The general decline in standards today

[LizzieMaine]

Then why do less people actually watch it on TV? Why are the ratings falling?

I think a big part of it is that the national broadcasts are lousy -- all jumped full of that stupid Fox Sports hype, idiotic studio hosts, sideline reporters, thunderous logos, and all the rest of that idiocy. I don't watch the national broadcasts myself for just those reasons -- I listen to the radio instead.

 

[HudsonHawk]

There we must respectfully disagree. The only thing anyone could ever have honestly claimed to have learned from our games classes was how many push-ups they could do in a minute, or the rules of a given sport. There was absolutely zero attempt to teach us anything about health or physical fitness. It was widely accepted to be a joke class - great for those who given half an hour out from lessons would want to go and play football/soccer, no fun for those of us who had no interest in that. I suppose you could say I learned from it that sometimes in life you're forced to do things you hate, but I got more than enough of that in Physics.

I would argue that's a function of poor instruction, not an intrinsic lack of value of the subject. But, moving on...

 

[jamespowers]

1. More people are attending games in person.
2. More games are on TV. Each game has fewer people watching, but more people overall.
3. Baseball has never been a "television" sport like football.

The World Series for goodness sake? You mean more people attend that than watch it on TV?! lol lol I doubt that.

 

[jamespowers]

I think a big part of it is that the national broadcasts are lousy -- all jumped full of that stupid Fox Sports hype, idiotic studio hosts, sideline reporters, thunderous logos, and all the rest of that idiocy. I don't watch the national broadcasts myself for just those reasons -- I listen to the radio instead.

Yes, I can see a lot of idiocy there.
I am not sure about the radio audience. There are no figures.

 

[jamespowers]

We never had a gym until I was in high school, and even then we weren't allowed to use it for PE.

Wow! I should have been to school where you went back in the teens.

 

[HudsonHawk]

The World Series for goodness sake? You mean more people attend that than watch it on TV?! lol lol I doubt that.

No, I mean more people attend games today than they did back in the day. More people are watching baseball games every night than back in the day. I get it...you hate baseball and want it to die, so you make up stories about its demise. That doesn't make it true.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Wow! I should have been to school where you went back in the teens.

Seriously, I never heard of a school below high school level having a gym. We had PE outside.

 

[rjb1]

Different conditions for different places. Here in Nashville, when I came through, the junior high schools (7-8 grades) shared buildings with high schools (9-12 grades), so there was no school I know of which *didn't* have a gym (and PE).
For sixth grade and below we used the lunchroom as a gym (the tables folded up into the walls).

 

[LizzieMaine]

There has only ever been one gym in my home town town and from 1969 forward, it was used by all the schools. That same gym is still used by all the schools for everything from phys-ed to graduation.

Prior to the construction of that gym, basketball was played upstairs in the Union Hall. The players all wore thick leather knee pads in case they ran into the woodstove in the corner.

 

[dh66]

I actually have an Alabama cap that I wear on occasions when I really want to blend in (like a quick run the hardware store or something) and don't feel at all like dressing up. It's sort of my Alabama redneck disguise. It's amazing how one article of clothing can render a person almost invisible in a crowd.

Hahahaha...undercover.
You can go in any store, restaurant, public venue, whatever...around here, and start counting folks in Alabama gear and you soon realize it would be much easier to count folks not in Alabama gear.

We had p.e. every grade, 1st thru 12th. There was a gym at every school I attended. If the weather was nice we went out and ran around the track, otherwise we stayed in the gym and played basketball.

Roll Tide!

 

[nick123]

I hated PE then, and I hate it now. I'd rather my kids be unfit than subject them to that hellhole.

 

[jamespowers]

Seriously, I never heard of a school below high school level having a gym. We had PE outside.

It must have been tough to live way back when. All of our schools had a gym from K-12.
What di you do on raiy days?!

 

[jamespowers]

No, I mean more people attend games today than they did back in the day. More people are watching baseball games every night than back in the day. I get it...you hate baseball and want it to die, so you make up stories about its demise. That doesn't make it true.

