And yes, the 1701 really has a bowling alley.
Bowling is kind of a clutch sport for a Federation starship, if you think about it.
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Bowling alleys are long and narrow, which means you can fit one in by shaving a little off a lot of rooms instead of a lot off a few rooms. They’re infinitely scalable, too; you can have a 2-lane alley, or a 200-lane alley, whatever fills your space. You can even stack them; if you’ve got two three-lane-wide spaces on adjacent decks, just add a staircase.
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Bowling accomodates a wide range of player counts; a lane might be one guy whose friends are all on-shift, trying to nail a perfect game, or it might be a scheduled five-member team competing against four other teams. There’s not a lot of “big room” sports that take up less space per player than bowling. Especially in the future, where the machinery is probably one micro-repulsor emitter in the ball return and a tiny antigrav in each pin.
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Bowling is easy to teach: even aliens who’ve never heard of it can pretty easily pick up “roll this ball across that floor to hit those sticks”.
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Somewhat relatedly, bowling is very social; if you’re on a team, you’re not actually playing n-1 shares of the time, so you can chat with your teammates, other players, etc. Good for both crew bonding, and for diplomacy.
Damn good sales pitch, Ferengi.
One objection: bowling is not a good game for socializing. I go to a fair number of networking events for my job, and the challenge in bowling is that you can’t have any conversation of substance before it’s your turn again. You’re constantly getting interrupted and then trying to restart conversations.
And, perhaps most critical to sports aboard a ship: bowling is flat. Even real tennis needs some headroom. In bowling, if the ball goes above eye-level, you fucked up.
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In TOS they didn’t have holodecks.
A space ship might fit bowling lanes but not a whole baseball field.
Also, bowling was waaaay more popular at the time TOS was airing than it is today
At least a batting cage
“Fucking Gary. That creep can roll, man.”
“You said it man, nobody fucks with the Gary.”
You don’t fuck with the Gary.
Neelix is a better candidate for The Jesus since he exposed himself to a two year old.
Bowling is fun
So is baseball.
This isn’t facebook, please don’t willfully spread disinformation.
Hey man, I don’t even like sports but I had so much fun taking a friend visiting me when I lived in L.A. and wanted to go to a Dodgers game. We sat in the cheap seats behind the batter. The crowd around us was mostly Latino and Latino people love baseball. Their excitement was infectious and I couldn’t help but get invested in the game.
Honestly, it was a great time.
Do I watch baseball on TV? No. But I’d definitely go to a game like that again.
Sure, being in an excited crowd is fun. I don’t really see what the baseball is adding.
Some of the parks have expensive but tasty food too
It’s adding a reason for the crowd to be excited for one. Do you think they’d be equally as excited in an empty stadium?
No but like a concert, or a dog show or domino knocking or literally anything else would involve an excited crowd and something enjoyable to experience.
I can’t explain it to you how this is different from something like a concert more than saying that the intense competition going on is a big part of it. I don’t even think you can say that about a dog show because there’s no action there.
I’m the same way. You’d be hard pressed to ever get me to watch a sport. But taking my kiddo out to a baseball game is so much fun. Plus I never feel pressured to stay for the whole game, so sometimes we’ll just catch a few innings and then when she gets tired we head out
Every person playing the game baseball is dedicated to stopping everyone else from doing anything at all. The entire game is based on waiting around or preventing any form of progress. It is excruciatingly frustrating and boring.
False
Hear me out. They don’t have fields because they play outside. Just crank up the artificial gravity on the hull, suit up, and head out an airlock. It’s one of the reasons for the saucer section.
I love the idea, but according to DS9, almost no one knows what baseball is.
Baseball is not really a thing outside of the US and Japan. So why would it be a thing outside of Earth?
And, at least in Europe, there are way more people that know at least the basics of bowling than baseball, and similar games have been played everywhere since time immemorial. Couple that with the relatively small playing field, without the need for too much vertical space, it’s a significant more attractive choice to have on a spaceship.
…and South Korea.
And the Caribbean
And my Axe‽
That’s because Khan took the ball home with him in a snit.
I thought according to SNW they don’t even need space suits outside on the hull… 🙃
Bowling is common worldwide, baseball isn’t.
And any person can play it, even people who can’t walk, bowling is the most diverse physical sport out there, no special skills required, just roll the ball, you can even choose weight to be comfortable to you
Presumably humanity spent a lot of time in bunkers prior to first contact, and there’s not enough space for baseball but there’s plenty of space for bowling
Wait, who says baseball didn’t survive? DS9 had a baseball game, against the Vulcans nonetheless iirc, clearly they still know the game is and have teams that play it. Am I missing something?
DS9 said baseball didn’t survive. Living holodeck version of Buck Bokai said as much to Sisko:
BUCK: Well, that was baseball’s epitaph, wasn’t it. Nobody seemed to have time for us anymore. I could’ve played five more years if they hadn’t killed the game.
SISKO: You were the best that ever played. I know. I’ve played with them all. I’ve got work to do.
BUCK: Hey, Ben. It really meant a lot to me, how much you cared. That day we won that world series, there were only three hundred people in the stands.
From If Wishes Were Horses.
Hmm, I guess I have forgotten the exact dialog, as it was over 10 years ago since I watched that. I guess the implication is that it didn’t survive as a professional competitive sport? Because there definitely are teams that play it at least casually - and I went to check, it was indeed a Vulcan baseball team that challenged Sisco https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Logicians - so I’d argue it still has survived to some degree, no?
The whole point of that episode was that Sisko and Solok had been competing with each other for years and Solok put together and trained a baseball team specifically to challenge Sisko.
The one place that baseball was still regularly played by the time of DS9 was Cestus III, which is how Kasidy Yates knew about it. Her brother played baseball there.
301 in my version - Ben
You know, I just had a thought. Maybe there were only 300 seats in the stands because he played for the London Kings and everyone in Britain was like, “why the fuck would we watch this American shite?”
Bowling and Baseball we’re both killed by Parchesi Squares.
I’m sure you could do field sports in the Holodeck, but it wouldn’t surprise me if fully interior sports like bowling or hockey became significantly more popular once human civilization started regularly spending time in space stations and ships.
This was also before they had holodecks, so they would have had to have another form of recreation. That was something the crew of the NX-01 kind of struggled with, so it would make sense the next Enterprise would have accomodations
Because bowling is fun and accessible for everyone whereas baseball is 15 minutes of action spread over 3 hours for chemically enhanced freaks where the biggest fans are mostly in it for the statistics?
It’s the Cetaceans. Even though their flippers can’t fit in the holes, they refuse to work on a starship without a working bowling ally. With proper pin setters too, non of those string pins.
That’s on the D. This is the A, which did not have accommodations for cetaceans.
Can’t believe they chose a bowling alley and not a wave pool.
They should put some saunas in as part of the cooling system. A lil treat for working in engineering.
