Hairyducked Idiot

Well now I don't have to feel bad for being glad when they lose.

while this may be true, literally nothing about this post is going to convince someone like myself to watch soccer. i don't outwardly hate on the sport, but i just don't like it. and that's ok. in regards to the "in terms of minutes" part, though, that seems a little lackadaisical in describing the action. Football is a sport that importance is dictated by field position. 3rd and 10 from a team's own 15 isn't going to require the same attention/anticipation as 1st and goal. Not all snaps are equal based on score, field position, time remaining, etc. In soccer, (in my extremely self admitting uneducated opinion) it's pretty much just "try to stop a goal" vs. "try to score a goal". There's just less nuance (as far as I can tell - I rarely watch it). First things first, people should like or not like what they want. Personally, I can't get into hockey outside of playoff overtimes, when I watch it seems like the goals are too much a function of what I'll call randomness, scraps in front of goal and aiming harder shots in the direction of the goal that a deflection or screen helps it through. I'm sure there's more to the planning than that, but I can't escape the feeling that teams have a lot less control in their scoring than I'd like to see. That said, if you are interested or curious, one of the things that helped with my enjoyment of soccer was to see the play on the field as most similar to basketball. Without the ball, teams have the option to press high up the field to try to create dangerous turnovers, give up a lot of space to stay compact and avoid the opponent getting close to goal, and (this is where the analogy breaks down a bit) they can also stay deep to try to lure the other team with the ball forward and then attack via a fast break of sorts when they get it back. With the ball, there's a lot of choreographed movement without the absolute structure of say, Football plays, players move without the ball to help create space for others and moving the ball around helps create opportunities. In other words, if you really like Xs and Os stuff in other sports, there's plenty of that in soccer too, but it also has baseball's slow burn as a viewing experience so it's not gonna have universal appeal. You’re not wrong about a lot of hockey goals being a product of luck. Some of them come from defensive breakdowns, but at the high levels the defenses are so solid that most of it is just trying to get as many shots as possible hoping for a lucky bounce or deflection. But that’s not something a baseball fan should be complaining about. There are so many layers of randomness between “striking the ball well with the bat” and scoring runs that we have 162 game seasons and still talk about teams having significantly different records from what they deserved.

OK, I know I've been pretty checked out this year but why hasn't Maddon been fired for letting Kris Bryant grow an awful mullet? Or has he been?

i'd honestly rather go to the dentist than watch either of the sports where they quickly go back and forth 8000 times and score once every two hours In terms of minutes you're sitting there watching it, soccer goals happen about the same frequency as touchdowns.

You don't wear pants under the hockey shorts. The bottom of your legs are covered by extra long socks that go over your shin pads and are held up with tape. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's better or worse.

I just try to swing right as he releases the ball. Just got a 2503

Remember when that was rare and cool?

He'll get the attention he was angling for.

No, it doesn't. Everything that ever needed to be said on that subject was said by roughly 2007. If anyone missed out, too bad.

The consensus was that 3-8 or 3-9 were pretty interchangeable, so it's not a huge reach, but he was about the fourth most-likely guy out of the six they were choosing from in the pundits' opinion.

I have watched like 30 seconds of Cubs games this season and sometimes go an entire week without checking a score or standings, so we can be the cool kids together.

The slow, inevitable death of my fandom, I guess. It's been such a big part of basically my whole life, it's not something I can, or even want to just shrug off easily. But more and more it's becoming clear to me that this org brings me more frustration and negative feelings than positive ones, and that shouldn't be the case, especially having seen so many terrible, terrible seasons (in terms of baseball being played). You're going about this the wrong way.

Kal Daniels did have the greatest Sports Machine highlight of all time skip to about 5:30 [bbvideo=560,315] [/bbvideo] If you go 10 seconds earlier, you get a Scott Servais sighting. Not to be confused with Tyler Houston, who borrowed my sharpie and signed for all the kids around me then handed it back without signing for me.

Leo Gomez goes into that large, faceless pile of "people who played 3b at some point for the Cubs" with no differentiating traits. Honestly you could take any Hispanic-sounding male name and tell me they played 3b for the Cubs in the 80s or early 90s and my brain would say "oh yeah, that guy."

I saw on Twitter that Almora had his fifth HR of the month and wondered "Holy crap, I know I've been checked out, but is Almora good now?" Upon further examination, he is not and I feel better.

DNLCCVB

Things I was not even a little curious about: 1) jamfan’s take on Russell 2) jamfan’s take on metoo 3) whether jamfan is still alive

This is like waking up from a 3 year coma, hearing about everything that has happened, and then going with, "boy, I was not expecting to see that the economy was doing so well!" as your main takeaway. I'm not saying you're wrong. Just that you doom blue-balled me.

I was all doom-bonered up to see the box score after readying about how terrible Darvish is. Was not expecting a no-hit shutout through 3.

Alright, fine. If these turds aren't gonna give us the fun of a meltdown, they better dominate the bigger turds like the Cardinals.

I'm not going to look it up, but I find Jeromy Burnitz averaging 138 runs per season over his career to be slightly dubious.

I went to check out the White Sox Interactive reaction and it appears they may have done some light hotlinking: https://www.whitesoxinteractive.com/vbulletin/index.php?s=16e3e4ebce8f4cb8bab0a59246995e68

So apparently the Cubs are good? How boring

What kind of odds could I have gotten on a prop bet two years ago: More home runs, 2019 Kris Bryant or 2012 Darwin Barney?