As a pastime that insists on referring to itself as a sport (or even a pastime) baseball is an unrepentant abortion of enjoyment

-25

I may have already told you about my third son. I don’t hate him by any means. His name is Jack I think…

…or maybe John, or perhaps James: after 14 years I’m too embarrassed to ask…

…and he has dreamed of becoming a baseballer ever since he saw the movie ‘Space Jam’ (he’s not the brightest kid, part of the reason that spending time with him is such a chore), and after a friend told me that you could easily smuggle gin into the school’s stadium by passing it off as a colostomy bag, I agreed that taking him to his school’s baseball games would be my court required paternity care.

+3

I mean, he’s going to be on the field, so at least I’d never have to talk to the tedious little shit

+2

That was a mistake. I didn’t realise that baseball 7’975 match league season require a game roughly every 48 minutes, and that the games themselves usually take longer than three solar eclipses. Which I wouldn’t mind if it was in any way a passable waste of time, but watching baseball is like keeping an eye on the infusion pump of your wasted life filled with drying paint endlessly drip toward sweet death

-6

When a football match kicks off, think of all the infinite possibilities that could take place over the next 90 minutes, how with each second and each gentle nudge of the ball in 360 degrees of direction opens up infinite parallel universes of possibilities and opportunities, fortitude and fluke

+7

Do you know how many possibilities there are in a baseball match? Twenty one. Trust me, I counted: there are exactly twenty one things that could possibly happen in any baseball match. Baseball is the remorseless decortication of life’s potential

-4

(I wrote that a few weeks back. I’ve no idea what ‘decortication’ means)

I mean, God rest his soul, but it was almost a relief when he was killed in that freak kitchen knife to the back accident, as it meant that I was finally relieved of ever having to painfully endure the absolute nonsense of baseball ever again. I say almost a relief: I was very sad when Joe (Jaden? No, Jinder. Jake, definitely Jake) died, and I had to cancel my holiday to Micronesia, where two people can provide an alibi for the time of the unfortunate incident

-2

‘Holy Ghost’ is a extremely decent and admirably succinct collection of ketchup and noodles rock (which, as well you know, is the student equivalent of meat and potatoes rock), that would probably have sounded a lot better had it been released any other year

+3

Some albums can’t help but be overshadowed by other records, and later in this list there’s an album by Hotelier

that performs much the same tricks as Mo-Ba, only infinitely better in every case, so the reasons for ‘Holy Ghost’s existence unfortunately become rather trivial

There’s a bit in Hiding where there’s a quick blast of a distorted drum roll. On an album that’s thus far been relatively standard poppy-punky-rock it’s a thrilling few milliseconds of sonic exploration

+4

Metacritic: +81

Really? Really?

Length 27 minutes +19

Hoooooooooooooooooooo yeah! Do you see?? Do you see??? Eleven tracks, no wasted time or filler, an album really doesn’t need to be any longer. I might lower

the accepted threshold next year. Or next decade. Whenever I manage to do 2017’s list

Best Lyric: ‘I don’t care about the lights or the beams/Spend my life in the dark for the sake of you and me/Only way to go is up, skin thick, too tough’ +1

Is the last song just the first track but played on Ukulele? No -1

Total 76

Pics stolen from:

http://www.notey.com/blogs/randy-marsh

https://randomnerds.com/stop-calling-baseball-boring-even-if-it-is-kinda-boring/

http://sportsmockery.com/2015/06/top-5-sports-movie-fat-kids/