Reason Writers Around the Diamond: Matt Welch and David Nott on Loving the Angels and Dodgers

To honor the advent of baseball season, National Review asked fans of all 30 big-league teams to write a brief squib on "Why I Love the Fill-in-the-Blanks." Among the respondents are such Reason contributors as Rick Henderson, Martin Morse Wooster, and John J. Miller, plus Editor in Chief Matt Welch and Reason Foundation President David Nott.

Read the whole symposium here.

Comments

[robc]

Reversing it - Why its hard to love the Reds:

Dusty freakin Baker

[Joel]

How about "Why I don't give a shit about baseball"?

[Warren]

Loosing a lot of respect for Matt on this one. Baseball is a fun game to play, an interesting game to follow statistically, and with the right play-by-play man, potentially exciting to listen to. But it is dead boring to watch, and MLB doubly so. Games are stretched out two and three times as long as needs be to jam in more commercials. Baseball is worse than soccer. All one need do, is listen to George Will rhapsodize over it, to know how stupefying it must be.

[Nick]

Let's go Mets! Now we have a bullpen! Woohoo!

[Phillies]

Eat our dust (again), Mets!

[Butts Wagner]

I predict big things for my Bridegrooms this season.

[Rusty]

Nat Frum's story about his grandfather was, by far, the best of the bunch.

[Kolohe]

You know, I still don't buy that anyone 'loves' the Nats, but I can accept the man crush on Tom Boswell.

And what Rusty said.

[Syd]

All the way with Tampa Bay! Although the Red Sox would be fine, and now that their century of futility is over, the Cubs can win without bringing on the Apocalypso.*

*The music of doom.

[ed]

Games are stretched out two and three times as long as needs be to jam in more commercials

Wrong, Warren. Baseball is the only major sport that has naturally occuring commercial timeouts--the half-inning and end-of-inning breaks. Except for pitching changes, this holds true throughout the game. You cannot say the same for football or basketball, each of which has scheduled TV timeouts, regardless of the action. Baseball remains the perfect sport. Not that the powers-that-be will not find a way to fuck it up.

[Brian Clevinger]

Warren,

Matt is a brilliant baseball writer/analyst, and i feel 180 degrees opposite. It's too bad things like national and global interests takes his attention away from America's past time. It's truly tragic, so his few words of wisdom are treasured even more because they are rarer than they should be. To truly appreciate the genius of Matt Welch, you have to fully appreciate what he also brings to the game of baseball.