Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, May 05, 2010 11:26:48 PM
Baseball is a wonderful game, run by creatures of habit, occasionally complete idiots. I have some rants, some old, some new. Much of it will be too much "inside baseball" (sorry) to those of you who don't love it like I do, so bear with me.
There is no real Commissioner, and therefore nobody to slap the owners around and tell them they are acting like infants.
Is Albert Pujols worth $25 mil a season? Probably. The bloat in baseball salaries comes not from the cream of the crop. It comes from using salary arbitration as a salary structure. There are probably four dozen shortstops in the major leagues. The guy half way up that scale is probably batting ..260 with little power, and is an average fielder. In salary arbitration, his agent will pose his half way position as deserving of a mid point between the league minimum and Derek Jeter. Then the union uses the results as a wage floor.
There are too many pitchers. Carrying two more for lefty-righty matchups is way overrated. The five man rotation is a dinosaur in the world of pitch counts. Go back to four, pull them after 100 pitches, ice them down properly and use the extra innings they can pitch to open up two slots for position players- especially that third catcher that everybody needs.
Call the strike zone up to the letters, instead of at the waist. Good batters lay off rising fastballs that were the bread and butter of Seaver, Carlton, Koufax and Gibson and force pitchers to use sliders and other breaking pitches as strike pitches, adding strain to their arms, forcing more walks and reaching the pitch count limit an inning or two early, bringing out the middle relievers, usually the worst pitchers on the team.
Oh, and a special note to the short-bus, dunderhead, skeve-brained owenrship of my beloved NY Mets: you built a beautiful new stadium and tore down that old monstrosity, and I thank you. Citi Field is wonderful, but it has a really deep right center, obviously an homage to the old Polo Grounds. It isn't bad enough the field demands a centerfielder that can run like hell and is less than thirty years old (which you don't have). It demands your mid-lineup power hitters be dead pull, because only steroids will allow you to clear that wall consistently. And I don't know if you've noticed or not, but dead pull hitters don;t exist anymore! Everybody does the Charlie Lau top hand and goes the other way with the outside pitch now. Nobody among your baseball people noticed this?
Oh, and there is a recession. Taking your family out and dropping two c-notes on tickets, parking and food is not a path to success if you don't have a line of bond traders looking for season packages.
Stop letting the batters call time like they do. Hell, Derek Jeter alone is a human rain delay. Then again, his Yankees began the new mantra in babseball, laying off anything outside the strike zone, driving the starter out by the fifth inning and teeing off on the middle relief. The Yankees average well over three hours a game, and nobody wants anything less, especially their television sponsors.
Do these things, and watch the average time drop from the three hours of today to the 2:15 of 1980, and you'll go mainstream again. I can't let my kids watch a full game because they end well after bedtime. Where will your fan base be after twenty years of that?