The baseball playoffs are upon us, which means that most of the sports media are consumed with baseball talk. I find this faintly annoying, as I’m not really a fan of baseball. And, really, I can’t be a fan of baseball, for the same reason that I can’t be a conservative Republican activist– I don’t have the mental circuitry necessary to passionately believe self-contradictory things.
For example, being a baseball fan apparently requires one to simultaneously believe that a four-and-a-half hour game three hours of which are just players standing around scratching themselves is part of the beauty and natural flow of the sport, but the idea of using instant replay to correct blown fair/foul calls is completely outrageous because it would slow games down too much.
Also, being a baseball fan apparently requires one to simultaneously believe that it is completely outrageous for the season to run so late that they have to play playoff games in cold weather, and also that a best-of-five series in the first round is too short to really choose a winner.
If you think about it, are those really any less contradictory than simultaneously believing that a government-run health care plan would be a complete catastrophe, and anybody who tries to mess with Medicare is in for a world of hurt? I think there’s probably something very similar going on in the brains of baseball fans and “Tea Party” shouters. Some cognitive science type should do some MRI scans to check it out…