It’s my Parting Shot to talk baseball and scold folks for thinking that the sports seasons are too long when they are the cause of it…..
This was going to be the Fearless Predictor taking anywhere from 60-90 seconds to pick the World Series winner. I’ll quickly say that baseball is 90 per cent pitching…according to the experts. In this match-up, there isn’t much to choose between Boston and the Dodgers when it comes to their arms. That means, the next thing to look at is hitting, where the Red Sox have the advantage. So much so, that Boston will win the World Series in six games!
What irked me was how one fan responded to the fact that it was 25 years ago today that Joe Carter hit his World Series-winning, walk-off homer as the Toronto Blue Jays successfully repeated as baseball champs. The guy said something along the lines of the World Series should be over by now, like back then, not only starting!
Maybe…but as long as you fans keep on buying tickets and merchandise and season-long T-V packages and the products that are advertised on radio and T-V…then the regular-season schedules for all sports will continue to be at least as long as they are. There’ll be more playoff teams, with more games and later and later ends to seasons that make no sense. So, when there’s hundreds of millions of fans creating trillions of dollars in revenues to be shared by players, teams and media outlets, what’s their impetus to shorten seasons?!
The better question is, are you ready to organize a world-wide boycott of all sports in order to bring about contraction and sensibility? I didn’t think so! As you were!!
That’s my Parting Shot, I’m Les Lazaruk…