15 Reason To Hate (Er,... I Could Do Without ) Ba Living...

[Jaredberryman]

In my opinion, baseball doesn't take any more intelligence than any other sport. You just have more time to think about what is about to happen. In other sports, like basketball, for instance, you have to make smart decisions on the fly. I have played baseball, football, basketball, soccer, and other sports, and they all pretty much require the same intelligence. As far as the use of statistics go, I think professional football is much more in depth than anything else right now, and requires a lot of intelligent decisions, especially from quarterbacks, defensive backs, linebackers, and other skill positions. I think it takes a higher amount of concentration to play basketball or soccer because you must make quick decisions. If I think about the managers of said sports, the coaches that have to make the most decisions are football and basketball coaches, who determine nearly every strategy for their team.

Basketball and football also use highly advanced statistics like they do in baseball. Soccer hasn't caught up with advanced statistics yet, but it will eventually. It also requires smart play.

 

[Jaredberryman]

Terrific that you have an interest in etymology, however the fact soccer is currently north american reference to football. I am sure we could spend endless hours discussing late 19th century phrases and words, however it would be fairly irrelevant to the sporting lexicon of the 21st century. Not that it matters.....

Football is the world's game, it has the greatest amount of players in the world and the most popular club side in the world. Watching Manchester United, Barcelona or (if they have any sense) Liverpool is one of the few things that unites kids from the Americas, Europe and Asia. It is global, beautifully simple and yet devastingly complex. It is experiencing an all time high in the US, if it ever makes the crossover from a kids, womens and colleges sport into the working classes (non college educated folks I guess) in the US it would not be long before the US won a world cup. With its growth and existing popularity in the US latino population that moment may not be far away.

I have played soccer in some tournaments (football, let's not get all worried about semantics), and it is a fun team game, just as fun as the American sports. Football is definitely the world's game, but I have to tell you, clubs are way behind when it comes to advanced statistics as compared to professional sports teams in the USA, especially in the area of scouting. I think soccer/football is a complex game that requires great strategy and know how in order to produce a good team. It requires the same amount of intelligence as baseball, football, basketball, etc. I know that soccer is an incredibly intricate game. That being said, professional clubs have some real catching up to do when it comes to the use of statistics and analyzing data in the sport. Personally, I think the coaches and directors of the sport are very old fashioned, and like it that way. I think this is definitely a contribution that the USA could bring to the game.

 

[internationalguy]

What makes soccer so popular around the world is its simplicity. You don't need any special gear to play it. Kids play it on the streets down here in Brazil.. heck Pele even used to play with a stuffed up sock since he and his friends were too poor to even have a proper ball. Popularity in the states has grown a lot. Before the 94 world cup it was like an alien sport of sorts, it still is very low on the list but nowhere near as it used to be.

It's not the first time I hear someone refer to baseball as the most cerebral sport. In a way I see where they're coming from. That doesn't mean that other sports or people who like other sports are stupid or should be insulted in any way ajoknoblauch (why can't you be nice once in your life?). Personally, I can't wait for the NFL season to kick off, maybe this will be our year.

 

[ajoknoblauch]

What makes soccer so popular around the world is its simplicity. You don't need any special gear to play it. Kids play it on the streets down here in Brazil.. heck Pele even used to play with a stuffed up sock since he and his friends were too poor to even have a proper ball. Popularity in the states has grown a lot. Before the 94 world cup it was like an alien sport of sorts, it still is very low on the list but nowhere near as it used to be.

It's not the first time I hear someone refer to baseball as the most cerebral sport. In a way I see where they're coming from. That doesn't mean that other sports or people who like other sports are stupid or should be insulted in any way ajoknoblauch (why can't you be nice once in your life?). Personally, I can't wait for the NFL season to kick off, maybe this will be our year.

Agreed that one of soccer's strengths is its simplicity, and the fact that relatively little equipment is necessary, and that it can be played in reduced spaces if necessary. The same is true, to some extent, with basketball, which you can even practice alone. Baseball, on the other hand, requires a large dedicated space of irregular shape, and a great deal of equipment (though Dominican and Cuban kids seem to manage pretty well).

Personally, I don't care much for any kind of football, including the organized version whose primary goal is to hurt players on the other side, but I'll acknowledge that they're all athletes (as opposed to, say, participants in fossil-fuel "sports"). There is an interesting article on women's softball in this week's New Yorker (http://www.newyorker...fa_fact_mcgrath), which notes that "playing third base at the elite level requires a quicker reaction time than returning a Serena Williams serve does."

 

[robwerwe]

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[Lamb]

Argentina is NOT a European country. It is a New World immigrant country. Baseball is flourishing in the US, and even more so in much of Latin America, not to mention Australia (which will host its first major league games next year) and parts of Asia. It is growing even in Europe, and I might add that since last year, the first two Brazilian players have reached the major leagues, but Argentina lags far behind its larger neighbor in many other things as well.

 

[ajoknoblauch]

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In reality, soccer players are best known for their skills at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQojgdfUAe0

 

[ajoknoblauch]

We've drifted a little from the original topic, but it's worth pointing out that Nate Silver, who precisely predicted Obama's easy victory over Romney at a time when traditional wisdom suggested a tossup, "first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009."

Silver has since left the New York Times for ESPN, where he will return to analyzing baseball and other sports without abandoning his political interests, apparently.