Love/Hate With Brido: How Nerds Ruined Star Wars and Baseball

How Nerds Ruined Star Wars and Baseball

Today's Love/Hate will cover a different topic: Liking things.

Whatever happened to just 'liking' stuff? It doesn't exist anymore. 'Like' is dead and it was killed by nerds. I'll explain with two examples.

When I was a kid, my favorite movie was Return of the Jedi. I liked it more than I liked any other movie. Fifteen years later, I was in college and the world had
something called the Internet. Things had really changed.

A kid in my dorm asked me if I liked Star Wars. I said I did. He proceeded to show me his tatooo of the Rebel Alliance symbol and his Star Wars edition of Trivial Pursuit.


If you didn't know every obscure character's name and title, or if you've never read any of the Star Wars Expanded Universe fan fiction, you were a chump in the game.

Did you know lightsabers were invented in the year 9990 BBY? That's Before the Battle of Yavin. No? Never heard of the Battle of Yavin either? Well, fuck you. You
don't really 'like' it. Not according to the nerds, anyway.

I'm sorry, nerds. I didn't know that in order to like something, or say something was my 'favorite,' I had to immerse my entire life into it in a way that would
scare people.

COME ON, nerds. I really liked Star Wars! I had the toys. I went and saw it with my Dad. Now nerds convinced me I was undeserving. I know the main characters. I was Yoda for Halloween when I was 4. Do I really have to know the history of the Sith Lords or who was named Grand Master of the Jedi Order after the Conclave of Exis Station?

Star Wars is an easy thing for nerds to ruin. It's sci-fi AND fantasy. It's a marraige of two things very historically popular in the nerd community. But
the next thing ruined for me came as much more of a surprise. It was a sport. That should be kryptonite to a nerd.

But not with baseball.

Growing up my favorite sport was baseball. I had stats and records memorized. But that's the thing about baseball. It has statistics. You know who loves statistics? Nerds!

Nowadays, if you don't have Bill Jame's Baseball Abstract memorized and listen to
hours of sports talk radio every week or frequent your favorite team's message board, you don't have a clue what's going on. I don't want to play Fantasy
Baseball with people who worship Sabermetrics and have acronyms for things like the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.

What happened? Do you have to carry around a TI-83 graphing calculator and a book of formulas to be a baseball fan now? Say it ain't so, baseball. Screw steroids in baseball. Nerds in baseball is the number one thing disenfranchising me.

Mike Bridenstine is a stand-up comedian based out of Los Angeles. He is a member of Blerds.com and quite possibly the funniest person of all time. He recently wrote about his experiences with Eminem fans and his love of England. You can contact him at Myspace.com/MikeBridenstine and read his column here every other Wednesday.

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