Baseball isn't really a sport

This is an interesting read for anyone who is interested in baseball and the history of that game. I'm not, so I don't have much more to say about it.

I'm blogging it because I wanted to share this quote:

The philosopher/commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote that baseball was "not a territorial game; it is not about conquering; I do not send a team out to capture the other team's goal or ground. Baseball may not even be truly a team sport; it may really be a game an individual plays with a group."

For over a decade now I've been saying that baseball isn't really a sport, at least in the purest sense of the word. I define (pure) sport as an athletic contest in which a team or individual tries to advance a ball towards a goal while preventing opponent(s) from doing the same. You have to really stretch to fit baseball into that. This isn't to demean baseball in any way; at the time I first made this argument I was a huge baseball fan. It just isn't like the other athletic games that we call sports. I had always considered my position somewhat unique, but I'm glad to see that Giamatti said it long before I did.