I’m in Love with a Terrible Sport

That famous etching

Nobody plays baseball because they like playing baseball. They play because they are contractually obligated to play. It’s a kind of punishment. That’s why they have to put a wall around the field - to keep the players from running away.

It's also why they have to pay such exorbitant salaries: to attract people who would put themselves through the wringer like this. It's no wonder that major league baseball and various vitamin supplements have gone hand in hand since the olden days.

These poor sods get dressed in an underground dungeon dug out of the ground. They don’t even get to see the sun unless they’re on the field! They get driven around on a special bus, like prisoners.

It is a boring, horrible life.

But there are some perks to being a baseball player that bear mentioning.

You get to

• spit on the floor, 
• scratch yourself in front of thousands of people, 
• smack butts,
• generally act like a chimpanzee right out in front of lots of people - sometimes as many of 5500 or 6000 people will show up to a game (more in Boston and New York), 
• and eat snacks all the way through the game!

Someone does your laundry for you and you get to dress up in a lot of different accessories. Gloves, mainly. Fielding, batting, base-stealing... all kinds of gloves. You get to wear makeup under your eyes. You get flip-up sunglasses. You get to wear a hard hat and a soft hat (sometimes both at once.) You play in a nice button-down shirt tucked into your pants (with a belt), socks and stirrups (what other activity requires two pair of socks?) and polished shoes. 

Polished. Shoes. 

Just like most activities, this act of collective self-flagellation gets better as you get drunker, so they sell lots of beer. But only for 7/9ths of the game for some reason. How children put up with this, I’ll never know. Cough syrup maybe. 

As you can clearly see. she drinks the beer while the filthy baseball is still inside it. That beer cost her like $13, and she can't have another one until they finally let her back out into polite society. She's not even playing and she's turned into a freaking savage!

It is a sport that is literally better to read about in the newspaper than it is to watch.

And yet...

And yet...