Sports I don’t like

In response to my most recent post on Things I Don’t Like, Southtwelfth replied: “Biking and baseball?? You’re even more of a communist than I am, Alex!”

I have to reply to this reply.

Although I say it’s because it’s boring, the real reasons I don’t like baseball are because Little League was a constantly traumatic experience for me that most likely left me socially withdrawn, and because the Pittsburgh Pirates have been historically bad, and arguably the worst professional sports team, since I was 7, right around the time I started playing Little League.  I didn’t think it had anything to do with my political or economic views.  But maybe I’m wrong.

Now, nobody cares whether or not I like baseball.  What people seem to care about (at least people blogging for a certain American institute dealing primarily with enterprise) is the important debate Sport X: Socialist or Capitalist?

If I didn’t know better than to question the infallibility of The Institute’s word on soccer, I might actually put soccer into the capitalist column, but I do know better, so moving on:

Baseball - Capitalist

I think we can all agree on this one.  On the business side: No salary cap, and trading seems to balance cost and value alright.  The US exploits capital from the developing world.  In the game itself: Requires minimal teamwork (nonmarket coordination), ties are impossible.  There’s also a relatively small umpire to player ratio.

Cons: Sure there is redistributional revenue sharing and rookie drafts, and the crackdown on performance enhancing drugs (is that still going on?) is just red tape fussing with the invisible hand.  And, many new stadiums are partially publicly financed.  Also, baseball is widely popular in Venezuela and Cuba.  But I mean.  It’s baseball.  It has to be capitalist, right?

Bicycling - Capitalist

Turns out Southtwelfth is right about this one, although I had to think about it a while.  I associate biking with socialist enclaves like the Netherlands, France, and the West Coast, which led me to think it must be socialist.  But it turns out that the Union Cycliste International is not a players union, but a governing body.  But what really tips the “sport” of biking to the capitalist side is the laissez-faire attitude all bikers seem to have regarding traffic laws.  Content to ignore red lights and stop signs and ride on the fucking sidewalk, but flip their shit when a car doesn’t want to give them an entire lane, that’s pretty much Fortune 500 behavior.

[So that (1) we don’t just get into a pattern of sports I don’t like are capitalist and (2) I don’t only piss of bikers, here is a post about socialist soccer that had been marinating in my drafts folder since the World Cup began:

Nice things I can say about soccer:

• It is less boring than baseball
• The world cup only happens every four years
• My favorite soccer team doesn’t employ any rapists.

]