The most hated sport

[Cesar Rodriguez]

The most hated sport

Yes

At the youth level, baseball is far too serious. Too many "tryouts". Kids 10 and under should be able to just show up and play. It's becoming too expensive to play baseball.... which is ironic as lacrosse, a sport know as a rich kid's game grows in popularity.

The percentage of MLB players from Latin American countries continues to grow. In these countries, kids also tend to learn the game by playing unsupervised pickup games and stickball as people in the US did in the 50's, 60's & 70's. Maybe it's the formal, structured nature of baseball that kids find boring?

and yes

Right on! Wiffle ball, stick ball, pickle, 500, pepper, strike out (that's what we called it -- mano a mano with anything hit over the pitcher's mound a base hit) -- all can be played with 2-5 kids and are all more fun and better training than organized baseball games. I walked by the 1st grade practice field last spring: 1 dad pitching, 4 dads fielding, 1 kid hitting, and 14 kids goofing off behind home plate.

[Furtho]

The most hated sport

Wiffle ball would be when you take a bunch of, um, wiffles and then you... er... and anyway the team that ends up with the most wiffles wins, right?

[Guy Profumo]

The most hated sport

Furtho wrote: Wiffle ball would be when you take a bunch of, um, wiffles and then you... er... and anyway the team that ends up with the most wiffles at the end wins, right?

Isn't that the shit Johnson was on about in his "speech" at the 2008 Olympic Games?

[ursus arctos]

The most hated sport



The holes allow the rankest amateur to throw nasty curve balls, while at the same time restricting the distance the ball will fly in the air, thus making it the ideal backyard version of baseball.

[KGR]

The most hated sport

Wrote something about the rugby result at the weekend, and about the Twickers types who will be sad at it.

But I wimped out cos I'm a timid cunt.

[Kevin S]

The most hated sport

Haha, I saw it.

If it makes you feel any better about that, I happened to flick onto it as Wales put the move for that try together. My thoughts when they scored were along the lines of "Serves you right for trying to mess with the Super League Grand Final, you bastards," and also "Any half decent League defender would have covered that kick."

[Ray de Galles]

The most hated sport

This thread keeps on giving me a (quite unsavoury) Beastie Boys earworm:

"I did it like this, I did it like that
I did it with the wiffle ball bat"

.

[Flynnie]

The most hated sport

So I'm on the run, the cop got my gun, and right about now it's time to have some fun

King Ad-Rock, that is my name, and I know the fly spot where they got the champagne

Licensed to Ill is crack for the 30-45 Irish-Catholic, urban generation.

Wiffleball is the bomb. One of my last memories of my grandfather is him taking me to the factory in Shelton, Connecticut - the next town to where my father grew up - and buying me a set. You can throw anything with a wiffle - my go-to was a wicked sidearm screwball that I could throw as hard as a fastball.

Travel ball has three pernicious effects:

1) It creates a lot of burned out kids. You can't concentrate on one sport that much when you're young.

2) It makes playing in your local league a lot less fun. This is what's killing Little League baseball. Travel ball is hoovering up the talent in local leagues, and the kids leftover stink. It's one thing when you've got mixed-ability teams and the bad kids can learn from the good kids and experience winning. But it's just the chaff left over, and anybody who's been in a baseball game where there's been more errors than runs scored can tell you it's no fun.

3) Pay to play shuts out most of the lower-middle and working class. You can only really circumvent this by being insanely good, to the point that coaches will let you play for them because you'll look good on their CV. This shuts out the late bloomers.

It's worth pointing out a lot of this happens to other sports - it's why soccer and basketball are also seeing a decline. Travel soccer is basically the same as above, along with the effect of coaches coaching to size and creating Jozy Altidores who are big and have the ball skills of a fucking elephant.

But even in hoops, there's reports that young talent is getting more and more well-heeled. Maybe not middle-class suburban bliss, but fewer ghetto kids are making the NBA. It's why there's no kids from NYC in the NBA anymore.

