After considerable thought, I hereby offer my predictions for the 2008 Major League Baseball season. Unlike other prognosticators, I guarantee my predictions. Therefore, feel free to bet large amounts of money that each of the following will occur, for certain, during the 2008 MBL season:
Unabashed optimism will surround the ritual of spring training.
Thousands of dignitaries and celebrities will show up at Opening Day baseball games to be seen.
Columnists will crank out thousands of articles on baseball, each of them suggesting that following Major League Baseball is important to the overall scheme of life.
Some young relatively unknown baseball players will impress the fans this year.
Some of the high-priced veterans will not do as well as the fans hoped and the fans will grumble, many of them expressing their displeasure at length on sports radio call-in shows, arguing that those players are washed up, on drugs, too old or slackers.
Millions of fans will go to the baseball stadiums, willingly paying thousands of dollars to attend baseball games and to buy outrageously over-priced beer and nachos (at least $170 for a family of four). Thousands of these fans will be named Daniel, Robert, Michael, James, Mary, Susan, Karen, Linda or Donna.
During each MLB game, the fans will be subjected to an unending stream of advertising in the form of videos, posters and PA announcements.
Each team will play about 162 games, totaling about 2,500 games. [Note: Scientists have calculated that each team should play 256 games each to make certain that the truly best team ends up with the best record.]
The “great” teams will lose about 60 games each. “Horrible” teams will nonetheless win about 60 games each.
Fans will continue to call the playoff finale the “World Series,” even though teams from only two countries will be invited.
Huge numbers of fans who have no athletic talent will buy expensive sports jerseys bearing the names of baseball players who are athletically gifted.
Some of the players will set obscure records this year, yet this will nonetheless be deemed important enough to discuss by baseball announcers.
Thousands of drunk fans will get into fist fights that begin when one of the drunk fans insults the other fan’s team by saying something like “Your team sucks.”
Players who are being interviewed by the media will employ an endless stream of clichés and platitudes.
Fans will often spend more than one million person-hours watching a single baseball game in person (36,000 fans during a 2.75 hour long game).
One million person hours is the equivalent of 500 people working full time for a year.
[This calculation does not include travel time, which would increase the time commitment dramatically].Many of the managers will tell the sports reporters that they have things under control regarding their teams, even though they know they don’t have things under control.
Based on the time, money and thought they will commit to watching games, huge numbers of fans will care more about the performance of their baseball team than
they care about feeding the poor, the state of their marriages, or the well-being of the U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
Even after carefully watching a game in person, many fans will flock to the radio and read tomorrow’s newspapers to see what other people thought about that same game.
Most of the team members will sit on the bench for most of the game, every game.
Many of the players will make more money in a week than the fans make in a year; nonetheless, the fans will continue to scrape together enough money to come to the games.
There will thus be a massive aggregate payment running from the poor to the rich. To make sure that that money continues to flow from the poor to the rich, the pejorative phrase “fair weather fan” will be amply employed.
It would take the annual household incomes of 500 families to equal the annual salary of the highest paid professional baseball players.
Baseball writers and announcers will uniformly hide their wretched track records (regarding their baseball predictions from previous years) when they make this year’s predictions about who will win the playoffs and the World Series.
Thousands of beaming fathers will drag their young children to baseball games to introduce them to baseball, but many of the children will be bored.
On thousands of occasions, a player who makes a terrific play will tell the media that it was no big deal, even though he will think that he was quite impressive.The national anthem will be played at the beginning of each game to make the game seem more important than it is (If you doubt this, imagine the effect if they played the Looney Tunes theme instead of the National Anthem).
Throughout the season, numerous baseball players will be portrayed as heroes for their participation in orchestrated events characterized as selfless giving.
A significant portion of the fans attending games in person will pay very little attention to the game itself.
The managers of the teams with losing records will strive to point out their team’s “positives.”
All across the country, those fans who spy their baseball heroes at restaurants and bars will mention those sightings to their friends to impress them.
The winner of the World Series will be declared the world’s “best” team, even though that might not be true (because that team just happened to get hot during the playoffs and World Series after barely squeaking into the series.)
Even three years after the season ends, most of the fans won’t remember anything at all that occurred during most of the games they followed in person, on TV or on the radio.
MLB games will seem important to many fans merely because there were so many other people attending.
I want you to hold me to these predictions. At the end of the 2008 season, please come back to this site and compare to see how I did with these predictions. I suspect that you’ll be amazed at my level of accuracy. You might think “That’s amazing!” and “How did you do this?” Well, that’s my little secret.
If I’ve missed any sure-fire predictions, feel free to comment.
