Baseball In The Daytime: 8-8-08

It's Friday, so we have a Cubs day game, which we'll get to in due time. But you'll also notice that we kick off the Olympics tonight--the Chinese have a mythical connection to the number 8, so 8-8-08 gets them all hot in the shorts.

The Olympics actually already began. They've had soccer games for several days now, because for some fucking reason you can't fit enough soccer games into three God damned weeks and they have to spill over into a fourth, thus interrupting my ritual morning intake of Joe Scarborough. Fuck you, soccer. Actually, it's not soccer's fault. I'm pretty sour on the entire Olympic movement right now, for reasons I will list in excruciating detail.

REASONS THE OLYMPICS SUCK

The Opening Ceremonies These already happened as well. You see, it's a big round world, and China is several hundred hours ahead or behind us. NBC was able to cut that delay to only thirty hours, by excavating a site in rural Kansas, digging straight down through the Earth's crust until they came out in China. But all the images were upside down, which required descrambling. That's why it will look like Beijing is so polluted, it's the descrambling.

The Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics are the gayest event ever conceived. They even have a giant display of two Greek dudes having anal sex, right there on the track. They don't show it on US television because of that prude John Ashcroft, but it's there. They have a bunch of children wearing scarves and dressed as candles and they throw confetti. Good God it's gay.

No Baseball The IOC is getting rid of baseball, because they say it's too American. Never mind that the U.S. has won exactly one gold and one bronze medal in the entire history of Olympic baseball. Never mind that we sucked at the World Baseball Classic too. Never mind that it's the most popular sport in Asia and Central America and the fastest growing sport in Europe and South America.

MLB fucked this all up in the first place, of course. Had Bud Selig instituted IOC-level drug testing back in the 90s we'd have Dream Team Olympic involvement by now, but Bud decided he'd rather let Sammy Sosa turn into a backhoe.

Baseball is too American, yet curling is an Olympic sport. Curling. 95 per cent of the world's curlers live within 50 miles of the U.S.-Canada border. But that's a winter sport, and the Winter Olympics suck even more than the summer version. One thing Curling has in its favor is that it is not one of the...

Judged Sports If winners and losers in your sport are determined by judges, your sport sucks. The Olympic motto is the hendiatris Citius, Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for "Faster, Higher, Stronger". You can objectively measure who is faster, who goes higher, who is stronger. But if you need to empanel judges to dictate which gymnast or diver or skateboarder was the most artistically masterful, you need to turn in your sport card, pack up your Greek buttfucking statue, and head for Broadway.

Lack Of An Enemy When we were kids, amidst the Cold War, the Olympics were fucking awesome. We attached our faces to the television and watched the Games in Los Angeles, in Seoul, in Barcelona. We watched Americans bust their asses to defeat the evil soldiers of the Communist Bloc. We were morally superior, politically superior, and we didn't hook our female shotputters up to intravenous cattle steroids like East Germany did. When Carl Lewis or Mary Lou Retton or Greg Louganis won, our system of democracy and capitalism trumped a totalitarian ideology.

Now, I could care less if the U.S. beats anyone. I'm wearing shoes made in China, a shirt made in Bangladesh, and typing on a laptop constructed in Mexico. An impressive American medal tally won't lower the price of gas or reduce the global threat of terrorism.

Superserious Political Diatribes in Allegedly Lighthearted Sports Comedy Blogs See above.

REASONS THE OLYMPICS RULE

Pollution The Chinese turned off all their factories a month ago, meaning the supply of poison toys available for Christmas will be dangerously low. Most Chinese factories are powered by a mix of dirty coal and Taiwanese children, which really fouls up the air. But look at it now! It's breathtaking!

Green Goo Beijing's waterways are choked with some seriously chunky algae, which the locals have been removing for competitions like sailing and open-water swimming--yummy.

Human Rights Here in the U.S., we're used to letting hippies and rabblerousers ruin everything. Not so in the land of the Great Wall. Protest Tibet? You get shot. Good policy.

So in closing, I predict that these Olympics will suck balls, with the exception of horrible ecological travesty and lack of free speech. Enjoy!

St. Louis @ Chicago Cubs, 12;20 Mountain Braden Looper and Ted Lilly renew this rivalry, which no one really cares about. Seriously. There aren't any decent baseball kerfuffles going on. Giants-Dodgers, Yankees-Red Sox, the various city and state interleague affairs, all boring. I thought that this Rockies-Diamondbacks scrum was going to really heat up, but then the Rockies decided to suck this year. Feel free to watch anyway, and Play Ball!