Well smack my ass and call me a track star, it’s another beautiful day to play with your nipples. Hey, speaking of nipples, baseball season is almost here and my tits are HARD. Opening day always brings me the purest sense of joy. It’s like crack but for nostalgia.
Son of a buttchin accountant, now we have to talk about dogs because this lady’s pup is losing it. Dogs are awesome. I know this. Everyone knows this. It doesn’t really even need to be stated. People, however… we’re questionable at best. And because we’re questionable at best and we find a way to ruin everything, we’re ruining dogs. Yeah, I said it. We’re ruining dogs.
First off, stop breeding dogs that can’t breathe. “Aww look how cute it is, its face looks like someone smashed it in with a shovel and when I take it on a casual walk it starts wheezing! Isn’t that adorable?” No, it’s not. It’s gross. Just because you want a pillow that farts doesn’t mean you should support decades of selective inbreeding. The dog is in pain. It can’t breathe. It can hardly walk.
It didn’t have to be this way. It could have been a normal dog, running around and smelling the daisies. But no, people are lazy and they want a dog they don’t have to walk so they choose one that can barely exist. If you don’t want to walk your dog, get a cat. Stop making these fucking dogs. Oh man this is gonna be good folks, I’m getting pissed. Weeeeee get a little caffeine in me and start me on the dog train and we’ve got ourselves a Friday!
Secondly, stop being obsessed with breeds. It’s not a pokemon card, it’s an animal. Its ancestors weren’t supposed to be forced to have sex with their siblings. Yeah, that’s how we have dog “breeds.” They took dogs that looked like each other and said “have sex with each other so we can have more dogs that look like you so we can sell them for money to white people in Austin.” That’s a direct quote, I promise. If you’re gonna get a dog, the rule should be that it has to look like a dog. Get a mut. Stop shopping like it’s a customizable piece of clothing. If you’re gonna get a certain breed, at least get one that still looks like a dog.
Third, for the love of dick and ass, train your dog. Discipline your dog. Especially you, ladies. It’s okay to yell at your dog. They like to be trained. They want to be stimulated by learning how to behave. I get that he’s cute, but you don’t have to coddle your dog. Just like a coddled child, it will grow up to be impossible.
Fourth, don’t get a dog if you can’t even take care of yourself. The dog will become like a small version of you and all your dumb faults. If you’re a mess the dog will become a mess and then we have to watch both of you stumble into a café and witness the social retardation of our society right in front of our eyes and it’s gonna make some of us really upset, okay? Okay? I’m upset right now. You’ve made me upset. You did this. You did this because you can’t even shop for groceries and you decided it might be a good idea to adopt a living, breathing creature that needs a lot of attention, care, and intention. I don’t like you right now.
Anyways, baseball season is coming up. I love baseball for a lot of reasons, but most of all I’d have to say it’s because of the character it maintains. From the players to the stats to the broadcasting, baseball has a lot of character. A lot of people don’t like baseball because it’s not “exciting” to them. And that’s okay. That’s not what makes baseball great. It’s not a full-throttle sport like football.
Baseball is fascinating because of everything going on beneath the surface level. And for me, personally, I’m a slow-paced guy. The pace of baseball fits me. I like it. I enjoy that it’s not overstimulating like everything else in this addicted society we live in.
Baseball is also great because of the comradery. It’s a team sport, but you’re not sharing a ball. Each at-bat is an individual battle. So, it only benefits you to root for your teammates all of the time. Just because someone hit a home run doesn’t mean you didn’t get to hit a home run. You have the same chance as you would have had before. Even more of a chance, because he didn’t make an out, so you might get another at-bat you wouldn’t have gotten if he didn’t just tank one into the upper deck.
In football, receivers tend to be divas a lot of the time. It makes sense. It can be frustrating if you’re constantly getting open but not getting the ball. Your involvement is dependent on your teammates. Sometimes you have to develop that “fuck you, give me the damn ball” attitude.
There’s also a lot of downtime in the dugout. It gives players the time to develop relationships on the field and also come up with goofy ideas and celebrations. Players do wacky things as a team like ignoring a player when he hits his first home run and then mobbing him in celebration once the joke is over.
Baseball is also one of the most unpredictable sports, which makes it forever interesting. In basketball, if there’s a team that is a lot better than the others, you can be pretty confident they’ll win the championship, or at least get there. Everyone knew the Bulls were winning it all in the 90’s. Everyone knew the Warriors were winning it all just a few years ago. The finals are always exciting because a team had to be good enough to get there, so you know there’s a chance the Bulls or Warriors might lose, but those first and second round matchups are entirely unenticing because we know what’s going to happen.
Baseball, not so much. Teams can dominate throughout the whole season, but once playoffs start, anything can happen. It’s also a sport that can’t be dominated by one player, which I love. In basketball, if you have Lebron James, you’re probably going to the finals. That dude had some absolute GARBAGE teams around him in Cleveland and still took them to the chip. In football, if you have Patrick Mahomes, you’re going to the playoffs for sure and have a good shot at winning it all. Football is more unpredictable when it gets to the playoffs because you’re only playing one game instead of a series of games, so that keeps it interesting.
Another great thing about baseball is all of the characters it attracts. The broadcasters are far and away the best of any of the mainstream sports. Because of the downtime between game-time actions, the space has to be filled with something, so broadcasters must learn to be entertaining or interesting or thoughtful. Broadcasting is a huge part of the baseball experience.
The booth is sometimes filled with great characters, as are the stands. I think baseball attracts a lot of misfits on and off the field. The sheer amount of goofiness present in any baseball game always makes me happy.
And my favorite thing about baseball… the STATS. Oh cream on my cheese do I love stats. Stats are great because they tell a story. Each individual has their own stats as well as a team, and it tells you everything you need to know about how the game was played without having seen the game. When you’re looking at stats, you can always find something you’ve never seen before. It’s the crazy outliers that are the most entertaining. Sometimes you look at a stat sheet and just wonder “how? How in the name of Sandra Bullock did that happen?”
My friend and I found something ridiculous the other day. There’s a player named Brandon Guyer, who was never a big time player by any means. Mostly a bench player. In 2016, he had 345 plate appearances over the course of the year. If you’re a starter throughout the season and play nearly every game, you’re likely to get around 700 plate appearances, so he had about half a full-season’s worth.
In half a season, he led all of baseball by getting hit by a pitch 31 times. Not only that. The last time any player got hit 31 times in a full season was 1998. This dude was getting hit by a pitch once every 11 times he stepped to the plate. That means every three games he’s starting he’s getting beaned. If you’re familiar with baseball, you know that guys don’t get beaned that often. In fact, in 2019, the average amount of times an MLB player got beaned in any given game was 0.41, and that was the highest of all time. The total amount of plate appearances per game was 38.1 that year. So that means the average amount of times any given player got hit by a pitch was once every 93 plate appearances. Brandon Guyer got hit once every 11 plate appearances: eight and a half times as often as the average player. Insane.
