Players should be happy with deal for more playoffs
Spring training observations, in two parts:
There’s still time to make sense of the baseball postseason. Pandemic sense, that is. No one seems to understand that.
Back and forth they go, players and ownership, predisposed to acrimony and leaving crucial issues unsolved. It sounds as if there will be a designated hitter in the National League this year. It seems that expanded playoffs have been ruled out. But with the regular season about a month away, there is no set structure.
See if you can fathom this procession: MLB has told the players that the DH can become permanent in both leagues. That’s what the players want, for the most part, and it’s the way of the future, tradition be damned. But it
can’t just happen, like a light fixture being installed. This calls for some really bitter discussion. It works only if the players accept expanded playoffs — in the manner of last season, when the number of eligible postseason teams jumped from 10 to 16.
“Whoa,” say the players, acting like big, tough union guys. “No way! Unfair trade!”
How does it even come to that? When these two parties have a negotiating session, do they bicker over the sandwich choices until someone storms out of the room?
I can’t believe the players don’t realize that the expanded playoffs work for everyone. Not just .500level teams like the Giants, who were able to stay competitive throughout last season, but the game as a whole.
It’s great for the public, with so much postseason variety to follow. The league earns millions in badly needed revenue, and not just from television, but in ticket sales if attendance begins to approach a normal level. There’s a massive increase in fan interest with so many teams gunning for glory.
Remember, too, how many respected, conscientious players opted out of last season, the likes of Buster Posey, Lorenzo Cain, Ryan Zimmerman, David Price and Ian Desmond, among others. Their reasoning covered the spectrum: staying close to family, keeping focus on socialinjustice issues, fears for their health. But for everyone in the game — just like the rest of us — there’s the specter of depression, an ongoing sense of anxiety over the unknown.
Now, with 162 games ahead, it’s easy to imagine players losing interest if their teams fall out of contention around midseason. Maybe they don’t bail out, for the sake of loyalty, but they begin to question a life of caution, endless travel and stifling social restriction. The notion of “maybe I get to the World Series” is hardly a cureall, but for a great deal of people, the 2020 postseason was a blessing.
For the scandalridden Houston Astros, living in shame for months, it meant a spiritual revival under classy manager Dusty Baker. St. Louis and Miami got involved after enduring significant coronavirus outbreaks, and the Marlins won their firstround series against the Cubs. A lot of interesting
players got starquality exposure, such as the White Sox’s Tim Anderson and Tampa Bay’s Randy Arozarena, who wound up hitting a record 10 home runs along the way.
Exposure: That’s the key word. The players are all wrapped up in TV revenue (“Will the owners lowball us?”) and fear that too many teams, figuring the playoffs are a lock, will cease spending big money. But that’s where they’re blowing it. This isn’t the longshoremen’s union, with serious workplace issues. It’s a bunch of people being paid extremely well for playing a game. They
should drop the tedious rhetoric and realize what postseason exposure does for so many people — the more, the better.
Did you catch Posey on KNBR a couple of weeks ago, talking about shifts? “I think you have to get rid of the shift,” he said. “I feel very strongly about that. I just think that if a guy like Brandon Belt is at the plate, and he hits a rocket that shorthops the right fielder and the second baseman or third baseman is standing there, and he’s out. He’s thinking, ‘All right, what’s the value in hitting the ball even remotely closely to the ground now? I’ve got to get the ball in the air.’
“It’s easier said than done to just punch something to the left side,” Posey went on. “These guys are throwing 100 (mph), and they’re throwing it in spots that make it hard to do that. I always think about Brandon Crawford. If you’ve got him playing a traditional position at shortstop, and a hard groundball is hit up the middle, he’s got an opportunity now to make a diving play and show off his arm, but instead he’s already standing there, so it’s a routine groundball and it’s not exciting.
“I think removing the shift would do a lot.”
Why this matters: A lot of us share Posey’s sentiment, and it’s fine to hear from someone like Bryce Harper, Cody Bellinger or Joey Gallo, who refuse to surrender their basic hitting approach and pay the price. Posey is an authentic shiftbuster, someone equally comfortable poking the ball to right field or crushing one down the leftfield line. He’s thinking about the game itself, how it suffers from an alarming trend, and how it turns people off. Listen carefully.