Nobody Is More Nervous About Lacrosse Being The Sport Of The Future Than Jared Carrabis Of Starting 9
Jared Carrabis is the co-host of Barstool Sports’ baseball show “Starting 9″. As you can tell by the photo above, the man was an absolute specimen and clearly one of the greatest high school athletes the nation has ever seen. Either that or he spent the majority of his time skipping class and smoking cigarettes behind the bleachers while playing hackey sack and bitching about conformists. One or the other. Regardless, Jared Carrabis is very much like your grandfather in the sense that he is a huge baseball fan. Also like your grandfather, new things seem to worry him a bit and he lashes out at things that he doesn’t fully understand. Which is why yesterday on his Sirius XM Radio show “Evening Yak”, Mr. Carrabis dropped this line.
Jared, bud. It’s okay to be scared. I know this must be an extremely difficult time for you. You look around and you see the World Lacrosse Championships going on right now and there are forty-six (46) different nations competing in Israel right now. It’s gotta be tough to see how rapidly the sport of lacrosse is growing. It has to hurt to see baseball’s popularity, especially amongst the younger demographics, on this steady decline while lacrosse is taking over. I don’t blame you for being scared. I don’t blame you for lashing out. I just hope that you realize that it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, Jared. It’s not your fault.
Baseball players and the comment section love to say that lacrosse players are just baseball players that got cut from JV. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Lacrosse players are just guys who decided to turn on their brains and realized that they could use their athletic abilities in an underpopulated sport to give themselves some great opportunities to go on to receive great educations at great institutions which they probably could not have otherwise attended if it were not for the sport of lacrosse getting them there (See: Francis Ellis/Harvard). They’re too smart to even consider trying out for the baseball team in the first place. Lacrosse players are also guys who don’t want to just pretend that they’re athletes by standing around in the outfield for a couple of hours while catching one or two balls that were popped up 50 feet into the air to them. Don’t get me wrong. It definitely takes some skill to play baseball, or at least the hitting/pitching aspect of the sport. I’m not going to get up here and pretend like I could stand in the batters box today and hit a curveball. But athletes? Come on, now. You’re either standing around doing nothing or sitting in the dugout for half the game.
The fact of the matter here is that lacrosse is the sport of the future. If you follow the popularity trajectory of both sports, you’ll see them heading in complete opposite directions and the day is going to come when lacrosse passes baseball. It may not be tomorrow. It may not be next year. But it’s coming and it’ll be here before you know it. And the world will be a better place because of it. We just need to allow guys like Carrabis a little extra time to process it and come to acceptance with the fact. That’s all. We’re here for you, Jared.