[Bored Of Education]

The most hated sport

Guy Potger wrote:

Wiffle ball would be when you take a bunch of, um, wiffles and then you... er... and anyway the team that ends up with the most wiffles at the end wins, right?

Isn't that the shit Johnson was on about in his "speech" at the 2008 Olympic Games?

Ping pong.

[ursus arctos]

The most hated sport

Licensed to Ill is crack for the 30-45 Irish-Catholic, urban generation.

Equally true for Reform Jewish boyz of the same age (and some Conservative kids that liked to annoy their parents).

[Ray de Galles]

The most hated sport

Bored of Education wrote:

Wiffle ball would be when you take a bunch of, um, wiffles and then you... er... and anyway the team that ends up with the most wiffles at the end wins, right?

Isn't that the shit Johnson was on about in his "speech" at the 2008 Olympic Games?

Ping pong.

Wiff-waff, to be exact. Which reminds me...

.

[The Inner Light]

The most hated sport

F1 For me.

[Sporting]

I've tried to like ice hockey, but half the time I can't see the bloody puck, and the goals move. What kind of sport is it where the goals themselves actually move? Plus I think I'm against most sports where you can't see the faces of the competitors clearly, which rules out fencing (also because you need to constantly depend on a machine to tell you when they've made a hit) and indeed just about any sport where they dress like trainee astronauts.

On a tangent: are the USA and Canada the only countries where ice hockey is known as just hockey?

[ursus arctos]

If you make it to New York, I will take you to a game. Watching one game live makes seeing the puck on television much easier.

My recollection is that the Nordics, the former USSR and the former Czechoslovakia also consider the “ice” to be self evident. It is not a coincidence that none of them take the “field” version of the game particularly seriously.

Do you even consider the various forms of motor racing to be a sport?

[Janik]

My recollection is that the Nordics, the former USSR and the former Czechoslovakia also consider the “ice” to be self evident. It is not a coincidence that none of them take the “field” version of the game particularly seriously.

Not to the point of omitting the word from the name of the National Federation though.

Sweden - Svenska Ishockeyförbundet
Norway - Norges Ishockeyforbund
Denmark - Danmarks Ishockey Union
Finland (not Nordic, of course) - Suomen Jääkiekkoliitto (Jää = Ice)
Czech Republic - Českŭ svaz ledního hokeje (led and variants therefore = Ice)
Slovakia - Slovenskŭ zväz ľadového hokeja (l'ad and variants therefore = Ice)

The former USSR is a bit different, as the names in the actual language do not include the local word for 'ice', but the translation they use of their name into English does! c.f Russia translates Федерация хоккея России (Federatsiya Khokkeya Rossii) to "Ice Hockey Federation of Russia" despite the version in Russian conspicuously not containing any variant on лед. Ukraine and Belarus do similar. Lithuania go the other way, bizarrely. They call themselves Hockey Lietuva, which is regarded (reasonably) as clear enough to not really need an English version. However the full name in Lithuanian is Lietuvos ledo ritulio federacija. I spot a 'ledo' floating around in there...

That leaves just Hockey Canada and USA Hockey as the only ones in the world who always refer to themselves as running Hockey and not Ice Hockey. And that includes the World governing body, the IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation).


Something like the opposite is true in Field Hockey, but not as clear. The world governing body is the Fédération Internationale de Hockey, or the FIH. USA Field Hockey and Field Hockey Canada exist, but some others also include Field in the title such as the Romanian Federation. The Romanian Ice Hockey Federation is Federaţia Română de Hochei pe Gheaţă, btw. Romania chosen as an example as Hockey, Field and Ice came up in a conversation with a Romanian colleague one lunchtime this week, and he was completely flummoxed that there was any other sort of Hockey than Ice Hockey. The Romanians could drop 'pe Gheaţă' from their official name and it would be perfectly clear to all what they are saying they govern.

