Sportsball: Au Contraire

h/t Cold Fury 

"Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio?
Joltin' Joe has left and gone away..."

If MLB, or any other corporate sportsball, wanted to engage a new generation of sportsball fans, they'd show that by moving to change ticket prices by moving the decimal point one place to the left at every park in their leagues. Maybe even two.

I'm not griping about the recockulous salaries of the players, but in order to pay them, the sport - any sport - has soaked the fans to the point that going to a game is an exercise in pointless nostalgia about a sport made of entirely of prima donas, both on the field, and in owners' boxes, in a financial exercise for fans who show up in person that makes Disneyland seem like a non-profit effort. Taking an average family to a game, and buying everyone a hot dog, beverage, and bag of peanuts is currently an field trip that requires selling a kidney to finance, in order to watch multi-millionaire corporate pawns try to gin up enthusiasm for other corporations' paid sumo wrestlers. The only people who actually give a flying f**k anymore are Vegas oddsmakers, which is only fair, since they're the only ones with more at stake than the players or the owners.

Which explains why watching any pro sports nowadays has all the compelling allure of televising the trading pits on Wall Street. Give day traders hand weapons like swords and axes, and televise their fights, and you might find something people would truly enjoy watching, and at far higher levels of enthusiasm for anything happening between epically-long commercial swaths on TV. Truth in advertising?

"We now interrupt this forty-minute orgy of bad commercials to bring you five minutes of corporate sport."

A little too on-the-nose there? You betcha.

You might as well televise corporate board meetings, and let the underlings stage kabuki-theater knife fights or brass-knuckled dust-ups. It would be as compelling to the audience.

Nobody not criminally stoopid gives a wet fart about multimillionaire children playing a children's game for lottery-payout annual salaries. These are not "enduring examples of excellence", they're simply the highest paid racehorses and whores in society, albeit for demonstrable skills.

Frankly, I'd rather get a hot dog from a sidewalk cart vendor, and watch a pickup game at the local sandlot, played by any 18 total unpaid amateurs, of any age from pre-teen to retiree. The game is identical, the sportsmanship higher, and the stakes far more important to those on the field than anything happening at Corporate Sponsorship Monstrosities.

Eff Sportsball, for any value of that term. The main difference between pro wrestling and any version of Pro Sportsball is everyone knows pro wrestling is totally fake and ghey. Field of Dreams has transmogrified into Field Of Used To Be. There's hardly anyone under the age of 40 now who even remembers what it is they used to watch, unless they're watching Ken Burns' Baseball documentary. The sport memorialized in the docu-epic is deader than dinosaurs, deader than canned tuna.

To quote two other lines from popular entertainment:

"It's dead, Jim."

"Let it go."