baseball

[airassault101]

if they strike will you ever return to baseball as a fan?

[USC MissingLink]

I'm very proud to say that I haven't watched a major league baseball game since the 1994 strike. I should also mention that I was a huge fan; I still have around 65,000 baseball cards, and I knew everything about the players and teams.

jEd

[MSCD Roadrunner]

Baseball for me is just that momentary gap between the end of hockey season and the begining of football. If a real sport starts threatening to strike, I might worry.

[truthisjust]

I think strikes are a conspiracy against the Dodgers. Everytime it seems they are going to make the playoffs and have a good shot at going far, as they did in 94, they strike... screw that.

[Dan6814]

You're worried about the Dodgers? How about the Expos?!? Their best season ever was 1994, and now, when they're just becoming a productive team again, the labor situation is helping to push them in their coffin.

I still think they'll come to an agreement before the Cardinals-Cubs game, but it's getting more and more depressing.

Dan

[ShrimpFarming]

Lets not get silly about how the Dodgers don't get lucky. Lets all remember the 1988 Bulldog and the Gimp show. My A's wasted a lot of steriods losing a series that was clearly theirs to win.

[mrnonsenseretired]

The Expos are crap. They lose their best player to free agency next year.

[truthisjust]

Losing their best player isn't even their biggest worry right now, losing their whole team is.

[Dan6814]

First: The Expos are not crap. They're third in the East at the moment, right around .500. Even if Vlad leaves -- and that assumes that baseball doesn't sell the team off to a rich owner before the end of next year -- Omar Minaya is an excellent general manager, and he can trade Vlad for the last couple of months of the season to a pennant contender for some great prospects. Think Freddy Garcia, John Halama, and Carlos Guillen for Randy Johnson as a relatively equivalent trade.

Second: The Expos are not going to contract for at least four years, as per the new labor contract. There's no way the Expos stay in Montreal for all four of those years, so by the time contraction becomes a possibility again, Les Expos will most likely be in a new and productive environment (D.C., New Jersey/Brooklyn, Portland, etc.). Montreal, though, is not going to have a baseball team for very much longer.

Dan

[WWUPhil]

Good Poll question...
I had tickets to the Ms game the strike date... I slept with ESPN NEWS on all night and woke up everrry hour to see if they had announced an agreement. I was happy to hear about the agreement and spent the day gearing up to go to the game, even though I had spent two weeks coping with not going and the idea that the standings on that day would determine the playoffs when they returned from the strike in Oct. I was going to make a sign that said, "We made it, glad you did. Sleepless in Seattle" I didn't because I think signs are cheesy... I am glad the fans in Anaheim showed their class on Thursday night by almost killing players. Fans in Disney Colloseum are almost as dumb as the "Net" dwellers. When they show up.

Still love you, Justin.

[AClare]

I've never watched a baseball game in my life--not even a little league or high school one. It's even more boring than watching football--and that's pretty mind numbing. I really wish "sports as current event news" would just go away. It's not news. It's not significant. It's...just...gah, ok not going to bad mouth sports aloud, anymore, I'm just going to sit quietly and mutter to myself.

[Dan6814]

See below

[Dan6814]

Sports qualifies as current events because it's something that tens of millions of people are interested in. How information affects our lives is a major component of what ought to be reported, but given a profit incentive (and necessity, if you don't want the government distributing your information), what people care about is also a relevant and appropriate function of information sources.

Hey, if you find baseball boring (even having never watched it), that's fine; I think it's a great activity that's both physically and strategically demanding, where I appreciate both the mental gymnastics involved and physical feats that I can't achieve but still amaze me. My parents are fond of quoting a Latin phrase: "De gustavus, non disputandum" (sic, I'm sure), which translates to "Concerning taste, there can be no argument." Works for me.

Dan