I'm a bona-fide baseball fan. I just love the game. I've been a Yankees fan since the day I was born. But I'm getting more and more disgusted with what's become of the game with each passing season. Here are 10 reasons why:
10. Ballplayers As Role Models - I've admired many ballplayers over the years, especially when I was growing up, most of them Yankees of course. Joe Dimaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Willie Mays, ... they all meant a lot to me. But I couldn't care less about their off-field activities or behavior.
My ticket to the game gives me the right to watch the players play the game. It doesn't give me the right to make judgements about their personal lives. If a player does some thing off the field that's offensive or distasteful to me, I am of course entitled to my opinion of it, but it really has nothing to do with baseball games.
Once, when I was a teenager, I went to a game at Yankee Stadium. After the game, I waited outside the players' entrance to see some of the Yankees up close and personal. I saw Don Larsen, the only player to ever pitch a perfect game in a world series, leaving with four beautiful young ladies, two on each arm. Did I feel disappointed and disillusioned by a Yankee's playboy style? Hell no, I was just envious.
Its not a ballplayer's responsibility to live his life by my personal standards of behavior. His only responsibility to me is to play the best game of baseball that he can in return for my price of admission. What he does before the umpire yells "Play ball!" and after the last out is made is none of my business.
I just don't know if Pete Rose really ever gambled on baseball games, but I've never personally seen any evidence to suggest that he ever did. Anyway, I just don't care. Pete Rose played baseball with more dedication, intensity, passion, heart, and integrity than anyone who ever played the game before or since, And he got more base hits than any player in history, more even than Ty Freakin' Cobb. For those reasons, and only for those reasons, the guy belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Is's important to remember that baseball is a game; not a morality play, just a game.
9. Broadcasters' Cute New Terminology - Baseball announcers and commentators like to draw attention to themselves by making up really stupid new terms. Home runs have become ''dinger's" or "jacks". Of course for a while, it caught on, and pretty soon nearly all of them started calling home runs by their new stupid names. Funny, but I don't recall ever hearing any real true baseball folks use those words. Fortunatly, they've recently fallen into disuse, and a home run is now mostly just called a homer.
A few years ago, the announcers for the Colorado Rockies, Drew Goodman, and his overly talkative sidekick, George Frazier, decided to start calling strike outs "punch outs". I wonder if they thought they were announcing prize fights. I wonder if they had any idea of how stupld they sounded.
8. Managing With Pitch Counts - What's gained by having a starting pitcher's performance limited by putting him on a pitch count? I think that the theory is that almost any pitcher gets too tired to continue pitching after throwing about 100 pitches as hard as he can, and at that point he should be taken out for a relief pitcher. How does any manager or pitching coach really know this is true?
I think the theory is flawed. Every pitcher is different in his abilities and endurance. While pitcher A's strength might be an overpowering fastball, pitcher B's might be his pinpoint control at speeds well below the speed of sound. Obviously, pitcher B should be able, all other factors being equal, to throw well over 100 pitches effectively, while pitcher A could easily become worn out well before he pitches 70.
What's lost from the game is complete game victories. In the past, a good pitcher would pitch lots of complete games each season. It wasn't unusual for a pitcher who had a 20 win season to have 13 or 14 of those victories be complete 9 inning efforts.
Sandy Koufax has long since retired, and Pedro Martinez is still active, but Koufax won 142 complete games in his distinguished career, while Montinez has only 37. If he continued to pitch for the rest of his life, Pedro still wouldn't come close to Sandy's total.
7. Organ Music and Other Offensive Noises - Besides the just plain annoying sound of the organ, music is out of place at a baseball game. After a good play, fans should be able to relish it and discuss it without being distracted by the din of the organ. If I want to listen to organ music, I'll go to church. By the way, I'm a huge music fan as well as a huge baseball fan.
Other kinds of noise during a game are also out of place. Things like "Charge!!!", "Day-O!!", and the "Mexican Hat Dance" have nothing at all to do with baseball. Yell and scream and boo all you want, but let's save the cheerleading for football games, OK? The noise sounds a hell of a lot better when it's disorganized anyway.
6. Batters Can't Bunt Any More - It's every batter's responsibility to perform a well executed bunt when the situation calls for it. Bunting is a fundamental baseball skill, yet in this day and age, very few players can do it well. A manager should be able to count on a batter's bunting skill, no matter who he is, even a power hitter. There are three situations that may call for a batter to lay down a bunt:
1. It's a close game, with a runner on first and less than two out. The batter should he able to lay down a sacrifice bunt precisely enough so that the fielder has no other play but to first base, thereby moving the base runner into scoring position.
2. Again, late in a close game, with a fast runner on third and less than two out, the batter should be able to squeeze the tieing or winning run in. There's nothing more exciting than seeing your team win in the bottom of the ninth on a suicide squeeze play.
3. To get a base hit. This is the only case where the batter is required to be a fast runner.
Its always been the case that pitchers are expected to bunt frequently when there is a runner on first base. This is because pitchers are usually weak hitters anyway, so they might as as well sacrifice a runner to second instead of swinging away and making an empty out. But even pitchers these days are pretty bad at bunting. Managers often seem to lack confidence in their hitters' bunting skills, with much justification. Often they'll waste a pinch hitter to swing away in a situation that calls for a sacrifice bunt because they're just not sure their pitchers can pull off a bunt. How often do we see half hearted or just plain awful bunting efforts? Badly placed bunts seem to be more the rule than the exception.
