This is the worst time of the year. All we have left is baseball and …well I guess soccer but ya’ll know my opinion on that one. Actually I don’t even know if soccer is a thing right now, that’s how little attention I pay to it. It probably is, but I have no idea when the season runs from and to.

The worst part is baseball isn’t even interesting yet. We’re around the middle of the season. Teams have started to take shape, but so much could still change, and nothing truly compelling is going to start happening until after the all star break. Right now it’s just boring old baseball, every night, forever. If my team wins a game tomorrow, hooray…I guess? It just feels so worthless to watch or care about a single baseball game when so many happen.

It’s not like baseball can’t be compelling. Individual games can be great, but it’s the lack of scope or impact one game has that ruins it. Baseball gets truly interesting in September, when individual games start to actually feel like they matter. When the overall scope and narrative of the season commences into a cohesive, interesting series of events. This is of course one of the reasons why football works so well: every game has tremendous implications for the overarching narrative of a season.

What I really wanted to make this comic about though is about a fact that I hate, and it’s that Hockey and Basketball run parallel to each other. One of those needs to be offset. A perfect world will have every sport end right as another becomes interesting, and the basketball/hockey thing ruins it.

Baseball goes from April till October. October is when football really begins to take shape. The flukes and kinks of September are worked out, and the sport gets really good. Football’s primetime is January. Then football ends and we have basically the second half of basketball and hockey to go, and both have their primetimes in May. If I had full control, I would stagger these two. I hate watching them compete at the end because basketball will always win and hockey deserves some more attention. So I would move hockey up so that it ends in mid-May-ish (after March Madness), then stagger basketball to end in July. This way we never really go more than a month and a half without playoffs in a major sport. You could even end BBall at the end of June and put Soccer in there for August. Just imagine how wonderful this would be.

Playoff Baseball! Oh snap, now we get exciting, important football for 3 months! Then March Madness! Then Hockey finals! Then Basketball finals! Then Soccer or relevant baseball! The sports world would be perfect, because we’d always be getting the best parts of each year one after another. A never ending sports gasm! I’ve pretty much neglected Hockey as a fan because basketball is on at the same time and I’ve become more invested in that. But if I could just sort of ignore less important BBall while Hockey ramps up, I’d probably get into it, and I’d wager so would a lot more people.

I guess the ultimate thesis here is that of the big 4, hockey totally gets screwed. #SetHockeyFree

Now can someone tell me if the Orioles are doing good so I can pretend I watched them before this week? Go Birds