.

DAD:  Hey, John.  Check this out.  Here's a CBS list of 25 reasons football is better than baseball.

JOHN:  :: shrugs ::  ["what's next?  A list of 25 reasons that three-on-three hoops is better than plunging the toilet?  Okay, just gimme number 22.]

DAD:  What would be your reason?

JOHN:  What?!  There's always something HAPPENING in football.

DAD:  What do you mean.  Felix striking out the side is nothing happening?

JOHN:  :: rolls eyes :: They never score in baseball.  Three outs, next inning.  Three outs, next inning.  When somebody does hit a home run, you didn't know it was going to happen.  It's not like you can get on your feet and root for a big play to happen.

In football they're always moving the ball down the field.  If they didn't score, they just moved it from the 40 to the 50.  Or if it's the Seahawks, they just moved it from the 25 to the other team's 40.

dad thinks:  there is a whale of a lot of dead space in a baseball game, yeah.  Maybe you should get like bars in left field and center field so people have something to watch besides "nothing."

dad thinks:  if you put an e.e.g. onto a sports fan's brain, and measured the % of time that he was stimulated by the spectacle, what would it be?  Stimulated 70-90% of the time in football, 5-15% in baseball? 

JOHN:  Every play in football, all eleven players are involved.

dad thinks:  The isolation of the pitcher and batter are unique to baseball, no doubts there.  It's what makes sabermetrics possible, the isolation of the sports duel without teammates creating "noise."  That isolation is the very reason that SSI exists.  (Is that argument enough for football right there?)

dad thinks:  the fact that the pitcher and batter are isolated has its upside, but it also has its downside.  Supposing that the Mariners' 50% of that duel ... Joe Saunders or Brendan Ryan ... is completely boring?  You don't have that with the Seahawks.  Every time the ball is snapped, Sherman and Thomas and Bennett are swirling around the field.

JOHN:  They're hitting each other.  It's intense.  It's a hardcore game.

dad thinks:  until they start making rules that it's 15 yards against your team, when you pull a QB down by his shoelaces.

JOHN:  If Marshawn Lynch were born 2,000 years ago, he'd have been in the arena, him against five guys, and they'd a had no chance.

DAD:  That is exactly what he looks like, yeah.  He does look like a gladiator who is out of place and out of time.

MOM:  The thing about football is that it's MANLY!  It's HIGH-TESTOSTERONE!  :: shudders with admiration ::

dad thinks:  don't you wish you had a woman like mine, you SSI poster feebs

.........

Docter Dee:   You know, it's a true proverb, Sports is Vicarious War.  I'm well-and-truly tired of being Poland 1939.  Think I'll play a different Strat-O team for a coupla months.  I'll go with Greece 325 BC.  You take Iberia.

Any scholars of Alexander in here?  No kidding, you would not believe the quotes from his contemporaries.  He was Brad Pitt handsome, Brad Pitt chill, Arnold Schwarzenegger untouched by fear or pain, they say his eyes sparkled and if you stood close to him he smelled like roses ... If ever there was a guy destined, a guy born to do a job, a BIG job, that guy was it.  Moment the job was over, he just stopped living, when he was at like Sidney Rice's age.

Richard Sherman was born to his job, too.  Marshawn Lynch.  Russell Wilson, of course.  The other guy destined to play football, maybe?  Bruce Irvin.  A speed-rushing DE who intercepts the ball downfield.  I never in my life saw an NFL play like Bruce Irvin's interception.

The Mariners have two guys who smell like flowers.  Felix, and ... Mike Zunino.  (Not Seager.  He's a baseball rat.  He smells like sweat socks, in a good way.)

You ever notice that?  The M's have three new guys who seem Destined, Born to Play Baseball, that being Zunino, Taijuan, and Paxton.  You got three new guys who have the scent of roses, which brings our team total to 1+3=4.  And ... it's "uncool" to get too into them.  

SSI is all about players of destiny, babe.  As one amigo put it:  there are a lot of people who would have traded Edgar.  And in the name of WAR.  No, at SSI we "get it."  Taijuan and Paxton are worth fifty something elses.  Richard Sherman is worth fifty Walter Thurmonds.  Felix Hernandez is worth a lot more than five Yankee prospects of our choice.

I got your War right here, pokey.

...........

All we gotta do, is put down one stack of Strat-O cards, and pick up the other stack.