Posted on 07/01/2014 4:16:50 PM PDT by mojito
American kids: Pick up a glove, bat, and ball.
Parents: Take your kids to Cooperstown. Take them to Williamsport. Take them to your local minor league park. Please!
...unfortunately, baseball has made its own bed of unpopularity, by refusing to speed the game up...I mean, must the batter step out of the box after every pitch, and must the pitcher step off the rubber and run through signs again, must he toss over to first base time and again, must the relief pitcher get ten warm up pitches, must...well, you get the idea...
...as it stands now, it is four hours of spectator drudgery...
And GMs would rather go and pluck players from the DR, than develop home-grown players.
And GMs would rather go and pluck players from the DR, than develop home-grown players.
...the DR...?
Thank you for mellowing down with your comments, (politically) on soccer. As Rush Limbo has said sometime after he was fired from ESPN, the majority there are as liberals as you can get them (Bob Costa???). IMHO sports and politics is not a good combination of bringing people together!!!
Dominican Republic.
Apologies for lateness of reply, been ill.
Baseball WAS invented in England, not the US. In the 18th C, as the game was called ‘base ball’ (two words), and there is a famous reference to it in Jane Austin’s Northhanger Abbey, chapter one. There is plenty of evidence that it was invented in the UK and taken across the Atlantic.
As to rugby and gridiron, anyone with any knowledge knows that North American gridiron is based on rugby. Changed to suit tastes, but the roots are there.
My initial point was that people here keep wittering on(not you) about hating snobby Europports and sticking to ‘American sports’, when everything they watch was the idea of a Brit, European or Canadian, or at the best a slight changing of an existing British, Irish and European sports.
If you want to be strict about it, according to Wikipedia the origins of the game of baseball might have come from France. Supposedly, they played a game with a some of the manifestations of the modern game. So what? That’s like saying because some goat herders in central Asia kicked around a goat’s head (or an enemy’s head) two thousand years ago, they invented soccer or football as it is called elsewhere than the U.S.
I state again what I said. To try and suggest (again not you) that ‘American’ sports are somehow ‘apart’ from ‘Eurosports’ is nonsense. The former exist because and only because of the latter.
Baseball in its modern form has its clear roots in England and in fact was brought to the US by British immigrants. And gridiron is a clear US version of rugby union, with elements of rugby league.
Their roots should be celebrated, not denied.
Who’s denying them? I’m just saying that every modern sport, not just baseball, has roots elsewhere. That does not mean the game played five hundred years ago is the same as the modern game. If the modern game of baseball per the current rules was invented by the Mongol hordes as they were wreaking havoc around Europe 800 years ago, I wouldn’t give a fig.
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