Baseball and spiders

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/08/SPGS96I1VP1.DTL

I love spiderman more than I love any sport. Although, I have recently come to like baseball for it's unpredictability. So I thought it was a great idea to use the bases as billboards. In truth you will be advertising more to the people who are playing than the actual fans. Now if you painted it on the field, that would be true advertisement.

So I was reading this article from a "true fan", and thought that I would share it.

Commissioner Bud Selig defended the ludicrous cross-promotion deal on "Spider-Man 2" at his Oakland news conference by saying that baseball was trying to reach out to the youth market. If baseball really wants to reach out to the youth market, it should put some money into keeping playgrounds open for youngsters to play baseball.

This person believes it is the MLB's job to build parks for his kids. It seems to me, if you wanted parks to have a baseball field in your neighborhood you should pay for it. If anything, the MLB should build baseball parks in Mexico and other such places to spread the sport around the world. As it is now the market in America is fairly well set. To ensure the survival and growth of baseball, the MLB should concentrate on places where the baseball market has not been tapped, like China and Latin American.

The first sign of greed was expansion beyond the original 16 teams. Then came the big television contracts and now, in the case of select teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, cable-TV companies that have greatly expanded revenues. To pay for those contracts, TV networks put in more commercials between innings, which slows the game to a snail's pace.

The reason why the teams expanded was because people loved the sport so much that they wanted it in their home town and because certain people thought they could make money with the baseball teams.

Secondly, If his beloved game did not make money for the TV stations, no one will see his game (not even him). Lets take a the made up sport named wack the monkey. If no one watched wack the monkey, then the TV stations will show other sports that pull in viewers. The TV stations are businesses also. If no one watches their stations, they can't sell commercials. If they can't sell commercials, they go out of business.


To pay for those contracts, TV networks put in more commercials between innings, which slows the game to a snail's pace.

Baseball once was the contemplative sport.

Contemplative means slow as hell to me. I don't know what century this guy was born in, but if you have to think about something, then it is slow. Kind like chess is a contemplative sport, and you don't associate chess with action. He complains about baseball being slow, then says that it used to be slow and he liked it that way.

Detroit was once known as a great baseball city, whose fans supported their team through thick and thin. But those were the hard-core fans, who loved watching baseball, even losing baseball.

No one likes a loser. America has always been that way, and that has never changed. We can respect you if you put up a good fight, but if you get constantly trampled, you just suck and no one cares.

Just as a side note here is a link to detroit's record.
http://detroit.tigers.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/det/history/det_history_results.jsp

Last winning season was 1993 (it was close). The last solid winning season was 1987. Which that is enough time for all the real fans to die of heatburn over their favorite team.

Then again this guy is a liberal, and they do have the ability to pick losers amazingly well.


cube

PS I sent an email to this guy with a link to my site. I told him this:

Here are some comments on your article, i thought it was great. I fully agree with you out look on baseball, it has really gone to crap in the last 20 years.

heh heh sucker