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I love baseball --- In the end I do care if the Yankees win - but still - it's just a game - but there are other benefits - collateral if you will -- brings people together - families even - across generations. I don't think my 19 yr old daughter would hang out w/Dad if not for both being Yankee fans etc etc.
That being said - Thank God George Steinbrenner doesn't get to nominate Supreme Court Justices, but he would be no worse than GWB --- and come November the game of baseball hibernates, but we will all just be beginning to live with the consequences of Election Day.
In conclusion - I agree with you totally even though I want the Yankees to win and I Care.

Sweeping generalizations about the sophistication of the average sports fan's political knowledge aside, I gotta say that baseball is far superior to politics as practiced in our enlightened age.

Baseball players - and really athletes in general - routinely face the kind of one-on-one, one-on-team situations that our current breed of politicians spend millions of dollars trying to avoid - "hero or goat": advance the guy to third in the bottom of the ninth; answer the fucking question mr president.

The recent presidential "debates," if you can call them that, were a tiresome scripted farce, the kind of stupendous fraud that our unimaginitive, TV-saturated populace has been trained to accept without any resistence. I didn't see either candidate take risks, or make any effort to communicate their essential humanity to the american people. They took as "victory" the post-debate evaluation of whether or not they looked good on TV - don't leer, and wipe that shit off the corner of yer mouth mr president, you look like a goober.

As I write this, Curt Schilling has, after a humiliating game 1, retaken the mound in game 6 in an effort to extend the Red Sox season by another game. It's him on the road, against the formidable Yankee lineup and packing the freight of all that Red Sox history on his back - hell on that suspect tendon in his right ankle - will he come through? Thankfully, the answer will not be determined by the volume of the TV attack ads, the sophistication of the voter fraud or the size of the campaign warchest. He'll have to make the tough pitches and trust his surrounding defense to make the plays. And if he comes through and the Red Sox live another day, all they'll have to do is something no other team in history has ever done and win another game to make it 4 straight after being down 0-3.

That such a comeback is possible is what makes sports so interesting. The outcome is always in doubt because you can never really know how a single human being or group of disparate human beings will respond when faced with a complex athletic challenge.

The vast majority of voters in this country already know how they're going to vote, or not vote, come November.

I'll take a game 7 any day.

I knew people would love this post.

Okay, look.. I like baseball. Baseball is super nifty. Great physical prowess, interesting strategy, gargantuan sums of money, tax-payer funded half-billion dollar stadiums, the whole magilla. It's lovely, I mean it. (Well, the money and the stadiums, not so much.)

I would never, and did never, argue that sports are not interesting. What I argued it that they're not important.

The drama you describe is certainly... dramatic. No argument. But drama doesn't imply relevance. I've seen many movies that had me on the edge of my seat, but when I left the theater, not much had actually changed.

As for politics, all of your points are true, Steve, the whole thing completely sucks. But if anything that should be an argument for greater involvement and greater attention, not less. Unless, that is, you prefer it this way, or worse.

My aggravation in this post was not with baseball or with sports, it was with apathy. Targeting baseball or baseball fans in particular was arbitrary, inspired only by what I was currently looking at. My plea is only for some perspective.

In the end, cynicism towards baseball has no effect, while cynicism toward participation in the political system has a profound one, particularly when multiplied thousands or millions of times. I would argue that in politics as well, "the outcome is always in doubt because you can never really know how a single human being or group of disparate human beings will respond when faced with a complex [athletic] challenge."

Forgive me for embarking on a truly cheesy metaphor, but we are all faced with such a challenge right now. Instead of sitting and watching others respond to a challenge, we get to see how WE -- we as a nation, we as a society, we as a group of people with half an ounce of sense, whatever -- will respond. If you ask me, it's not only vastly more important, it's a hell of a lot more interesting.

Go Yankees.

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