Opening Day for Baseball/Closing Time for Basketball
There’s less than one week until opening day of the 2025 Major League Baseball season, which means there is no shortage of excitement in my household!
I’ve resupplied my Orioles merch for 2025, and, of course, picked up my new Detroit Tigers cap as well (yes, you can root for two teams.. It’s okay).
Baseball is my mojo, my jam, my kung-fu!
I love it in every respect.
And baseball cards do, and always will, hold a special place in my heart.
They started it all for me a very long time ago, and they will continue with me for what I am hoping to be a long time yet.
John Dudley has done an amazing job going over each division in the MLB, previewing them and looking at them from a hobby-lovers perspective. I strongly encourage all of you to scroll through the past few weeks of Sports Card Nonsense newsletter articles on this subject. I know you’ll be impressed and amazed at the knowledge John drops on all of us! It’s time well-spent.
Which leads me to what I want to discuss this week — my complete and utter disinterest in basketball as a hobby and a professional sport as a rule.
The game is difficult to watch as a fan, the hobby is on tilt, and overall, it’s lost me totally in pretty much every possible way. And let me tell you, this is tough for me to admit. I played through college and there was a time, for a long time, that the game, and the hobby was my life.
Those days, I’m afraid, are long gone, buried beneath referees who desire to make the game about them, temperamental superstars implementing a term I loathe —“load management,” on what seems to be a regular basis (BTW: superstars, this is your job… play the game, every game. I have yet to get a load management day approved by HR in my office. Come back to Earth, you play basketball, you’re not curing cancer here. Play the game you’re paid to play every night), and a strategy that has been so dumbed down that the game is literally about shooting the ball from 35-feet and hoping it goes in. If it doesn’t, no worries, we’re going to do it again the next trip down the court… and the next trip, and the next trip…
The game I once loved is a shell of what it once was, and I’m afraid it will never even flirt with what it once was, which is very sad.
It’s a beautiful game, played by tough people and incredible athletes…. But there isn’t much value in that anymore, I’m afraid. Today’s game is about flash and gestures to the crowd and opposing teams. It’s about padding stats and playing for contracts.
The NBA is telling us they’re working on a way to help these issues, and I hope they come up with one, honestly.
But this longtime fan — I’m afraid I’ve lace up my last pair of high-top sneakers and bought my last overpriced box of Prizm basketball.
Heck, baseball is starting next week!
So farewell, hoops…