Ah, college sports. The realm of unbalanced schedules and player management practices enabling a caste system that keeps the power programs entrenched. Sounds like Real Madrid's vision for a Euro Super League!
Baseball is all about the experience at the park. Enjoying a beer and watching a game on a warm summer evening.
I go to a couple Dodger games every year and went to playoffs the last 5. Still bored lol. I do it more out of duty to support LA. Drinking beer with friends is the only enjoyable part. Except its always warm here, so that doesn’t factor into the equation for me.
Out of duty to support LA? What other "boring" events do you attend out of duty to support LA? Sounds to me like you're a closet baseball fan.
I've got baseball in my back pocket for the mental health days. $10, to sit somewhere in the sky totally isolated and sleep for hours in complete anonymity.
I like cricket (even have Shahid Afridi's and Saeed Anwar's autographs). Having said that, the NBA blows cricket out of the water.
Just on the surface, any sport that has super athletes doing super athletic things cannot be the most boring thing to watch. Football and basketball are too dynamic to be put in the same category as baseball, cricket or golf in terms of a viewing experience. Skill games all are boring unless you appreciate the nuances of the game itself. We appreciate soccer on TV more than many others because we appreciate the small things. I assume the same can be said with a baseball player watching baseball or possibly a golfer watching golf. With all that said, all team sports are pretty boring to me nowadays.
The delay between balls, alone, makes cricket a lot harder to watch than the NBA. Switching ends after every over is similarly annoying. I mean, I prefer watching cricket to baseball (and probably the NFL), but the NBA and soccer are simply superior entertainment products.
My love for LA > how boring baseball is. If some of my best friends weren’t big baseball fans, I would never go. Like you said, drinking beer with them is enough fun. I also go to a UCLA football game every once in a while, because tailgates are fun and lots of friends and I graduated from there, but I don’t like college ball very much.
To enjoy watching baseball, you have to follow baseball. You really can't just flip on a baseball game and watch it and enjoy it, unless you know the game, you know the team(s) playing, the players, the situational things about what's happening in each moment, and they need to matter to you. I would imagine cricket is the same way. I grew up a San Francisco Giants fan, and as a kid I played baseball and I went to games and the players and the season mattered to me. Now, living on the east coast, the Giants rarely play on TV before 10pm. The team has had some down years, so I don't follow their progress, I am less familiar with the players, and when they're on TV, I don't bother to watch.
The world Audience for basketball, and participation destroys cricket The only sport that beats it is football
The delay between the balls is when you talk shit with your mates, or listen to a fascinating anecdote from Michael Holding
I think you can't really follow cricket unless you played it as a kid and had a misspent youth watching test matches, and getting hellishly drunk on the grassy bank with a gazillion other school kids - that was basically one big party and hookup fest in those days Without that all the references don't make sense. And like you say with the players, you really follow their entire careers
A Waqar Younis over could take 8 minutes by itself. Don't get me wrong. I like watching cricket. It was the first sport I ever truly spent money on (equipment is really freaking expensive). But basketball and soccer are better products. They are more fun to watch on the field, and there's so much more entertainment off the field.