I tend to agree with the flopping stuff, especially when the three guys with "Doctor" shirts come out and remove the guy with a stretcher and 1 minute later the guy is back on the field.

My pet peeve with NFL football is the excessive celebrations after scoring (heck these days, the guys celebrate when they make a tackle). It is rather poor sportsmanship.

I must admit, I did watch the US-Italy game yesterday (the Braves-Red Sox game was a bust and NBC is horrible with golf). I somewhat enjoyed the game although the red card stuff was dreadful with the US-Italy game. I am watching Japan-Croatia; however, I went up stair to take care of some business and when I came back 20 minutes later, nothing happened in my absence. I have to admit, when goal scoring opportunities come up they are exciting; however, it takes a long time. It is like eating crawfish or crabs, a lot of work for a little meat.

A baseball player, let alone a basketball players, gets his face smashed and bloodied the way MacBride's was in yesterday's match, and he's on the 15 day dl.

Not uncommon tho in true football for someone to get stitched up on the sideline and return to the match.

You mean like Dave Roberts yesterday? If a baseball player ends up that bloody, or carted off the field, it means someone actually had to do something extraordinary, and punching someone's elbow with your face doesn't count in that regard. (As for the gymnastic aspects, I still like the way Ishikawa landed on his feet after that catch.)

Any sport in which "fouls" play an important part is going to have its acting aspects. But he's right about the flopping, it, along with football like displays after making a play you are paid to make is what makes it unappealing. As for football, players may not flop themselves only because there are so many officials (and now instant replay) on the field that its hard to get away with anything. (And yes, some of the most famous baseball plays are close, often involving a Reggie Jackson type.)

Maybe what soccer, which is supposedly such a beautiful sport, needs to to to achieve US popularity is to add judges who score the artistic and technical merits of the players, like they do in ice skating and gynmastics. And make those scores count for something in the standings, too.

"Baseball? It's not possible, really—you can't fake getting hit by a baseball, and it's impossible to fake catching one."

This guy begs to differ.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhtnK_bC-Ic&search=college%20baseball%20player

Andrew,
Nice video find. The umpire didn't buy the act and threw the offending player out of the game when he complained about it. That's quite a difference from the soccer fakes that I've seen. The batter's reaction does make me wonder how many times the act has worked.

I don't think the Canadian birth of the inventor makes basketball a Canadian invention, since he invented it while in the U.S.

The amazing thing about that story is that it took them years to think of cutting the bottom out of those peach baskets.

I'm not into any sports really, but the thing about soccer is the interminable back and forth of the game. With football, the game at least lets people progress if slowly and in futility. Baseball they take turns making points. Basketball is quick enough that the back and forth isn't that annoying. But the soccer field is so big that it just drains the interest out.

Papaya:

Well, on that theory, For Whom the Bell Tolls is the greatest Spanish novel of the 20th century and Canada gets at least 50% of the credit for the New Deal. I suppose you also suffer from the quaint conceit that you invented the telephone.

Did I ever tell you how Orrin first conceived of this blog at an Expos game in Montreal?

Montreal doesn't have a major league baseball team. Montreal has never had a major league baseball team. The ExExpos, er, the Nationals, have always been in the District of Columbia. And we've always been at war with Eurasia.

(Has a team that lost a post 1905 or so Major League team ever had it replaced by a minor league one? Candidate cities would be Milwaukee, Seattle, Kansas City and Washington City and now Montreal. And the 2004 Mariners don't count, despite how they played.)

I caught near the end of the Korea-Japan game to see some guy (Korean I think) carted off the field on a stretcher. In real sports, if you can't make it off under your own power, you are at least headed for the clinic for some x-rays. The recuerative abilities of soccer players is simply amazing, as I saw him moments later sitting up drinking from a bottle like nothing much happened. Do they delay the games in this way as a way to compensate for the lack of official time outs?

D'Oh! That's Korea-France.

What will OJ do when he relizes that the 100 million (is it up to a billion yet?) immigrants he's so bent on importing turn us into a soccer loving nation?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Peter: Hah! Canadian revisionism. I can find no mention of any period of residence in Canada after the invention. Naismith lived the rest of his life in the U.S. and became a citizen on 1925. He married twice and served in the Army, on the Mexican border and in France. Sorry, he's an immigrant, we get credit.

The Hemingway analogy is inapt because he didn't write in Spanish, wasn't becoming Spanish when he wrote the novel, and didn't become Spanish afterwards. If he had and did, yes it would be.

Bell gets credit for the telephone the way Columbus gets credit for America and the Wrights get credit for the airplane: while there are nitpicky semi-arguable earlier claimants, the famous names deserve their credit because the real-world practical consequences came from their work.

At least Naismith can be reasonably claimed as being of Canadian origin, unlike Alexander Graham Bell, whom the Canadians are always trying to claim as their own, mainly because he spent two years there between leaving Scotland and settling in Boston.

You'll note that this CBC site of the Ten Greatest Canadians somehow avoids mentioning that Bell became an American citizen in 1882.

Papaya:

Horse droppings! He was a proud Canadian who invented the game as an indoor winter diversion for a bunch of Americans who were too delicate to go outside and play hockey. He didn't become a U.S. citizen for almost thirty years. That he was subsequently entrapped by a Yankee siren and eventually succumbed to the lure of your filthy lucre bespeaks a spiritual weakness that has nothing to do with the original invention.

Hey, given all those American draft dadgers who spent their lives making crafty things up here and eventually took out citizenship, does that mean we can claim blue grass?

No Peter. The originator of bluegrass music was Bill Monroe (born and raised in Rosine, KY.). Come on down to Owensboro and visit the International Bluegrass Museum some day.

You know, I have to disagree with Dave Eggers and pehaps Peter as well. I think the American aversion to soccer is easily explained and it turns not at all on an over-inflated love American invention or aversion to fakery. We could in this comment section come up with a list of hundreds of imported games and activities that Americans participate in with delight and pride. We could similarly list hundreds of sports and games with an element of fakery that Americans readily embrace.

But the fact is that prior to the end of the 19th century, most sports were played by and restricted to an elite group. With the invention of baseball, basketball, and football-excellent and fun group sports became available to the American public which was egalitarian enough at the time to make it a public pursuit. As a consequence, Americans invested their time and allegience to these sports. They played as children, came to know great players, memorized volumes of stats, and gave their hearts completely to favorite local, college and profesional teams. Egalitarian sport did not reach the rest of the world until the advent of soccer. The regular people of the world embraced it as their everyman's sport, but it was too late in America. We had a half century's head start and there was no room in our lives for a fourth great public sport. It's just an issue of timing.

I actually think it's a little sad that we can't be a part of the world's fondness for soccer. But compared to the games that came first and won our hearts, soccer is unfortunately not nearly as big a thrill to an All-American girl.