THINGS YOU CAN AND CAN’T HATE ABOUT BASEBALL

With Opening Day just about a week and a half away, it’s time to address the terrible rumor that yr obt svt hates everything about baseball. What a vicious rumor. You people need to learn there is a huge difference between (a) hating everything about a sport, and (b) not finding anything to like about a sport. I’m definitely in category ‘b’ when it comes to baseball, because there are just too many things about baseball that you can’t hate.

First of all, it’s plainly obvious that anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of the teams in Major League Baseball aren’t good enough to hate. Life is short; why devote any time or psychic energy to hating the San Diego Padres? Innocuous games between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds harm no one since, in the grand schemes of both baseball and the universe, they’re piffle. Sort of like a game of ‘Sorry!’ between 8-year-old neighbors on a rainy afternoon, except the ‘Sorry!’ game would probably feature more action.

So that means that, at most, there’s about eleven teams in baseball that it’s probably worth hating. But I think the actual number of teams worth getting upset about is even smaller. You can’t really get upset about the Atlanta Braves, for instance. They’re sort of like the St. Louis Rams of the National League; they make the playoffs every year because somebody from their division has to go. But why get upset about them making the playoffs for the 32nd consecutive year? Soon they’ll have lost enough in October that Ted Turner will become one of the losers he thinks Christianity is for.

Along the same lines, it’s not worth it to get upset about the San Francisco Giants or the Oakland A’s. Yes, it’s easy to hate Barry Bonds; the problem is, that’s what he wants us to do, so why give him the satisfaction? And as for the A’s and their ‘moneyball’ strategy, all they’ve proved is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to be as unsuccessful in the post-season as the Braves are.

You can’t hate the Twins, either, though you certainly can hate their owner, Carl Pohlad, who is essentially C. Montgomery Burns without the irony. If Pohlad could start one pitcher in all 162 games, and have one guy covering the entire outfield, he would. That’s why you can’t hate the Twins. Plus the players and fans spend Minnesota’s only nice season inside a giant Rubbermaid container. You just can’t hate the Twins, even though they’re good; just look at what they have to go through.

You can’t hate the Phillies because (a) they’re not good enough, and (b) sports fans in Philly aren’t happy unless they’re miserable anyway. If anything good ever happened in Philly, the populace would be at a loss; the last person in town who knew how to applaud anything has probably been dead for years.

You know what? You can’t even hate the Yankees anymore. They’re not a dynasty; they’re a money pit. A living argument that you can’t play fantasy baseball in the real world. I mean, George Steinbrenner has spent what, half a BILLION dollars on players in the last couple years, and what has it got him? Besides, Yankees fans are an endless source of amusement. There’s not a single player on the roster whose name they can pronounce. I, personally, would feel impoverished without getting to hear Yankee fans talk about “Deyh-rik JETAH!” or “Ayee-rawd.”

In fact, I can only come up with three teams in baseball that it might be worth hating: the Cardinals, the Cubs, and the Red Sox. I’ll exclude the Cardinals so long as the state of Missouri actually does remove Mark McGwire’s name from I-70 . . . by the way, is there any truth to the rumor that that particular stretch of highway is actually only six lanes wide, but it looks like ten?

Now, you may say it’s not right to hate the Red Sox right now, what with them being the world champions for the first time since before Walter Cronkite was born. And you may have a point, but remember: loveable losers invariably stop being loveable when they stop losing. Thus, I have a feeling we’re going to look upon the Red Sock Nation as just the latest example of “sore winners.” Therefore, I’m holding out the possibility of hating the Red Sox.

And the Cubs? Wow, talk about unfair, right? Why kick a team when they’re down, and they just lost/ran off the best player they’ve had in the past decade or so? It’s like this: all those people who have been ‘die-hard Cubs fans’ since their local cable franchise added WGN somehow have to deal with the fact that almost every team in the past century has had moments of excellence except for them. When cornered about why this is so, the Cub fan is impaled on a dilemma. It’s either due to (a) a century of epic mismanagement, lately perpetrated by a giant media company which believes it is incapable of putting out a product that’s so bad nobody will buy it, or (b) a tavern owner who was upset about his pet goat not being allowed into the stadium. Which is a Cub fan more likely to believe? Well, the team fired Steve Stone for saying what everybody and his goat already knew about the Cubs: they just weren’t a very good baseball team last year. I don’t care that they blew up the Bartman Ball. I wouldn’t care if they’d blown up Bartman himself. The only curse on the Chicago Cubs is the curse of lowered expectations. They cannot possibly field a team so bad that Cubs fans will abandon them; thus, they are doomed to perpetual sub-mediocrity.

Thus, you can hate two of the thirty-two teams in baseball. What else can’t a baseball detractor hate? Hands off the commissioner. If Bud Selig could figure out how to make money off the Brewers, and manage to bamboozle the people of Wisconsin into building a stadium that hasn’t worked properly since the day it opened, then he’s exactly the sort of person who ought to be running baseball.

You can’t hate steroids, at least not any more, since any baseball player stupid enough to use them now is more to be pitied than despised. After all, you, too, might be forced to deliver the world’s least believable testimony before Congress someday.

You can’t hate the prices of ballpark concessions, because you willingly pay those prices at the theater, DON’T YOU? Well, at least at the ballpark, you get food that sort of tastes good, instead of bug-riddled Butterfinger bars and a bucket of Artificial Infarction Flavored popcorn.

You can hate baseball TV announcers. You can hate the radio guys, too, but I’d suggest you don’t. It leads to interesting e-mails.

You can hate fantasy baseball players, too. Fantasy football makes sense; you go up against an opponent every weekend. It takes about five minutes a week to run a fantasy football team. Fantasy baseball is different. The non-stop schedule watching and mathematical finagling is enough to take all the fun out of a sport that wasn’t all that fun in the first place.

So we face the question: If all you can truly hate about baseball is the Cubs, the announcers, and the rotisserie-leaguers, is that enough? Does baseball deserve scorn just for those reasons?

I’d say so.