[ursus arctos]

My understanding is that the national federation names were influenced by the name of the international federation, which understandably went for the more precise variant. The names also tend to have been established a long time ago (both Hockey Canada and USA Hockey are 1990s rebrands, though the former names didn't include "ice" either).

For a better sense of contemporary usage, let's look at popular media in the six most prominent ice hockey countries other than Canada and the US:

Sweden = hockey

Finland = ice hockey

Czech Republic = hockey

Slovakia = hockey

Russia = hockey

Switzerland = ice hockey

[ad hoc]

Not to the point of omitting the word from the name of the National Federation though.

Sweden - Svenska Ishockeyförbundet
Norway - Norges Ishockeyforbund
Denmark - Danmarks Ishockey Union
Finland (not Nordic, of course) - Suomen Jääkiekkoliitto (Jää = Ice)
Czech Republic - Českŭ svaz ledního hokeje (led and variants therefore = Ice)
Slovakia - Slovenskŭ zväz ľadového hokeja (l'ad and variants therefore = Ice)

The former USSR is a bit different, as the names in the actual language do not include the local word for 'ice', but the translation they use of their name into English does! c.f Russia translates Федерация хоккея России (Federatsiya Khokkeya Rossii) to "Ice Hockey Federation of Russia" despite the version in Russian conspicuously not containing any variant on лед. Ukraine and Belarus do similar. Lithuania go the other way, bizarrely. They call themselves Hockey Lietuva, which is regarded (reasonably) as clear enough to not really need an English version. However the full name in Lithuanian is Lietuvos ledo ritulio federacija. I spot a 'ledo' floating around in there...

That leaves just Hockey Canada and USA Hockey as the only ones in the world who always refer to themselves as running Hockey and not Ice Hockey. And that includes the World governing body, the IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation).


Something like the opposite is true in Field Hockey, but not as clear. The world governing body is the Fédération Internationale de Hockey, or the FIH. USA Field Hockey and Field Hockey Canada exist, but some others also include Field in the title such as the Romanian Federation. The Romanian Ice Hockey Federation is Federaţia Română de Hochei pe Gheaţă, btw. Romania chosen as an example as Hockey, Field and Ice came up in a conversation with a Romanian colleague one lunchtime this week, and he was completely flummoxed that there was any other sort of Hockey than Ice Hockey. The Romanians could drop 'pe Gheaţă' from their official name and it would be perfectly clear to all what they are saying they govern.

I'd make a stab that there are large swathes of Romania where the word hochei would be largely unknown at all. Yes the assumption by those who had heard it that it would be pe gheata, but I bet half the country would not even know the word. Ice hockey is very localised here. Whereas field hockey is non existant

[Hot Pepsi]

I've tried to like ice hockey, but half the time I can't see the bloody puck, and the goals move. What kind of sport is it where the goals themselves actually move? Plus I think I'm against most sports where you can't see the faces of the competitors clearly, which rules out fencing (also because you need to constantly depend on a machine to tell you when they've made a hit) and indeed just about any sport where they dress like trainee astronauts.

On a tangent: are the USA and Canada the only countries where ice hockey is known as just hockey?

It's really not that hard to see the puck or, at least, know where it is by the way the players are moving. Once you've seen it live for a while, you'll find that it's easy to see it on TV. Of course, it's not always easy to see it when there's a scrum in front of the net, in which case you have to rely on the ref and the reaction of the people sitting right behind the goal.

Of course the goals move. If they didn't move, there'd be a lot more injuries. They don't move in the course of play. If the goal is dislodged, the game is paused. It seems like they're more moveable than they used to be. They could move in other sports - lacrosse, for example - but its rare that somebody crashes into it that hard to make it move.

I find basketball tedious, F1 is boring even though it really shouldn't be, and there are lots of other sports I'm not going to bother with, but the only sport that I think is actually making the world noticeably worse is golf (unless this topic includes stuff like hunting, of course)

Well, maybe American football is too. Actually, I'm sure it is. But we're stuck with it for now.

