by Rob Perez

The Sports Void

For some people, August is not a month. For some people, August is a waiting room. There’s just not a lot of professional sports on television. Basketball’s on summer vacation. Hockey’s long gone. And football doesn’t start until September.

Some people will tell you that you can watch baseball. And this is technically true. But then you would be watching baseball. True, watching baseball is more exciting than watching golf—but that’s a very, very low bar. I would like someone to do a study and see whether fans watching baseball or golf on television were more likely to fall asleep first. Then I’d like to know whose sleep was deeper.

Baseball is a numbers game. You know what’s not a sport? Numbers. I know how to score a baseball game. I know what an F9/9-2 double play is. And yet it’s hard to take the game seriously anymore. Moneyball’s Michael Lewis once said the only way to make baseball more exciting was to put a lion on the field. I’d watch that. I wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt. Especially not the lion. But I’d like to score a play that had a lion in it. I mean, a 6‑L‑3 double play. That’s short to lion to first. Rare, but by the book, I think.

Very serious football fans will tell you the season has already started. The Wife went to opening day at training camp. Alas, training camp is not a sport. Training camp is practice. And practice—while critical to sport—is not sport. You can’t win practice. You can’t even score practice. Nobody has a trophy on their shelf for practice. There are no banners hanging from the stadium that say: “2023 World Champions at Practice.” And there are no bronze, life-size statues of players that make fans stop, place a hand on a child’s shoulder, and whisper, “You should have seen him practice.”

The most interesting thing that happened at training camp is the mascot was there. I guess the mascot also has to practice. I mean, the mascot can’t just show up on opening day and wing it, can he? Well, now that I think of it, the whole job is just winging it. But maybe winging it takes practice. Or maybe the mascot’s not there for the fans. Maybe the mascot’s there to acclimate the players. I suppose an eight-foot horned cartoon man takes a bit of getting used to. Otherwise, the new guy doesn’t even catch a glimpse of him until the first game. That kind of thing could rattle a rookie.

While some people this time of year have too little to watch, I have the opposite problem. I watch tennis. Football season is six months long. Baseball is seven. Basketball is eight. But the tennis season? You’re not going to believe this, but it’s true: the tennis season is eleven months long.

I’m a serious fan of tennis. I love tennis all the way to my bones. I love to play tennis. I even love to teach tennis. And I love to watch tennis. But you know what I cannot watch for eleven months in a row? Tennis. Fun fact: did you know there are twelve months in a year? Which means—as soon as tennis ends, guess what? More tennis?! (They say tennis players get one month off. Most of them spend it recovering from Cincinnati. Not the tournament—just the city.)

So this August, let’s agree that one man’s sports void is another man’s sports glut. Let’s also agree that sport is not practice. Sport is sport. And there are always sports. And some people play pickleball. Thus, I suppose sometimes we—fans, viewers, mascots—just have to wing it. Which, of course, is why we practice.