Andy Rooney is crazy

Andy Rooney isn’t just that senile old guy on 60 Minutes. He writes columns too.

He wrote an entire column about baseball, yet decided to have this in the beginning (emphasis mine):

My disinterest in baseball as a kid has lasted all my life. I’m still not interested in the game. I don’t watch it on television or follow it in the newspaper. I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me.

OK, so you don’t like baseball, but you’re going to write a whole story about it. That makes sense. And today’s stars are all guys named Rodriguez … are you kidding me? Is that supposed to be funny? Rooney continues with several thoughts that should’ve never seen the light of day.

… the player who starts the game as pitcher should have to play all nine innings without a substitution. A pitcher hardly ever plays more than a few innings and then the manager replaces him with someone who isn’t as good.

Umm … so when a pitcher like Kei Igawa is replaced by Mariano Rivera (or Tim Wakefield by Jonathan Papelbon, or Jorge Sosa by Billy Wagner, or Brett Tomko by Takashi Saito, etc.), he’s being replaced by someone who isn’t as good? Really?

There are 30 major league baseball teams, but sometimes it seems as though the New York Yankees are the only team that ever wins the World Series.

Six different teams have won the World Series since the Yankees last won one.

Five teams have never won a World Series. What in the world keeps baseball fans in those cities coming to games?

I’ve been an Angel fan since the early 1990s, and when I started rooting for them, they had never won a World Series. I guess I just should’ve stopped following them before 2002 then. And as for the five teams — there’s actually eight of them (D-Rays, Mariners, Rangers, Padres, Brewers, Astros, Nationals, Rockies). But the sport Rooney later claims to like, football, has 15 NFL franchises that have yet to win a Super Bowl (Falcons, Bills, Lions, Vikings, Eagles, Chargers, Saints, Bengals, Browns, Texans, Seahawks, Cardinals, Panthers, Jaguars, Titans). I got the data for the last two sentences from comment #36 on this excellent thread at Baseball Think Factory.

I ended up as the backstroker on the swimming team. I was a good swimmer but hated doing laps for practice. The water was always cold and after half an hour in the chlorinated pool my eyes were red and my skin wrinkled. It took the fun out of swimming.

Thank you Andy, for enlightening us. Not about baseball, but about how senile you are.

(Hat-tip to the previously mentioned Baseball Think Factory and Fire Joe Morgan)