Playing game all wrong
MLB should simplify things in wake of history of scandals.
It is such a simple game.
And after all this time, we still find the most beauty in its simplicity.
Ball. Bat. Glove.
That’s it.
All that was required in the murky, distant beginnings. All that is truly necessary in 2020, more than 115 years after the first World Series was played.
So why does Major League Baseball — the game, sport, players and teams — keep ruining baseball?
And why can’t baseball get out of its own way?
“Was it against the rules? Yes it was. And I personally am sorry for what’s come about, the whole situation,” Dallas Keuchel told reporters Friday, becoming the first player linked to the 2017 Astros to publicly apologize for a sign-stealing scandal that forever changed the perception of Houston’s only World Series winner, completely rocked MLB, and eventually altered three franchises.
“First and foremost, I think apologies should be in order,” Keuchel said. “It was never intended to be what it is made to be right now.”
Baseball loves and lives off its hallowed history.
History hasn’t been kind to the grand ol’ game the last 25 or so years.
The 1994 strike, which pushed away countless believers, made millionaires on both sides of the aisle look cheap and turned a World Series into a frozen blank space.
The historic 1998 home-run chase, a national obsession that we now know was a harbinger for fake news.
A sport-changing steroid scandal and the still-damning Mitchell Report, which was released in 2007, almost a decade after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa “powered” MLB into a new millennium.
The 2017 and ’18 Astros, the 2018 world champion Boston Red Sox, and every other team that may have been doing some version of the same thing during the previous decade.
The NFL has had serious public problems, but nothing close to the above.
The NBA looks like a contemporary athletic dream compared to MLB. Another superstar leaving another small market is the biggest ongoing concern in The Association.
Since commissioner Rob Manfred issued his latest report and Jim Crane began an intertwined search for a new manager and general manager, it’s been in vogue within some circles to coolly point out that cheating always has been a part of baseball. That’s true. It’s also old news and something every good baseball fan learns in their second decade on earth.
The real news is the damage that MLB keeps doing to itself in the name of … what?
Modern progress?
Hundreds of millions of dollars that become another billion? Fake numbers and statistics? Competitive advantage?
The Astros played a zero-sum game and eventually lost. Giving up Game 7 of the 2019 World Series in the seventh inning in their ballpark has nothing on the fallout from 2017* and a shadow that will follow the 2020 club from city to city this season.
Alex Cora is out of Boston, and the Red Sox are now under Manfred’s prying microscope.
Luis Rojas, not Carlos Beltran, now manages the New York
Mets.
Because of sign stealing.
At least in 1998, a once-mythical home run record was at stake.
Manfred is expected to again try to tighten up all the high-tech thievery before Opening Day. A crazy suggestion in this analytic, Sabermetric, launch angle, WAR, GIF, social-media driven age: Make the game simple again.
Remove any technology from the dugout/field area that isn’t absolutely necessary. Consistently monitor what remains. Deliver a message that, if another hard rule is intentionally broken, a lifetime ban will follow and rings will be revoked.
I’m also pro-robot umps. The brave new world can be helpful, when it’s used wisely.
In recent years, Manfred has focused on speeding up a sport that can drag on TV in this low-attention span era.
Baseball has to keep up. Baseball is too slow.
Baseball, again, was breaking written rules while MLB foolishly kept looking the other way.
The crack of a bat in the spring sun. A ball smacking a glove. Cleats digging into red dirt.
We keep coming back, even after all the sport-changing scandals, because of the beauty inherent in a simple game.
After all this time, baseball is still worth believing in. When we know that we’re actually watching baseball being played.