd times. (I'm not sure when the soccer season starts or ends.) Football wraps at the beginning of February, when outdoor activity of any kind is out of the question for half the hemisphere. Your Josefina Average Fan is stuck inside her house, with nothing else to do, which helps greatly, admittedly, in boosting television ratings for football's "Big Game," but makes a neutral, temperate climate necessary for the championship. Hockey and basketball both wrap their seasons in June, which is equally ridiculous. Who wants to be sitting in an ice box-- or even indoors for that matter-- when summer comes calling north of the equator?
 

The story of the week in American sports was Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday. The air conditioning conked out at NSA Arena in San Antonio, fans sat in thorough discomfort, children cried, and superstar LeBron James (picture above) took off most of the fourth quarter complaining of cramps. If the Finals were held in April, as they should be, the temperature at center court likely would have been quite balmy, air conditioning or not. The very concept of a live sporting event-- good health, good spirit, and all that-- should act in opposition to the burning of fossil fuels.

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My entertainment bookends for this weekend were the movie A Million Ways to Die in the West and the television series finale of FOX's Cosmos. Completely disparate, both thoroughly enjoyable, both delivered to us by a unique talent named Seth MacFarlane. The movie was funny, and the TV show as epic. Bravo, Seth.

posted by CM @ 8:03 PM