Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Relaxation Doesn't Have a Heavy Metal Theme Song

Attended tonight's Mariners-A's tilt at Safeco Field with my family and saw Felix Hernandez toss a new career-high 13 strikeouts. I feel I'm connected to dominant performances by King Felix, as I was lucky enough to have seen his previous career-high of 12 punchouts, also against the A's, on Opening Day in 2008. Continuously, as I get older and more knowledgeable about baseball, I really appreciate watching paramount pitching performances. But that's not really what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to bitch about some 'problems' with the game of baseball as I see it.
First of all, I'm not trying to pick at M's new manager Daren Brown, but why in the hottest reaches of hell did he pull Hernandez in favor of that hack closer Aardsma for the 9th?!? Felix was beating the shit out of the A's. He was cruising. And that also meant we had to endure that ridiculous metal intro for Aardsma that goes on waaaay too long and is a hype engine as full of crap as most political campaign ads. The heart of my argument is this: I enjoy, love baseball and going to baseball games, but the pastoral, meditative side of the game is being ruined by all the racket and noise. Every player has 16 different songs they walked to the plate to. Every 35 seconds, some retard at a sound board pushes a button to play an annoyingly stiff and hollow rhythmic noise, because we fans need to be prompted at exact moments to cheer.
Instead of bitching, albeit creatively, in endless ways about how there is too much over-amplified noise at a baseball stadium, I'd just like to posit that maybe it's time to cut out a bunch of the audio detritus and let people return to attending baseball games in the calm, intellectual and reflective environs of old parks.
Or maybe I should just start going to more minor league games.

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