The trouble with baseball is that it is not played the year round.
Football is pretty much played 16 times a year, where training is kind of a year-round thing.
As a kid from Detroit, I played whatever sport was in season: football, basketball, wrestling, whatever it was. I was an active kid.
In the summertime, I played Little League baseball; football in the fall; basketball in the winter.
My favorite was always whichever sport was in season. I think these days it's almost saddening to see kids who are 10 or 11 and are forced to choose one sport and specialize in that sport and play that sport year-round. By playing different sports... you become a better all-around athlete.
. . perhaps the greatest satisfaction on the first day of the season is the knowledge in the evening that the whole of the rest of the season is to come.
I played everything. I played lacrosse, baseball, hockey, soccer, track and field. I was a big believer that you played hockey in the winter and when the season was over you hung up your skates and you played something else.
February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
Football has an off-season. Basketball has an off-season. TV has an off-season. Everything has an off-season except wrestling.
Other sports culminate at different times of the year, but the NFL is in the fourth quarter - that's where the money is.
It's hard for anyone in the 24-hour news cycles that we all live in now to follow something that the first round is played in March and the final finishes in December. I understand the challenges there.
Everybody is a football senator for a while, but it is a much shorter season and there are not that many teams that are on top, and baseball is just built into the American psyche.
I played hockey in the winter, and then I would play golf in the summer. But I always knew I'd be a golfer.
I'm just a seasonal guy. Basketball, football, baseball, boxing, golf. Give it to me all the time.
