After the excitement that was the World Baseball Classic I kind of hoped that some of the enthusiasm that I had for that tournament would carry through to the regular season of MLB and I did watch a few games but the overwhelming level of play that happens in an MLB season started to hit me pretty early this year, a bit earlier than it does most seasons.
Sure, it is nice to see the teams playing again after the long off-season (it's not that long) and there are a lot of friends of mine that are really dedicated to their home team if they happen to live in an area that has a pro team. I can understand that and in that regard I am kind of happy that there are so many games in the big cities so that the ticket prices can remain relatively low especially for daytime games that happen mid-week.
For me though, since I don't really have a favorite team, is that there are just too many games in a season for me to possibly keep up with all of it. There are 162 games for each team in the regular season, so you would imagine that around 80 of these are home games and this is great news for people who want to attend a game or two. Ticket prices for most pro sports in USA are just astronomically high-priced to the point of extortion especially since the brokers and ticket-resellers have gotten involved in the trade.
But the mid-week games are still something that most people can afford to attend. The stadiums are for the most part, massive, and since most people have to go to work, if you can get a day off you can probably get a ticket for under $30, which is awesome in this day and age.
That doesn't change the fact that unless you are some sort of autistic and dedicated fan, keeping up with all the stats is too overwhelming for me to follow.
If I was going to claim a team as my own it would be the Kansas City Royals but just look at that schedule man. IT's a game nearly every single day and several of them have 2 games in the same day. It's just too much IMO.
Now imagine how much effort would go into attempting to follow multiple teams or even more daunting, all of them.
I am the kind of fan that will look at the scores on a sports page and maybe some of the stats for individual games but other than that, I don't really pay much attention to it until about 4 months from now when the season starts to near the playoffs. Then I watch.
I think that MLB is an absolute monster when it comes to how much money it makes because if you ever watch American sports on the television you already know how many commercial breaks there are, now multiply that time 30 and then times 162. This is a huge amount of commercial revenue. I don't think they would be able to pull this off with any other sport.
That is the main reason why I don't tune it though, the commercials are the reason why the sport exists, or so it appears. I often say that almost zero sports are about the actual sport, they are about making money and MLB makes a ton of it.
I can't stay interested in something like this and here we were, just a few days into the season and I already have commercial fatigue. Maybe it is because I am getting older but I just get annoyed at how no matter what we do in our lives the objective of almost anything it to try to encourage us to spend money constantly.
So for me, I'll see you at the box scores on a website, which I can block the ads from quite easily.
I'll see you in the post-season.