I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, but I kept up with it enough to be able to not be flat-footed if it comes up today, so you can see where the question comes from.
Pitchers’ duels are tense — one pitch can end up carrying enough win expectancy to crystallize the final result. Slugfests are tense, but in a different way: the long-tailed cat and room full of rocking chairs way. (Side story: the reason why we stopped taking our cat on long trips with us is because one time, we were forced by an ice storm
to get off the road and make an unplanned day-long stop, where the hotel beds were somewhat bizarre in that the box springs under the mattresses were exposed/accessible despite being affixed. The cat immediately went amid the box springs, and we spent the entire time trying to prevent her from getting crushed. That was the end of travel-with-cat (not because she got crushed).)
On the flip side, slugfests tend to have more stuff happening. I guess it’s a matter of personal choice whether the stuff is interesting or wearying. It probably goes from one to the other after a point.
I think I prefer the former because it can (but does not necessarily) feel less scattershot, or, more to the point, random. The thing with a high-scoring slugfest is that you get lots of opportunities for one team to benefit from HR/FB in a way that the other team just can’t match due to what is effectively a roll of the dice, and which team ends up with a higher tally in the end can feel non-specific to what actually happened. That’s not to say that a pitchers’ duel can’t be settled on something off-kilter, too, like a dying quail with two outs that scores a runner from first, but it just feels less whimsical in the end.
Anyway, what about you?
