After reading that “90 percent of baseball is apparently spent waiting around,” Lowen Liu steps up to defend the sport:
This will no doubt fuel those gleeful detractors who go on and on about how boring the sport is. But to disparage the inactivity in baseball, the seemingly interminable spaces between action, misses what makes the sport beautiful in the first place. The downtime is, in fact, functionally important to an appreciation of baseball. The kicking of the dirt, the look in, the waiting, the twitching, the time outs, the languid anticipation, compressing time into the tiny window where the pitcher is actually about to throw the ball and everyone’s eyes widen in possibility. What other sport teases your attention in this way, dares you to look away, to yawn, and then grabs hold of you with a resounding crack of the bat?
And with what other sport is not paying attention a part of the game? The exciting moments would not be so exciting without the preparatory tedium. Nodding off for a few minutes in the sixth inning after two beers, drooling on yourself a little, only to wake when others cheer is not a flaw of spectatorship but a charm.
The Dish 