One thing to consider when picking sides in the current Major League Baseball lockout is that like virtually all hostages, you have no voice in this battle. You are powerless, and when it’s over only you will have lost.
It’s your fandom, your love for baseball and its place in your life, that is being used by each side to get its way. The only certainty about what will come of this spectacle is that you will pay for the changes, whether it’s for tickets, hot dogs or the ability to watch games on cable television. Owners and players will each get a little more of what they want, and you’re the ATM.
You can decide later whether you want to, or can afford to, make baseball a priority in your life.
The real shame will be if baseball, after being further strip-mined by billionaires (worse) and millionaires (not much better), is less than it was, that we are left with Stupid Baseball. Because while wrestling over money, owners and players are also somehow discussing how to make baseball easier for players, as if how the game is actually played inside the chalk is relevant to labor talks.
Depending on which tweets we’re to believe, owners and players are using their differences to change significant ways the game has been played for decades. Considering that owners and their mouthpiece, the formerly independent Commissioner of Baseball, used the coronavirus pandemic to dumb down extra innings and make sure pitchers will never bat again, it’s easy to believe it all.
The most remarkable had been the assertion by MLB Network reporter Jon Heyman that owners and players have agreed to ban the defensive shift, an astonishing acknowledgment that major league hitters can’t play baseball well enough to beat a defense giving them, in some cases, an entire side of the field. The bags are about to get larger, as well, so it’s easier to steal bases, and the players union introduced the idea of the postseason “ghost win.”
It’s so close to coming off the rails that when a parody Twitter account tweeted Tuesday that it was agreed the bunt would eliminated, a lot of fans took it at face value. In light of recent news, and on the heels of significant rules changes in 2021, it was believable.
Owners and players have every right to hash out minimum salaries, draft and free agency parameters, arbitration, medical, retirement, etc. They have every right to expand or shrink the regular and/or postseason. Those are labor and management issues. That’s theirs. But is capital ‘B’ Baseball theirs, too?
Some rules have changed, most notably when baseball lowered the pitcher’s mound and shrank the strike zone in an attempt to kickstart offense after the 1968 season. But other than the designated hitter being adopted by the American League in 1973, the game has remained largely the same. Now, with owners making more than ever, we’re told amputation is required to save the patient.
Last season, a new rule required a pitcher to face at least three batters, limiting a manager’s ability to exploit a left-right matchup, offensively or defensively, and one that started extra innings with a runner on second base. Now, it’s the defensive shift — a cagey and legal, if frustrating, challenge to offenses — about to be 86’d.
The shift, by the way, isn’t new; teams were shifting Ted Williams. It’s just become popular because batters — swinging for the fences since junior high — are unable and/or unwilling to make their shifting overlords regret it.
Eliminating strategy is a bad idea. It’s part of baseball’s appeal that the more you know about it, whether it’s the rules or a pitcher’s repertoire or a batter’s weaknesses, the more entertaining it is. At this rate, we’ll be watching a pitcher face nine batters who score runs by driving in ghost runners by 2030. Stupid Baseball.
It seems especially shortsighted to make these kinds of decisions during heated labor negotiations. Baseball’s finances are theirs to parse and parcel, but is the Game — capital ‘G’ — theirs too?
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March 09, 2022 at 07:04AM
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John Shipley: Let’s hope we’re not left with Stupid Baseball - St. Paul Pioneer Press
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