A Confidently Worded Statement on Baseball, Football

While I’m inclined to agree with the author of Ecclesiastes* — in a general sense, at least — that there’s “nothing new under the sun,” I’ll also submit that the particulars of all the things under the sun change with enough frequency that it’s important for humans to taxonomize them, lest we (i.e. humans) are overwhelmed and compelled by fear to crawl back into all our mothers’ wombs**.

*Part of my habit of deferring to anyone who identifies himself as “son of David, king in Jerusalem.”

**Awkward, gross.

And so it’s without anxiety, but with a small mustard stain on my shirt, that I submit this confidently worded statement on two popular 21st century games and the respective pleasures they provide.

To wit:

While the game of football allows for a number of pleasures in the bosom of its respective home TV viewers, the most reliable sort is the pleasure one feels at 12:59pm ET on Football Sunday, the very minute before a scad of games kick off simultaneously and saturate the nucleus accumbens with dopamine. This is the pleasure of great anticipation.

Baseball, meanwhile, is pleasant for its ubiquity. While the length of games — and their attendant pre- and postgame shows — will vary over the course of a 162-game schedule, a midseason game of base-and-ball typically produces about five hours of content, recurring 6.5 days of every week for about six months. The implications of each game are muted, which is fine: not every day is an event. Baseball provides the same sort of pleasure as a great and long friendship: the pleasure of merely being there.