Flipping through the TV stations Tuesday night, looking for something worthwhile to watch (an admittedly worthless endeavor), I stumbled onto something atrocious. Not surprisingly, the atrocity was broadcasting on Rupert Murdoch’s pathetic attempt at a network television station: Fox.
There were grown men grabbing their crotches, spitting large chunks of a slimy black substance all over the place, standing around like a dirty slop of fools, doing very little.
Yes, they were playing baseball, and I was appalled.
Here I had been, working under the assumption that baseball died out sometime in the early ’80s. One would think a sport that emphasizes boredom as its major point of interest would be outdated by now. No real network has so much as mentioned baseball for years, but you could count on old Rupert and his bastion of conservative crazies to give aid to the festering underbelly of a sport by rewarding baseball franchises with a TV deal. I felt like I was in a time warp, an evil time warp.
All I could think was, “they still play that God-forsaken game?” I was truly horrified to discover that, even in the midst of football season, not only do they still play baseball, but there are actually people who watch it, as evidenced by the obscenely large number of people in the stands. And here I thought that Red Socks were a fashion faux pas and that Yankees were a bunch of crazed white people that rebelled against the Brits in the 1700s-just shows how much I know.
Being that I am a TV-addicted degenerate, and literally nothing else was on at the time, I opened a beer and tuned in for about 15 minutes of pure, unbridled monotony.
During those 15 minutes of torturous tedium, I discovered, among other things, that baseball’s love affair with chewing tobacco is still holding strong. I wondered again if I was in some sort of cruel time warp, trapped in an age where athletes did terrible things because they didn’t know better. Hadn’t they heard about the harmful health effects of chewing tobacco-including, but not limited to, massive cancerous holes in one’s cheeks, lips and throats? Not to mention the pure disgustingness of a habit that involves spitting all over the place.
You would think these guys might be a little smarter than to take up such a repulsive habit, but then I remembered how repulsive most ballplayers are, and the initial shock gradually faded. Still, tobacco has such a wide array of negative health effects…then I saw how big some of the players were. Abnormally big. So big that some foreign substance, probably far worse than tobacco, had to be coursing through their veins. I looked up the home run records from the last 20 years and quickly ascertained that something was amiss.
I put the issue of home runs and foreign substances aside when I realized that, no matter how hard Fox tried to avoid it, there was more scratching going on than there was playing. I can only assume that the crotch grabbing has something to do with the incessant lice problem inherent in today’s ballplayers. How else can you explain baseball’s addiction to self-adjustment? All men know that it is a necessity from time to time, and it might be the fault of the tight uniforms, but somehow football players and basketball players manage to avoid the interminable scratching motion when millions of people are watching.
Admittedly, football has its own issue with slapping each other on the ass, but that’s another topic for another column.
The 15 minutes ended and, sure enough, something better than baseball was on another station. So I scratched myself a few times, drank another beer, spit out my wad of chew and changed the channel.