Originally Posted by
chasm54
Speaking as a European, I find baseball and basketball incredibly dull. I'm sure they can be exciting to those who understand them, but I've never taken the trouble.
Speaking as an American, who has actually played my share of baseball, I find it about as exciting to watch as vacuuming the living room floor. It can be mildly entertaining to play, but it's arguably even less exercise than golf...I suppose cricket could be worse. I have the same opinion of Basketball as the OP does of match sprinting. I don't see why they bother playing the first three quarters. They could replace them with a running race that we don't have to watch and then play for 15 minutes, as most games seem to be nearly even until the last quarter and the play only picks up near the end.
One of the things I like about track racing is that it has all the elements of road racing and crits, but distilled down to remove all the boring bits where you're just noodling (or even cruising at high speed) along without a lot of tactical action. And many of the races have significant "game" elements (i.e. you have to score points) rather than just being drag races, so you have to be not just strong, but able to keep track of the game score and play multiple parallel games of prisoner's dilemma while in oxygen deficit.