I’m sure that as long as professional sports have been played in our nation, there have been fair-weather fans. Philadelphia tends to have more than most. It doesn’t matter which sport it is or how well the team is doing, some portion of the crowd of fans is cheering when they win and sighing an expected sigh when they lose. Philadelphia fans are tough – our teams are rarely “robbed”, if they fall behind or lose, we know where they screwed up. And even if they seem to be on a streak, we all hold that safety net in our heads that if that streak fades, they probably had only been lucky anyway.
I have never been strongly into sports. I watch the Eagles play as often as I can. I’ll watch the Sixers when they are playing well (as in actually in a playoff series). But I have not watched the Phillies rise this season and even though they are now playing in the World Series, I still can’t bring myself to be overly excited about it. I tried to watch game 1 and ended up spending half the game working on my laptop and watching shows I’d missed on Hulu. Game 2 I didn’t even attempt to watch – I switched to it to check the score during commercial breaks in the shows I watched instead. I will likely watch the remaining games in the same fashion.
It isn’t that I don’t like the sport – I have a lot of respect for the skill of these players. It isn’t easy to throw, hit or catch a ball at the speeds these players need to. But to watch baseball holds no interest to me. In the course of a single game, there could potentially be between 200 and 300 pitches. At the speeds they are thrown, that equates to about 2 to 3 minutes of balls actually flying through the air towards the catcher. The remaining hours of baseball is mostly strategic postering until someone hits a ball. So while I do appreciate and respect the skill of the game, I can’t bring myself to watch it for any length of time.
So the Phillies made it to the World Series – awesome! The Rays can suck it! Now let’s see what else there is to watch.