Phil Rizzuto was the best bunter I ever saw. He was small, fast and agile, and more often than not, he'd end up safe at first. Mickey Mantle, who was not small at all, but just as fast and agile, would often forgo his imressive power swing to artfully drag a bunt down the first base line for a single. And Mickey could do it from either side of the plate.
What I think Mantle and Rizzuto had in common was that they both practiced bunting a lot. I'd love to see some evidence that today's players were doing the same.
5. Analysts In the Broadcast Booth - They talk way too much. It's yada yada yada after every single pitch.
When I was a kid, I used to listen through the earphones of a home made crystal radio to baseball broadcasts. There was only one announcer, and he usually kept me very well informed about what was going on down on the field without any help from a sidekick.
On television, there's even less need for spoken commentary than there was on radio. I know baseball pretty well, so I don't need anyone telling me how many fingers the pitcher placed across how many seams on each and every pitch.
Those analysts in the booth, they should just shut up. Better yet, they should just stay home.
4. Infielders Not Tagging Second Base On Double Plays - Believe it or not, there is an official rule book for major league baseball, and it doesn't say that the second baseman or shortstop only has to come close to touching second base on a double play. He's required to actually touch the base with some part of his body while the ball is in one of his hands, and do it before the base runner touches that base with some part of his body. Then he may proceed to throw the ball to the first baseman to make the second out of the play.
Making the play at second base and then relaying the ball to first base on a double play requires a great deal of skill. The agility, coordination, speed and timing involved are possessed by only a few great athletes, and even they need lots of practice. When umpires call the runner out at second base, and the infielder hasn't actually touched the base reduces the level of skill required by a huge amount. Any mediocre player can get a cheap two outs that way.
Because they're difficult to execute (or should be) double plays should occur relatively rarely. But because of today's sloppy execution and even sloppier umpiring, they occur way too often. I recently saw a playoff game in which one of the teams made 6 double plays! And that didn't happen because of the teams excellent defensive skills either.
It's often been said that "baseball is a game of inches", yet I've seen umpires call runners out at second when the infielder missed tagging the base, not by mere inches, but by more than a foot. This practice strikes a big blow against the integrity of the game.
3. Umpires Redefining the Strike Zone - The rule book is quite explicit and very clear on where the strike zone is. It also makes clear how much latitude the umpires have in redefining it: they have none.
Most major league umpires violate the rules and set the strike zone in ideosyncratic fashion. Nowhere in the rule book does it give umpires permission to espress their individuality when calling balls and strikes.
Whenever an umpire fails to observe the strike zone, only two explanations are possible. Either he's incompetent, in which case he deserves to be fired, or he's cheating, in which case he belongs in jail.
It's common knowledge that umpires give the "benefit of the doubt" on "close" calls to certain pitchers, e.g., Tom Glavine or Greg Maddox. This is clearly cheating, and the fact that the baseball commissioner obviously condones this practice, means that he is knowingly a part of the fraud.
This practice of the umpires, not the Black Sox scandal or Pete Rose's alleged gambling, is the most destructive fact of baseball history, and no one (exept for me, of course) is speaking out about it. Gamblers aren't destroying the ''integrity of the game" nearly as much as the umpires are.
2. Playing Rap Music Between Innings - They're playing this rap shit in Yankee Stadium. In Yankee Stadium, for crissakes!! That's as disrespectful as farting in church, and just as sinful.
1. Wild Card Teams - The greatest evil of them all is the practice of allowing teams that haven't earned them, places in the playoffs.
Major League Baseball officials and owners like to brag about how hard they work to preserve the "integrity of the game". But no sport can claim to have the slightest bit of integrity at all when it allows losers to be declared as champions, as has happened several times in recent years. A team has to earn its place in the World Series by first winning its division outright over the course of the entire season, and then by defeating all of the other first place teams that it faces. Second place teams are just that, second place teams. They aren't legitimate playoff teams.
It's been said many times, and it is true, that any team can beat any other team in a short series. That's easy to do. Hell, it isn't hard at all to find numerous occasions during a season where a last place team has swept the eventual first place team four games straight. Winning a short series isn't hard. Winning an entire season, then winning a short series againt another team that also won it's season ... that's hard.
Second place teams are not entitled to "do-overs". Their seasons should be over ... period. While first place teams clearly have to be the very best over the entire season, second place teams only have to hang on at the end of the season, and they get a shot at a few short playoff series. That's not integrity; it's just a convenience for the team owners, who think they have figured out a way to compensate for the artificial imbalance in the number of divisions they have created.
Well, if I'm going to complain about things, then don't I have an obligation to suggest a better way to do it? Hell no, I don't. I didn't create the problem, so it's not my responsibility to solve it. I don't know, and I don't care how it gets fixed, just as long as they get the @&^%*&# wild card teams out of the playoffs.
Any wild card team that wins four out of seven World Series games is not by any stretch of the imagination a legitimate World Champion. That means that the Boston Red Sox did not legitimately win the American League pennant by beating the Yankees in four of seven games. They never did what is required to earn that pennant. The Yankees beat the Red Sox, and all of the other teams they faced all season long, and thereby earned its place in the playoffs by finishing in first place. I don't mind the Yankees losing a playoff series, as long as they lose it to another first place team, i.e., another team that earned it's place in the playoffs.
The Red Sox will continue to be saddled with The Curse of the Bambino until the day comes that they actually win the American League East division, and stand in first place in that division at the end of a complete season, as the Yankees have done so many times.
The time has come for Major League Baseball to stop glorifying losers.
© 2004 by Bernard Schneider. All rights reserved.
