Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

…Baseball, Like Cricket, Is Kind Of Boring

1. Both baseball and cricket games take way too long. For baseball, a fast game these days takes about two-and-a-half hours, but often easily reaches well past three hours. Cricket, baseball’s illegitimate step-brother (or is it the other way around?), sees games range anywhere from one to five days. Who has that much time to watch? And how fulfilling can a sport be for spectators when after four days, it all ends in a tie? Honestly.

2. For both sports, players stand around doing nothing most of the time. There’s a lot of tossing the ball back-and-forth in both, and the occasional hit, but I would be very surprised if the total length of actual play was longer than a few minutes. Having said that, the players must get tired  - baseball players apparently need a seventh-inning stretch and cricketers need a break for tea and cucumber sandwiches.

3. The season is way too long for both sports. Fans never really get a chance to rest and recharge before training camps gear up again. While cricket generally has a shorter domestic season, international play means that there’s always a game going on. For baseball, the 162-game season means that there is a game almost every night for half the year. This doesn’t even include the playoffs. What fan can possibly watch 162 games? And how can players keep up the intensity over that span of games?

4. The games are mired, or buried, in statistics. Defenders of the games will argue that there a lot of strategy and the numbers are imperative to the game. But how exciting can the game really be if you have to spend more time mining for data than you would watching.

5. Cheerleaders. There are no cheerleaders.

Forget watching. Get off your ass. Get out there and do it.