[ursus arctos]

Ice hockey goals are considerably easier to dislodge than they used to be.

When I was a kid, they were held in place by cylindrical spikes that fit the tube of the goal frame with relatively little clearance. In order to dislodge the frame, one had to lift it, which rarely happened in open play.

That rigidity also caused a lot of injuries, though. In the early 80s, Mark Howe was impaled by one of the spikes after a pile up dislodged the net and lost a lot of blood (he recovered). That led the NHL to develop the magnet-based system that is still used today. The magnets will give if the goal is hit with significant force, but not if it is hit by a puck or stick, nor if there isn't some weight and power behind the hit. I happen to think that the contemporary "butterfly" style of goaltending would never have come into play with the old anchoring, as goalies too often hit the posts with their skates while doing splits. A glancing blow will not dislodge the net, nor seriously damage the goalie, but a spike-based system would lead to really bad injuries.

[WOM]

If there was a competitive sport called Two Men Staring At A Spot On The Horizon, it would be infinitely more interesting than NBA Basketball.

[Cesar Rodriguez]

I've tried to like ice hockey, but half the time I can't see the bloody puck, and the goals move.

Historically I have been a big detractor of hockey on here - in fact just a while back I was bashing it on another thread not dissimilar to this one, but............

I've been spending a lot of time at the local rink in the past three months since my daughter took up figure skating and there are two rinks in the complex she is at. Anyway, whilst she is on one rink getting her Torvill and Dean on sometimes I mosey over to the other rink to check out the kids playing hockey and I've done a complete 180 on the sport. Hockey rules! Last Saturday I watched a game that must have been (in football terms) under 12 and it was ace, it ended 1-1 but it was as exciting as any amateur sport that I have watched in live and in person. Now that I have gotten into it I just purchased tickets to the local NHL team and I've gotta say I'm really looking forward to it.

It strikes me that hockey is a sport that you have to watch in person to gain a proper appreciation for.

[Sporting]

Come to think of it (interesting stuff here, by the way) hockey itself doesn't really grab me. Too many arcane rules such as not being allowed to hit the ball with the wrong side of the stick. In ice hockey, I think you can strike the puck with both sides - correct me if I'm wrong - and certainly in cricket any part of the bat is good to use, though not always with desired results for the batsman. I seem to remember that you can only use one side of the stick thingy in polo as well. Anyway, I'm not keen on hockey (field) but would certainly give the frozen version a chance given some of the posts here in favour.

[ursus arctos]

You can strike the puck with any part of your stick.

That said, the curve in virtually every stickblade makes it more difficult to control the puck on your backhand.

Unless you are Sydney Crosby

[Cesar Rodriguez]

As far as basketball goes the go to criticisms of its detractors are normally:
1. Too much scoring dilutes the importance of the individual scores so that each basketball is ho hum rather than a game defining moment (as in football) and
2. Given that there is so much scoring only the last 1/4 or 5 minutes of the game really matter.

I think they are both legitimate gripes and I understand their validity and don't argue otherwise.

For me the reason that basketball works is because I watch it in a way that works for me and my lifestyle.......

I have NBA league pass which gives me access to all of the games around the league, on a given night I will pick a game that I want to watch and for the first half I will enjoy the game but I can "dip in" and out of it (get up and make some coffee, do chores, make phone calls, check e-mail, quickly run to the store to grab something etc). Then once I can see it has developed into a good game (ie worth my investment of time) I will watch the second half more intently until by the 4th quarter my interest has built to a crescendo and I am glued to the TV watching each and every play.

To the point 2 above: One other thing you can do with league pass is bounce around the league and watch the last 1/4 or 5 minutes of all the close games thus missing out the so called "boring" bits.

I realize that basketball is not for everyone but once you have developed an appetite and appreciation for it, it is as good as any sport out there.

[ursus arctos]

I can't stop reading that in LaVar Ball's voice.

You monster . . .