WEEKLY WHINE

K orientation is successful

Last week, Major League Baseball successfully completed its 87th All-Star Game. This event, held in San Diego, CA, USA, was completed in eight and one half innings, with the team designated the home team, the selected stars of the American League, defeating their counterparts from the National League. The American League players scored four runs in their twenty four total outs, besting the two meager runs that the National League players could muster in their full allotment of twenty seven outs.

Baseball, of course, is a strange sport. There is no clock, but there is a practical constraint in that most games must end within twenty four hours [so that the teams can play again]. Major league teams play 162 regular season games every year, plus more in the preseason. Teams that qualify for the postseason play still more. On occasion, teams can play one another twice in one day.

The mechanics of individual games are even stranger. The people who hurl the sphere are called pitchers, and the people who attempt to strike the hurled sphere are called batters. Pitchers are rewarded if the hurled sphere passes over a plate on the ground within a given altitude range without being struck by the batter; if this happens, counterintuitively, the pitch is called a strike. If the hurled sphere does not pass through this target region and is still not struck by the batter, the pitch is called a ball. The batter may advance safely to the first base if four balls are hurled; conversely, only three strikes are required to retire the batter.

Did you understand all that? Well, don’t worry, because several of us here at GoobNet are American and thus have an innate understanding of how to distinguish a passed ball from a wild pitch. Therefore, if you have questions about baseball, you need only send them to the GoobNet Mailbox. We will be right here, ready to open the GoobNet Mailbox.

Well, one of us will be ready to open the GoobNet Mailbox. The rest of us will be safely ensconced in the press box, where we will record whether each message was a passed letter or a wild thought.

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Why is baseball a thing?

– Patricia de Rosco
Stockton, CA, USA

Baseball is a thing because sports are things.

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No, I mean, why does baseball exist?

– Patricia de Rosco
Stockton, CA, USA

It exists because it is played. A sport can be said to exist if people actively play it, or if its rules are documented.

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But where did the rules come from?

– Patricia de Rosco
Stockton, CA, USA

Baseball can be traced back to Britain, where there were several early games that involved hitting a ball with a bat. It is believed that rounders, cricket, and baseball all derived from these games. Baseball itself was first documented in the 18th century, with a 1744 children’s book first using the term “Base-Ball”.

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You are wrong. Abner Doubleday totally invented baseball. That’s what I learned in school.

– Frederick J Sambo
Ruondack, MS, USA

You are wrong about us being wrong. There are plenty of accounts of baseball being played in Britain, the United States, and Canada before 1839. Indeed, by 1791, almost fifty years before Doubleday supposedly invented it, it was popular enough that the town of Pittsfield, MA passed a law banning “any game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Bat Ball, Football, Cat, Fives or any other game or games with balls”.

We here at GoobNet recommend returning to your school so that they may retract your education and replace it.

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You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like us all to go back to government schools where we can all be brainwashed into thinking that baseball wasn’t invented in America, and that Barack Hussein Obama’s socialist healthcare takeover is a good thing, and that Hillary Clinton didn’t kill everybody who talked shit about her behind her back, and that Zika isn’t a genetic experiment gone wrong that escaped and is gonna infect all of us and turn us into zombies with tiny baby heads! The truth hurts! Wake up, people! Read the Constitution!

– Will Sapien
Lubbock, TX, USA

America, fuck yeah!

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Remember that one All-Star Game where they ran out of players? And Bud Selig was like, “I dunno what to do!”? And then he was like, “Let’s make it count for something!”? That was so funny. I thought I was gonna laugh a lot. And I did.

– Jerry A Albertson
Austin, TX, USA

You are correct. Awarding home field advantage in the World Series to the team that happens to play in the same league as a guy who hit a home run in an exhibition game three months ago is hilarious.

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Wait. So they had to end a game in a tie because both teams ran out of players? And instead of changing the rules to end after nine innings regardless, or allowing players back into the game, they decided to give the winner an arbitrary, abstract prize? Who was running this sport at the time?

– Sandy Zemberg
Edmonton, AB, Canada

Bud Selig, previous owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, who hosted the 2002 All-Star Game.

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But don’t you love the excitement of having the All-Star Game decide home field advantage in the World Series? Isn’t that what makes baseball great?

– Bud Selig
Milwaukee, WI, USA

No. Go away.