Admittedly, I’m not a huge baseball fan. I appreciate the strategy involved, but it’s too slow for my liking. However, I like all sports to some degree. The beauty of all sports is that, unlike many Hollywood movies, you never know the end of a particular game, game, season, or series, or which team (or who) is going to win the championship that year (or that event). The unexpected can keep you on the edge of your seat in any game or match, whether it’s because you’re not sure who’s going to win or because a great athlete pulls off a spectacular play. However, I see no reason why the journey to get there has to be identical to what it was over 100 years ago.
Tradition has a place in everything in our society, including sports; But, there is always a balancing act between the sacredness of tradition and the improvement that change can make. Baseball and baseball fans, in my opinion, have always overemphasized tradition and continually failed to see the advantages of change. For crying out loud, it’s a sport, not a religion (yes, even if you’re a fan).
Soccer and basketball are constantly adjusting their rules, schedules, playoffs, conferences, leagues, and whatever else they can think of to keep their sport fresh and more exciting. They may know from studios, attendance, and TV ratings that their fans enjoy a certain amount of rating (for example) for their optimal viewing pleasure, and they adjust their rules slightly to do this. Soccer is as popular as ever and has replaced baseball as our National Pastime. Basketball is doing well, too, and I suspect the NBA Finals starting this week will get high ratings because of the ideal matchup between Boston and Los Angeles.
As for hockey and football, don’t even get me started on your problems. Yes I know soccer fans that soccer is the most popular sport in the world, but it is the fifth most popular team sport in the US and soccer will never make it big in the US until change the rules to allow more goals. Who wants to watch a sport where a 2-0 score in the first half is an insurmountable advantage? Enough talk. Hockey, by allowing grappling, grappling, grappling, tripping, elbowing, controlling, and above all, fighting, denies its athletes the opportunity to showcase their exciting athletic skills (eg, stick handling and skating). A bigger court, like there is in the international game, would also help.
Baseball and its fans resist any change no matter how small, reasonable, or advantageous the proposed change may be. For example, some fans would commit suicide simply because interleague play was proposed. And baseball itself added interleague play at least 50 years after it should have and for no good reason. How about denying some great natural rivalries (eg Yankees-Mets, Cubs-White Sox) by not allowing them to play? That makes a lot of sense. Interleague has only been good for baseball and it was fought with nails and tools.
The same can be said for the addition of the wild card team and, therefore, the extra round of the playoffs. There was a lot of resistance at first and now pretty much everyone loves it. However, I think baseball is wrong: the first round of the playoffs should also be a best-of-7 game. It seems unfair and, frankly, silly, to get eliminated in fewer games simply because it’s the first round. Basketball realized its mistake and corrected it. I wonder how many centuries pass before baseball corrects this mistake.
The Designated Hitter is more complicated because it’s not so clear if this is good or bad for baseball. I know some of you have strong opinions on this, but for once, I don’t. However, it seems silly to have him in one league and not the other. I know MLB is technically two leagues, but it’s really more like one league. And if baseball and its fans would stop caring about tradition for a second, they might find it more productive to be a league.
If you need more examples, how about how slow it was for MLB to allow African Americans to play? Was that tradition too? How about how long did it take them to start testing for steroids and even longer to have real penalties for a positive test? I think the last couple of weeks (4 wrong home runs) have shown that baseball has been too slow (again) to add instant replay to hit certain calls. At the moment when three referees decide to meet, then they really meet, discuss who saw what wrong, and then make the wrong decision; they could have watched the instant replay and hit it. Oh, God, how terrible, traditionally, the call was always made in the field. As with the previous examples, I guarantee none of the baseball gods will turn in his grave if you make this change.
Besides making changes too late for no good reason, baseball doesn’t change the things it should change. How to speed up the game to make it more exciting. How about not allowing the batter to walk away from the batter’s box, or enforcing the rule about how much time a pitcher has between pitches? Something, anything, to speed up the game. How about making all baseball parks (ie fields) the same size? I can’t imagine playing football one week on a 100-yard field and on an 88-yard field the next week. How about a 10-footer in Boston and a 9 1/2-footer in Los Angeles? Yes, to me, this tradition, for lack of a better word, is stupid.
And while we’re at it, can we get rid of all that disgusting chewing/spitting tobacco and excessive crotch-grabbing that baseball players like to partake in? Baseball players touch their crotch more than an episode of The Sopranos and a Michael Jackson video combined. The last thing a person who is trying to enjoy their hot dog (after all, they need something to do, the batter just walked away from the box again) needs is to see a grown man regurgitate brown saliva from his mouth at the same time. who is proving his manhood (or lack thereof), all the time on national television (and/or in front of 60,000 fans). Sorry, this is a tradition everyone can do without.