Letters to the Editor
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Football is designed to be covered by the media
I hadn't exactly noticed the total blackout of baseball, but I had noticed the clustering of football articles here around Friday, Monday and Tuesday. It made me think that a big part of football's success in this country has to do with the quality of its season, as opposed to the game per se. Everyone plays every Sunday (more or less), and no one plays other times (more or less), providing a natural hook for the nation's legion of sports columnists to devote their Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday (and some Tuesday) coverage to king football; this provides the fan a bonanza of concentrated football coverage all around the weekend, further whetting the appetite for the games.
Me, I prefer baseball to football by a wide margin, when it comes to the actual games, but the NFL has everyone beat in the construction of its season. And, just by the way, the extinction of the true pennant race in baseball doesn't help in this regard.
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Yes, but...
... you could say the same about almost any kind of crime fighting. No matter how many people are convicted of tax evasion, someone else will always give it a try, no matter how many people are charged with selling cigarettes to minors, some kids will still smoke cigarettes, and so on ad infinitum.
Steroids are particularly dangerous, because many young people try them not only to achieve success in sport, but also as an adjunct to recreational body building without being fully aware of the side effects and dangers.
Only a few weeks ago a young coworker of mine who was bodybuilding with steroids got into a 'roid rage induced fight in which he badly injured another man and ended up in jail. This kind of thing seems to be incredibly common and I suspect that an awful lot of crime is fueled by illegal steroid use. In fact I have often suspected that OJ Simpson (If He Did It) might have been under the influence of steroids, since he was supposedly crippled with arthritis and yet also able to make an exercise video, and was prone to violent temper tantrums. Certainly makes you wonder, doesn't it?
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Agreed on the wild card
I understand the need for wild cards in the NFL; the season is a short one. But baseball's season is ten times as long. By that time, we pretty much know who the good teams are.
In an NFL-type scenario, Toronto, Minnesota, Seattlea, Atlanta, St. Louis and Colorado would all be playoff locks. Big deal. We've already seen the ugly side of the wild card when Oakland finished 14 games out. Did anyone really think a team that finished 14 games out might be better than the team that handed them their hats?
Florida has won the World Series twice, but can't win a division title. Gee, maybe that's something they should aspire to.
Baseball was damned near perfect before Bud Selig showed up. Can we send him home now? Please?
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Good thing...
...that the Giants retired Bonds; what with all the steroid labs gone, looks like Barry was looking forward to a bad next season.
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Cover a real sport
Baseball and football coverage? Bah. I can get that anywhere. I'm still waiting for a week long, in-depth look at professional South African Wildebeest racing. I can't believe you haven't written about it yet. It's the big gnu thing!
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Another Fine Whine You Won't Let Me Uncork
If you would make even the slightest mention of college football, I am primed to raise the ever-offensive issue of the biggest fantasy of them all, the polls, and how overrated are my own beloved Texas Longhorns: 4-0, yes, and ranked #7 in several fake polls, but just a couple of timely interceptions from being 2-2, and showing no signs of a defense worthy of a top 10 team. They are a strong bet to finish 8-4, by my reckoning, in spite of having their first clean outing of the season (against Rice!) Yet there they sit at #7. The question I would love to ask you is, how does this Texas team get a #7 ranking, when effing TCU gave them all they could handle through most of three quarters and the University of Central Florida (who?) all but christened their new stadium with Colt McCoy?
But you won't mention college football, so I guess I'm going to have save this rant for another day.
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Soccer???
He says it's his job to write about sports, but has he ever written a serious soccer item? For once I am sympathetic to baseball fans.
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@Amerigo
I think the difference between crimes such as tax evasion and crimes such as drug dealing is that when a tax evader is caught, that does not leave a vacuum in the tax evasion market that will be more or less immediately filled by various competing tax evasion rings. People love drugs. People love drugs in a way that they don't love tax evasion, losing their temper and hitting someone or setting fire to buildings to commit insurance fraud. For this reason, there will always be criminal businesses organized to produce, distribute and sell drugs (assuming government control/monitoring of drugs). That is not the same as saying "selling drugs is cool." It is something that you have to accept if you are going to push for tough drug laws and tough drug law enforcement.
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King on Soccer?
Didn't King just say here that if he's not interested in the subject, the article he writes isn't going to be very interesting? Seems like pretty solid logic to me.
Myself, soccer is definitely my favorite sport, but it seems reasonable that King not want to write about it, and frankly I'm not that interested in what he has to say about it (e.g.'the team who scores first usually wins...'). I'd recommend soccernet, where they have consistently mediocre analysis of various european league (one exception being perhaps Phil Ball, who reports on la liga). Otherwise goal.com.
Or we could all just stop whining about what king writes and start our own blog where we can write about whatever we want...
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Well
"Similarly, while I can understand fans of, say, the Milwaukee Brewers, Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals being interested in that slapstick race, I don't consider it terribly compelling to dissect the antics of mediocre teams as they stumble their way to a decision."
You can just pick it up at play-off time and report as some other division from either league tries to beat the N.L. Central champ this year.