Hmmmm.....
http://www.sbnation.com/2013/7/2/4484824/why-do-baseball-ratings-continue-to-trend-downward

and
http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybr...the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-mlbs-2013-attendance/

Interesting.

 

[jamespowers]

I hated PE then, and I hate it now. I'd rather my kids be unfit than subject them to that hellhole.

Agreed.

 

[jamespowers]

Hahahaha...undercover.
You can go in any store, restaurant, public venue, whatever...around here, and start counting folks in Alabama gear and you soon realize it would be much easier to count folks not in Alabama gear.

We had p.e. every grade, 1st thru 12th. There was a gym at every school I attended. If the weather was nice we went out and ran around the track, otherwise we stayed in the gym and played basketball.

Roll Tide!

Finally! Someone who had PE and gyms. lol lol

 

[LizzieMaine]

My brother and his wife were big on the ice hockey when it moved into Belfast at the end of the 20th century. Popular "family" spectator sport over there as there's only one team and no obvious political slant to the game, so it's never been tainted by tribal bigotries. I went to a couple of games with them to be social, way back - one in Belfast, one in London. I found both of them very hard to watch because it was all go for less than a minute, then all stop, then all go... what really emphasised it, though was the music. Nothing wrong with what they played (a lot of it stuff I like), but they would play the music as soon as play stopped, then stop it while play was on, then start it up again... Always a different song, so you just got thisconstant, broken stream of fragments of songs. It felt like listening to an ipod being controlled by someone with serious ADHD.

This is what it's like at baseball games today. They aren't allowed to play music when the ball is actually in play, but between pitches here comes the blasting, annoying, bone-dumb music. Every batter has to have his personal "walk-on music," like he was a WWF rassler, and it's always, *always* some stupid metal-head or hip-hop junk played at skull-crushing volume.

When I started going to games over forty years ago, the only music you heard was an organist playing show tunes before the game and between innings. There was a sixty-second, no-frills National Anthem before the first pitch, with no exaggerated whitneyfied vocal, and there was no gratuitous, overblown God Bless America interlude at the seventh inning stretch. The flag flew in center field, but they didn't take every chance to cram it in your face and make you kiss it.

There was also no pulsating electronic scoreboard with stupid animated ads, no costumed mascot acting the fool for the kiddies, and no pandering to the "family crowd" with arcades and shopping malls under the stands. You came to see a ball game, and that's all you saw. And we'd driven 200 miles to see a ball game and that's all we wanted to see.

There are a lot of debates around here about whether "the old ways" were truly better, but I submit that this is one case in which there really can be no argument on that point at all. If you want to go to a damn circus, go to the circus, and leave the ballgame for those of us who can appreciate it.

 

[sheeplady]

We had P.E. in every grade. We had cafeteria gyms (they took up the tables) in elementary. In the middle school (which was once k-12) we had a separate gym and the same in high school. In the Adirondacks if we didn't have a gym we wouldn't have had P.E. They'd send us out in the snow but when it got below 0F they didn't let us out of the building until school was over.

I know someone said that people who enjoy it tend to be naturally athletic, but I'm not naturally athletic at all. I honestly can't run unless something is chasing me (and I have to be convinced it's hungry). I also am really bad at catching things. My memory for who's on what team also tends to get a little muddy.


But you know what I found P.E. really good for?
Revenge.

So, you called my friend fat? Well, let's play this so I can get you good out on the field. So now you're on the opposite team. And you have the ball. And I'm on offense. And I have this great field hockey stick. Guess what's going to happen?

It is absolutely amazing how much the "rules" of the game are flexible enough to accommodate a person totally taking another one down a couple of pegs. One semester in Middle School I ended up in gym class with a bunch of bullies that I absolutely despised. Many of them were jocks. I was not a jock.

One day one of them told a friend of mine that she was fat inbred pregnant poor trailer trash (not the actual words, I've cleaned it up a bit, but just insert all the hurtful insults that replace those words).

