Sports from the past week.

Past sports article for the week of 4/19/06

Three strikes and you're out!

By, Cozmic

Four and you will most likely be somewhere in the area north of Germany and west of Finland. That's right, it's everyone's favourite country to make fun of, Sweden!
And today we shall talk the national pastime of those United States of America, and how it is played in Sweden. Well, obviously, being an American sport, most Swedes just don't understand it. At all. It is very much the same thing with American football, a game that has surprisingly little to do with feet. The basic understanding of the sport would be that you hit the ball with a bat (initial attempts were thwarted by the ultrasonic sounds the creatures emitted) and then you run around the bases. And then we realized that you were supposed to use a not-actual-bat-but-rather-a-big-stick-that-you-call-a-bat to hit the ball, and that you got to wear gloves to catch the ball. Somewhere along the line the throwing ball and not hitting people in the face with it managed to occur as well. That someone else is supposed to throw it has only been recently discovered.

The biggest confusion seems to be simply about the bases. It was, in fact, so hard to figure these out that the Swedes invented a variant of baseball with only one base that effectively struck out all runners. Unless they were at the cones. It is rather weird how the addition of even more geometric shapes somehow made the game simpler. As it stands, playing with four bases leads to an entirely new dimension of giant issues, with nobody knowing where to throw the ball, regardless of it actually being quite simple. There is just something about that whole order thing that seems to be quite impossible to grasp. Not that I'm complaining, it brings about quite a few homeruns through sheer confusion.
Of course, the runners suffer from equally much confusion, suffering from a definite “Never look back” mentality, unless, of course, someone is behind them, or about to run past them, creating just as much trouble.

Yet there remains more confusion to be cleared out, such as points. You only get one point for whatever you do, something the alternate version corrected by making a homerun worth four points, instead of a measly one and some glory. Or what about the fact that a really bad team can spend the entire game out on the field, or.. well, you get my point. All in all, maybe Swedes should just stick to hockey.