Baseball

I am pretty much an expert on watching baseball.  My wife loves watching the Arizona Diamondbacks and I love my wife.  Baseball is a little boring.  It isn’t the most boring sport on TV.  Doesn’t even give golf or bass fishing any real competition for that title.  Just a couple of improvements would make it possible to stay awake through an entire nine innings.

For starters there are too damn many games played in a week.  It feels like it is on every evening of the season and it very nearly is.  It is wearing out the players and it is wearing out my recliner.  If a game were played once or at the most twice a week, it would become a normal sport, like football.  I could look forward to game night.  There would be fewer Tommy John surgeries.  This surgery is becoming as common to the pitching staffs across the nation as face lifts are to aging women.  The poor guys wear out their elbow tendons by pitching too often.

The outcome of the game rests squarely on the pitcher’s shoulders and his elbow.  We will play a team one night and beat them 9 to 1.  The next night, they beat us 12 to 2.  Same batters on both nights.  Same fielders and catcher too.  So, what has changed?  Well, obviously, the pitcher has.  He pretty much controls how much hitting the other team does and so goes the game.  When a pitcher does pitch a no-hitter, watching the game does rival golf and bass fishing for a boring experience.  The excitement of the sport is the hitting, running of bases and fielding.  If you really wanted to make the game fun to watch you would move the pitcher’s mound about twelve feet back.  The batter would have more time to realize what was coming at him.  The ball would have slowed down a bit and you would see more hits and more fielding.  The pitcher would have a better chance to defend against a line drive to his head and would be more able to field ground balls that normally find the gap between the short-stop and the second baseman.  It would be a better game to watch and the players, other than the pitcher, could have a greater impact on the game’s outcome.

Another rule that needs fixing is how they go about intentionally walking a batter.  The catcher moves out of the batter’s swing range and the pitcher throws four intentional balls to him.  A good friend of mine mentioned this as one of the things he would like to see changed.  If a pitcher would like to intentionally walk a batter, just wave him to first base.  There is no need for the silly game of catch.  The Baseball Commissioner is paid something like seventeen million dollars a year.  Ask yourself what he does to earn this money.  How about improving the game?

Baseball players are crotch grabbers.  I mean their own crotches.  I don’t know when or how this started.  Perhaps it isn’t a really manly sport, like football or hockey, therefore they spit and play with themselves to look macho.  The rock stars also grab their crotches and it really isn’t that attractive when they do it.  When I was about nine years old, I went through a four week period of spitting, like a baseball player.  I think my folks curtailed my habit.  When I played basketball in college, I never found it necessary to spit and neither did any other player I ever saw.  I don’t see football players spitting or crotch grabbing themselves.  Baseball players need to have a little more pride.  I know pride is a sin, but who wants to sit in a dugout full of spit.

Often you will see a ballplayer hit an infield ground ball and just jog up the first base line.  These men are being paid five or six million dollars a year and that ought to be enough to inspire them to run every hit.  When the hitter runs hard, it rushes the catch and the throw of the infielder.  It also puts a little more pressure on the first baseman.  This obviously increases the chances of an error.  Why does the manager not bench a player when little effort is made to get to first base?  I would guess that this is why they are called a manager, rather than a coach.  Some things they just don’t bother coaching.

 

If I told you that a home run is a different distance at different parks, would you believe me?  What if I told you that a home run is a different distance from the plate depending on which side of the field you hit it to?  What if a basketball hoop were ten feet high, give or take a foot at either end of the court and that a football field is one hundred yards long, give or take fifteen yards.  Well that is the great game of baseball.  Batter Up!

Comments are welcome, Old Buz