Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Sigh

In Defense Of "Bad" Baseball: For instance, the Houston Astros — a team that has made maybe two good baseball decisions since Barack Obama was elected President — are a bummer. They don't put out a competitive product, but they charge fans competitive prices for the right to consume it; their domed stadium features so much fake old-timey gimmickry and inauthentic quirk that it might as well be a gated community called Olde Baseballe Acres; much of Houston's Major League roster appears to have been spit out of a Random Athlete Name Generator, and the organization's player development strategy in recent years has been 1) short guys, 2) players who are related to former Major Leaguers, and 3) short guys who are related to former Major Leaguers. This is unfair to their fans for a bunch of reasons. It's unfair, too, to people like Chris Johnson and J.D. Martinez — real baseball players on the Astros, promise — who are good enough at a very difficult sport to make it to the Major Leagues, but still get goofed on at BuzzFeed for their implausibly generic names. Broadly speaking, this is not good. It's bad.

3 comments:

Deb said...

Houston put all of the bells and whistles into its stadium and now has no idea how to field a team.

I suppose I'll root for the Braves again this year.

Anonymous said...

I saw The Implausibly Generic Names open for Meat Loaf.

Just think: next year the American League.

Jeff

Cap'n Bob said...

The'll have to sink farther than that to catch the Mariners.