That was the day the teacher, who was the coach for the field hockey team, approached me about playing varsity field hockey.


You do NOT call my friends fat.

 

[Matt Crunk]

Different conditions for different places. Here in Nashville, when I came through, the junior high schools (7-8 grades) shared buildings with high schools (9-12 grades), so there was no school I know of which *didn't* have a gym (and PE).
For sixth grade and below we used the lunchroom as a gym (the tables folded up into the walls).

My school, at the time I was there, was 1st through 12th grades (now it's K-12). It was divided into different buildings by elementary (1-6), junior high(7-8), and high school (9-12) but all on the same campus, with a common lunchroom, gymnasium, auditorium and band room. Since many of us from the community went to the same local kindergarten as well, a lot of us were classmates from K-12, some even going into college at the local university together.

 

[jamespowers]

This is what it's like at baseball games today. They aren't allowed to play music when the ball is actually in play, but between pitches here comes the blasting, annoying, bone-dumb music. Every batter has to have his personal "walk-on music," like he was a WWF rassler, and it's always, *always* some stupid metal-head or hip-hop junk played at skull-crushing volume.

When I started going to games over forty years ago, the only music you heard was an organist playing show tunes before the game and between innings. There was a sixty-second, no-frills National Anthem before the first pitch, with no exaggerated whitneyfied vocal, and there was no gratuitous, overblown God Bless America interlude at the seventh inning stretch. The flag flew in center field, but they didn't take every chance to cram it in your face and make you kiss it.

There was also no pulsating electronic scoreboard with stupid animated ads, no costumed mascot acting the fool for the kiddies, and no pandering to the "family crowd" with arcades and shopping malls under the stands. You came to see a ball game, and that's all you saw. And we'd driven 200 miles to see a ball game and that's all we wanted to see.

There are a lot of debates around here about whether "the old ways" were truly better, but I submit that this is one case in which there really can be no argument on that point at all. If you want to go to a damn circus, go to the circus, and leave the ballgame for those of us who can appreciate it.

There certainly is a lot of circus involved.

 

[ChiTownScion]

But as the culture I grew up in is steadily erased by "gentrifying" people-from-away I'm seeing less of that kind of allegiance in kids growing up. Most of the younger fans I know today are what we call "pink hats" -- people who jumped on the bandwagon in 2004-2007 when it was the hip, trendy thing to do, and who don't have that deep heritage going back generations. We old-timers actively resent the pink-hats as one more example of middle-class cultural appropriation.

That's why the Red Sox are important to me. I couldn't care less about football, hockey, or basketball, because they weren't part of my cultural fabric. But I'll go to my grave a Sox rooter, no matter what.

In Chicago, you were generally a Cubs or White Sox fan when I was growing up. There were a few oddballs who had downstate Illinois roots who favored the St. Louis Cardinals, but they were rare. So... how did I end up a Boston Red Sox fan?

In 2004, our late son John wanted to get me a baseball cap for Father's Day. He refused to buy a Cubs cap, and my wife warned him of dire consequences of he bought a White Sox cap. He suggested a Yankees cap, and my wife warned him that such a gift would really infuriate me.

She then suggested a Red Sox cap: we'd been to Cambridge for a medical conference, loved Boston, and she thought it might be a nice gift. And I began wearing the cap: I have to admit that the fans of any city who celebrate a Super Bowl win by chanting, "Yankees suck !" endeared themselves to me. Lo and behold, the Red Sox had a winning season- the "next year" that had eluded me for five decades as a Cubs fan.

I attend a few Red Sox Nation/ Chicago events, I'm not a die hard fan, but I enjoy watching Boston win games-- even against That South Side Team and certainly against the Yankees. Proud to say that when I took the Circle Line boat tour around Manhattan a few years ago, I made it a matter of principle to turn my back on Yankee Stadium when we went by.

Our son John was murdered at the age of nineteen in 2010, so that kind of makes the whole cap and subsequent Red Sox affiliation episode a bit bittersweet. It's still on my Bucket List to see a game at Fenway someday, though.