Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader will continue with the sports theme today.

First, he directs your attention to this post from Keith Burgess-Jackson. What is it about baseball that inspires people? Your Maximum Leader’s library contains a few sports books. Most of them about Baseball. (One hockey and two football - but one football book is actually a Vince Lombardi bio so that might not count all the way.) Of the sports books that your Maximum Leader has read (more than he owns in fact) the baseball books stand out. They have an almost epic flow to them. They read well. Other sports books don’t stand up that well…

As forthe AirMarshal’s post on the NHL… The professional hockey game is dying in the US. It is being killed by overexpansion and self-importance (well put by Boswell in fact) that renders it dumb to the rest of the sports world. Your Maximum Leader well remembers so many hockey games. He saw his first game in 1976. It was a Washington Capitals game. The Caps were so bad then. Indeed, your Maximum Leader went to probably 10-15 games a season from 1976 to 1980 without seeing a Caps victory. All losses or ties.

Through the mid-1990’s your Maximum Leader would have listed his favourite sports as (in decending order): hockey, baseball, football. Then hockey started it’s declining spiral. As your Maximum Leader noted in his recent post, he hasn’t watched a Stanley Cup finals game. This is the first time in decades he hasn’t. He only went to one hockey game this year. He just feels the quality of the game has declined so much that the game is hard to watch. And neither the owners nor the players seem to care much for the desires of the fans. If your Maximum Leader were to name his favourite sports now he would say: footbal, baseball, and sometimes hockey.

It is sad really. Your Maximum Leader feels as though he has lost something that should be more important to him than it is. Ah well.

Carry on.