Some Off Beat Thoughts From the Most Boring Day of the Year

Today is officially the most boring day of the year. It is one of the few days on the calendar that one of the four major sports doesn’t have at least some kind of event. One of the others is January 1st and there’s plenty of college football on that day (among other things) to partake of. Tonight, all sports fans have are the ESPY’s. For Rays fans, we have to endure two days without Joe Maddon baseball and content ourselves with a slow news  day. Here are some of the things that have happened since the All-Star Game:

The Brewers made the first big trade of the season by acquiring Francisco Rodriguez of the New York Mets. K-Rod had expressed some interest earlier about going to the Rays, among other teams. It would not have been a good fit, so I’m just as happy to see him head to the NL Central. The Brewers struck early like they did in 2008 to get C.C. Sabathia and it helped them earn a playoff berth. This trade won’t have nearly the impact.

Last night’s All Star Game earned the worst rating for any mid-summer classic in history. I have two thoughts about this. The “baseball is dying” part of the media loves to talk about the low ratings and it worries me as a blogger because this is my passion and I love to share that with others. If less and less people are watching, will less and less people be interested in checking out blogs like mine? On the other hand, I want to bring up a point that Mike Greenberg brought up last year regarding the low World Series ratings. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), “Don’t worry about if everyone else is watching. Let Fox and TBS worry about it. If you want to watch it, watch it and enjoy it as a fan.” I’ve taken this approach and I had a lot of fun watching the game and interacting with people on Twitter. That being said, the game wasn’t all that interesting, which may have had an effect on the ratings. There were a lot of cool moments like Prince Fielder‘s homer off the top of the wall, Heath Bell‘s running in from the bullpen with the camera man chasing after him and Fox tracking the progress of Brian Wilson‘s beard, but they were events that you had to have been watching to really catch.

It’s time for the second half of the baseball season. All of the division races are close and there’s a lot of Rays baseball left to be played. I personally can’t wait to continue to watch and listen to their games everyday.