…Baseball

Growing up, baseball was my sport. I went to camps, played on travel teams every year from age 9-14 or so, and planned to play in high school. I ended up getting cut from my high school team my freshman year (unjustifiably so in most people’s opinion), mostly because the coach did a poor job of running tryouts in my opinion. But, that’s neither here nor there, and I do not intend to bore you with the story. I have grown to realize that there are some serious problems with the game of baseball as a sport, and another large group of problems with the way it is played professionally. I may add other things as time goes on, but 10 is it for now:

1) It’s slow. Painfully slow at times. Games seem to drag on with 17 pitching changes, even more pitching changes than actual pitches during some stretches. Everything about it seems lazy at times. Maybe I’m getting ADD in my old age.

2) Players don’t hustle. Despite the relatively low amount of physical effort required to play the game, and the obscene amount of money they are being paid, almost none of these professionals think it necessary to give 100% on every single play. I guess they don’t realize that when you sprint to first base every single play, infielders will know they have to hurry, and sometimes they’ll screw up. Maybe only 1 more time out of 100, but if every single player on a team started doing this I bet it would win them an extra few games a year. Outfielders don’t sprint to back up plays, which, one time in 100, will save a base or a run. These little things really add up over a 162 game season, but no one seems to care.

3) There are players who can’t bunt. If you watch baseball, you’ll notice that many power hitters do not know how to bunt at all, much less know how to do it well. They somehow feel it is beneath them to do something to help their team win a game. The sad part is that it’s not even hard. Any normal adult could learn to bunt a baseball, even one coming at 90+ MPH. And bunting is important – sometimes you have a runner on first, nobody out and your team only needs 1 run to win. I don’t care how good a hitter you are, the odds of you moving the guy over a base by getting a hit (30-35% if you’re good) are much less than your odds of moving him over by bunting (95-100% if you’re good). And your odds of bringing him in yourself are way lower than the odds that one of the two guys behind you gets a hit.

4) Outfielders don’t know how to catch and/or field a ball ready to throw. There is a technique that I learned to being able to throw quickly and powerfully after fielding or catching a ball. The trick is to catch or field the ball with two hands while your lead throwing foot is in front and you are moving forward. For you righties, you would field the ball with your left foot forward, then jump forward onto your right plant foot (using the momentum you had since you were moving forward) and step into the throw. You should only be taking two steps, both of which are necessary to throw well. If you watch, you almost never see this. Typically, you see the guy catch or field with one hand, causing him to take extra time to get the ball out of the glove, followed by some nifty but inefficient foot shuffling. And not surprisingly, you see throws all the time that are late, wild, and obviously out of control. Imagine how much harder you would make it on other teams if all of your fielders really knew their stuff.

5) Managers are expected to come out and argue and/or get thrown out of the game for clearly no reason. This is really an outdated idea and needs to be done away with. For some reason fans seem to like this, but it makes no sense at all, and it’s a waste of time. They never change the call, unless the manager is arguing a rule, and then there’s no judgment involved. But for some reason we seem proud when our manager gets in the umpire’s face.

6) They refuse to install some kind of instant replay. I don’t understand the idea that bad calls are “part of the game,” and that somehow instant replay would ruin the pastime feel of the game. This is crap. Football and basketball bit the bullet and added replays to improve the quality of the officiating. Bad calls do matter, and even though they even out in the long run, they can and do have a huge affect in the short run. Measures to stop this would be easy to implement, and would stop this problem once and for all.

7) The price of tickets has gone up so much since when I was a kid. I know inflation happens and all, but everything is ridiculous now. Tickets used to be like $6 a person when I went to baseball games as a kid, even for good seats. Now they are like $30 or something. And if you want any food, it’s ridiculously priced too. I know this is true of other sports too, but for me this one seems particularly bad because I didn’t go to other sports games when I was a kid.

8) Teams don’t seem to understand the theory of good and bad days with pitchers. Sometimes pitchers have off days. If you put a good pitcher in, the odds are he’ll pitch well, but every once in a while, every pitcher throws in a clunker. You’ll frequently see the following happen. A guy who’s usually a “set up man” comes in for the 8^th inning and absolutely blows the 3 batters he faces away. He’s in command, he’s pitching well, and then they take him out anyway to put in their closer. This is really stupid, but nobody seems to notice and/or think it’s a bad idea. Why would you take out a guy who’s on fire? Let the man work. If the closer really cares about his team and not his ego, he’ll find a way to not feel slighted because they left in a guy who made his opponents look silly, even though it’s “his job” to pitch the last inning. Teams who use 7 or 8 pitchers in a game are also eventually going to run into a pitcher who’s off, and they frequently pay for it when the first 6 guys pitch well but the 7^th gives up a bunch of runs.

9) Most good players don’t really care about championships. I say this because, when you really sit down and think about it, it’s obviously true. Let’s say you’re A-Rod or any of the other many players who’ve gotten revolutionarily obscene contracts. It seems like every good player who gets a new contract “needs” to get more money than his peers to prove to the world he’s better. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the more money you are paid, the less money your team has to hire other good players and win a championship. If players really cared, they’d start taking normal, run-of-the-mill 8-figure contracts instead of demanding more. Maybe this is happening and you just don’t hear about it, but it certainly isn’t happening amongst the games top players.

10) Steroids. I had to mention something about it. Do I hate Barry Bonds? No. Do I think he is/was on steroids? Absolutely. The human body at age 35-40 just doesn’t have the ability to pile on that kind of muscle. Do I fault him? Not really, he was just following others. And he’s still better than everyone else. Does he deserve the home run record? Probably not – it’s true that the hand-eye coordination he has is almost certainly not affected by steroids and that is still something he does as well/better than everyone else. But, the steroids did give him the power to make all those balls carry out, and it’s pretty hard to argue with that. So what’s my major problem with steroids? The fact that someday I might have a kid who dreams of being a major league baseball player and asks me if he can do it without taking steroids. What would you say?