Bleacher Views

I don’t watch regular soap operas; I don’t have to. If I want to get my fill of scandal, cheating and general chicanery, I just turn on the sports channel.

Recently, I was watching a Mets/Diamondbacks game out in Phoenix when the Mets pitcher, Marcus Stroman, and one of the Rattlers got to jawing at each other. Now the Diamondbacks are what I call an HCT (Historically Challenged Team), and they were playing in a home ballpark that seemed to have more New York fans than Phoenix fans.

These days, there seem to be a flock of fellas trying to figure out how they can futz around and fix the fine old game we know as baseball. You can figure what grade this old teacher assigns to this forgettable effort, can’t you?

Some unkind if accurate person, I don’t remember who at the moment, labeled America as a “country of mutts and outcasts.” If that is so, then I reply, “Arf Arf. That’s why I root for the “underdog.”

In all the rest of the world, a “No-No” is a very serious negative. It’s what the frightened mother yells to her toddler who thinks that hanging out with the stove, literally, is a really good idea.

As we all know, baseball is a game of threes: three strikes, three outs, three bases. Even the game is three squared innings. So if you want to be a well informed batter, you have to know the three types of pitchers and go up to the plate conclusion in mind.

Stereotypes are horrible things. They take what should be complex, nuanced and novel and turn it into simplistic, linear and banal. Terrible, terrible things, stereotypes,

There are some politically obsessed people who claim to believe that the terms conservative and liberal are purely political terms and have something to do with which party one tends to vote in agreement with come November.