Category: baseball

baseball

I’ll give you a hundred million reasons

Roofless

Dear Dodger bloggers,

It was not “shortsightedness on the part of Target Field’s designers” that kept it from having a roof. It was an unwillingness by the good taxpayers of Minnesota to pay another $100 million for a stadium that already cost them $390 some million (out of a total cost of $500 and something million) in order to give a bunch of millionaires a place to play a game while employed by one of the richest owners in the MLB. So please…shut it.

Yours,
Brian

P.S. Full disclosure, I love Target Field, think it’s a lovely stadium, (mostly) supported its construction sans roof, and still think Dodger Stadium is better since it only cost the people of Los Angeles something like six million bucks in 1959 (and that was just for the land) and has generated tax revenue every year since it was opened, but what do I know?

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

Opening paragraph from “The Green Fields of the Mind,” cut and pasted, according to the Orange County Register, in Vin Scully’s custom-made leather scorecard cover.

baseball sports

10 plus 1 things the MLB should change about the game

Blogger Neil Cohen wrote on The Dot the other day the ten things he thought Major League Baseball should change about the game right now. Most of his ideas are sound. One’s blasphemy.

1. Wild card teams should play two out of three

Yes. A hundred and sixty-two games coming down to just one is cruel and unusual. Cohen suggests the regular season be cut back by two games to keep the overall season the same length. I don’t much like that idea since only four teams make the Wild Card spots and cutting two games from the schedule is really cutting something like 48 games that would have otherwise been played over two days across both leagues.

2. Enough with the beards.

Totally. Enough said.

3. The NL should adopt the DH

Oh hell no. I won’t go into all the Totally Obvious Reasons baseball is a superior game with all the players actually playing the way the New York Knickerbockers meant for them to play, but for NL purists (hello) the DH is an abomination from them depths of hell. We may as well let pro players hit with metal bats.

How about this idea: Teach pitchers to hit.

4. Kill the blackout

I don’t disagree with this, either, but dude assumes there’s some kind of logic behind how games get aired where. Plus, he could solve his issue by getting MLB.tv. It’s the best thing on the damned planet. Worth every centavo.

5. No more smokeless tobacco

Agree again.

6. PED scarlet letter

If a player gets caught using PEDs, upon return from suspension, the player has to wear a red uniform all of the time.

Yes. Plus, if they get caught a second time, they’re banned from the game for life and all their records evaporate. Like they never existed. That’d fix the issue pretty quick.

7. Stop counting pitches

Back in the day, guys would pitch full games on consecutive days for years. I know, the game’s changed. Really? Or is it that these guys cost too much money to use them as much as they were used in the old days?

8. Change how managers bullpens something something

Whatever. Let them dance their dance. This one sounds it comes from a guy who thinks the DH is a good idea.

9. Get the cameras off the fans

Yeah, I’d rather see how the guys in the bullpen are reacting to the game than some random dude in section 325. While we’re at it, can we establish some kind of minimum acceptable dress code for those people lucky enough to score those seats right behind the batter? And throw them out of the stadium if they wave into the TV camera while on their cell phone. “Hey, can you see me!?” Yes. You look like an idiot.

10. Stop whining about how long the games take

Amen. During the winter, I crave baseball and its timeless, easygoing cadence. I savor every second and resent travel days and the All-Star Break and the NFL for playing over the baseball season. Plus the months of November though February.

That’s Cohen’s list. I got one more.

11. Let the computers call balls and strikes

Heresy, I know, but I’m tired of watching good batters go down looking because the ump called a crap pitch as a strike (only to “give one back” later by calling a wickedly placed pitch a ball). We have the technology. There’s no reason to leave this up to the arbitrary verities of fallible humans anymore. In what other game are we asked to accept the blatantly wrong calls of the officiants over and over again during the course of a game? It’s madness. This would be better for batters and pitchers and fans. It would be fair.

I know, in the greater scheme of things, these calls work themselves out, but at any moment a rally can be killed or wrongly born because an ump screwed up. We’ve already got the camel’s nose under the tent flap with instant replay review. Let’s finish the job and let HAL call the pitches.