Reese Kaplan -- Baseball is a Funny Game

I was driving home and stuck in road construction traffic, flipping around on the satellite radio in my truck when I stumbled upon an old comedy routine by the brilliant Bob Newhart hypothesizing what it would be like if Abner Doubleday approached a modern game manufacturer with the concept of his new invention called baseball.  If you haven’t heard it, the things we take for granted about the game are pretty arbitrary and ridiculous.  Reward yourself with a few minutes as we prepare for the start of the 2016 season:

The eloquent and erudite George Carlin waxed poetic on the differences between football and baseball.  Perhaps he was channeling commentator George Will who once said, “Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”  

Most of us got introduced to baseball through the Little League organization which was a systematic way of humiliating those less talented folks among us who didn’t quite master the hitting, catching and throwing aspects as naturally as some others.  Brian Regan gives us his take on his life in Little League:

Songwriter and comedian Tom Wilson continues with his take on what it’s like to be on the sidelines during a Little League game, trying to cope with the weather, the parents and his sanity:

The late Robin Williams highlighted the era of the mid 1980s when baseball players were fairly regularly indulging in things that MLB would just as soon forget:

Finally, what tribute to the humor of baseball would be complete without the classic confusion of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello asking the immortal question, “Who’s on first?”