Race car drivers are held to a ridiculous double standard

The double standard (continued)

However, a 0.533-mile track isn’t huge whatsoever in racing terms. In fact, it is extremely small. Yet it seems huge to non-racing fans, who ironically think that going around in circles on race tracks, including those five times as big as Bristol Motor Speedway such as Daytona International Speedway, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Pocono Raceway and Talladega Superspeedway, makes race car drivers not athletes and racing not a sport.

Never mind the fact that all basketball, football and hockey players do is go back and forth all game and all baseball players do is run around in circles at their, in racing terms, microscopic venues.

And never mind the fact that they go back and forth all game and run around in circles all game for far less time during their games than race car drivers do during races.

NBA games contain 48 minutes of action, yet they last an average of two hours and 15 minutes (135 minutes). NFL game clocks contain 60 minutes, yet they last an average of three hours and 12 minutes (192), and there is only an average of 11 minutes of actual action in them.

NHL games contain 60 minutes of action, yet they last an average of two hours and 20 minutes (140 minutes). MLB games last an average of three hours and five minutes (185 minutes), yet there is only an average of 18 minutes of actual action in them and not even six minutes if you only include the time when balls are in play and runners are attempting to advance on the base paths.

Here is what Steve Moyer of The Wall Street Journal had to say back in July of 2013 about the actual amount of action in MLB game.

"“By WSJ calculations, a baseball fan will see 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action over the course of a three-hour game. This is roughly the equivalent of a TED Talk, a Broadway intermission or the missing section of the Watergate tapes…The WSJ reached this number by taking the stopwatch to three different games and timing everything that happened. We then categorized the parts of the game that could fairly be considered “action” and averaged the results. “The almost 18-minute average included balls in play, runner advancement attempts on stolen bases, wild pitches, pitches (balls, strikes, fouls and balls hit into play), trotting batters (on home runs, walks and hit-by-pitches), pickoff throws and even one fake-pickoff throw. This may be generous. If we’d cut the action definition down to just the time when everyone on the field is running around looking for something to do (balls in play and runner advancement attempts), we’d be down to 5:47.”"