What Hope, Baseball?

The Nationals had a short rain delay tonight due to a short but powerful thunderboomer over the Park. TheGuy was out running errands in the car when this happened and heard a bit of the rain delay radio banter (which is always fun to listen to.) Tonight’s game is an Interleague game and the radio guys were apparently taking calls about the problems with interleague play. There are 16 teams in the National League and 14 teams in the American League. If you pay much attention to baseball at all, you immediately recognize that this doesn’t make sense.

Baseball is a carefully-constructed game of symmetry and balance. The schedules each season are designed to be as balanced and symmetrical as possible as well. But two leagues of differing sizes and interleague play? It totally screws up the balance. And this is completely a baseball decision – they could declare that a team from the NL  move to the AL. The debate is about which team, of course. But apparently when the Diamondbacks were added, they were inexplicably and unsymmetrically put in the National League. TheGuy told me consensus on the program was that perhaps a new commissioner could right this dreadful wrong.

But in thinking about this it just struck me that this demonstrates the sheer intractability of our political and planetary challenges. If even baseball, a game designed to be as symmetrical, balanced, and thoughtful as possible, if even baseball can’t address this minor imbalance that presents an obvious management solution without years of jibber-jabber, what hope the rest of us?

No hope for baseball, no hope for America.

Or Earth.

I know, I know I said I would try to blog more. Fail! And I’m really really missing it – many things I’ve wanted to spend more than 140 characters writing about lately – but no time and no energy. Sigh. Hope to post soon about TLG turning 2, though!