Nine Reasons to Continue to Ignore Baseball

As Opening Day marks another season of the game formerly known as America's Pastime, here (in no particular order) is a starting nine of our own: A lineup of reasons why baseball has been destroyed beyond repair over the past 30-odd years:

1. The Outsourcing of "America's Game"

I like what this fan and retired U.S. Marine had to say:

The Padres have made their presence known in Latin America with an elaborate $8 million baseball complex opening this spring in the Dominican Republic, an academy of baseball for foreign players - mostly Latin Americans. Their future is apparently hinged on Latin players.

[. . .]

There is a place for foreign players in America. But to recruit overseas so extensively that American youth are overlooked to the extent they are in the small towns and inner cities throughout the land is not a good idea nor is it a good business practice. Fans will eventually - many already do - resent the 'foreignization' of our game here at home. 

I remember grabbing my cap and glove and riding my bike to little league baseball practice as a kid, then riding back and watching the Game of the Week on NBC. I would watch Fred Lynn make circus catches in centerfield or George Brett leg out a triple to the gap and would be enthralled. There felt like a real connection between my local field and the major leagues. The outsourcing of the game has severed that connection, fatally, and is a huge reason why baseball has hemorrhaged young fans over the past three decades.


2. Steroids

Not much needs to be said here. This poison obviously comes in all colors. But one can especially understand why a young Dominican or Venezuelan can resort to PEDs as a way to escape poverty and make a new life for himself and his family. This quote from an early 1980s article on steroids made me immediately think of what we are doing with our Latino baseball players as soon as I read it:

Without adequate research conducted on subjects taking megadoses, it's impossible to clearly understand the potential steroids have for good or ill. One of the most extreme suggestions for cutting through the difficulties was put forth last fall in a speech by Arthur Jones, the founder, president and chief publicist of Nautilus Sports/Medical Industries Inc. At a strength-coaching conference at the University of Virginia, he announced the following grandiose plan:

"Next week I'm going south of the border to institute a 10-year study using thousands of subjects. Why south of the border? Because we can get the subjects at a price we can afford, and we can get subjects who are motivated, who will train. When you take starving subjects you can motivate them, believe me. We're going to take about 1,000 subjects and give them massive doses of steroids, and we're going to take another 1,000 and give 'em no steroids. You can't do that in this country. But you can do it down there. When they sign up for this program they'll be told in advance, 'Look, what we give you may be a drug, or it may not be. Even if it is, you won't know it. The drugs might be dangerous, and they might ruin your liver. Now if you don't want to sign up, there's the door, leave.' "

We've taken starving subjects and we've motivated them to abuse their bodies for our entertainment. No wonder it's many fans who are looking for the door.... and leaving.


3. Too Many Teams, Too Many Games

This is a problem in every sports league today yet it seems especially problematic for baseball, which at 162 games has the longest regular season by far. Having the Red Sox and Yankees play a ridiculous 18 games a season against each other does nothing to solve the problem. Fact is, teams with no real identity like Arizona, Colorado, Miami and Tampa Bay were added to an already packed slate, with the result being too many evenings of minblowingly dull games on the schedule. Contraction of teams and schedule would reinvigorate rivalries and make the daily form seem more meaningful.


4. No World Series Day Games

For those who are too young to remember, you are also too young to remember when baseball mattered. A nation would re-work its schedule around a weekday afternoon World Series game back in the day. While that may be impractical in our modern workaholic world, why there can't be weekend afternoon games is truly a black mark against the money-obsessed managers of the game today. Baseball was meant to be played on real grass in real elements, and the crisp fall air lighted by a dull autumnal sun always added to the gravitas of World Series baseball.


5. Cheap Home Runs

It may seem unbelievable but there was a time when a home run could actually kill a rally. When a team was behind by 4-5 runs and trying to stage a comeback and would get a couple of baserunners on, the idea was to keep the pressure on the pitcher, keep those bases occupied and keep moving station to station, wearing down the opponent like drops of water on a stone. A home run was seen to kill this pressure, as it emptied the bases while keeping the opponent still in the lead. This kind of baseball is completely extinct today. Now in our age of the cheap home run you can just hit keep hitting "long balls", even on breaking balls away that you pop to the opposite field, and hope to hit enough to get back in the game. Something very special has been lost in the process.


6. Uneven Financial Playing Field

Why teams aren't force to share all the revenue from their local cable sports television network deals is the biggest financial scandal in the game today. Cable TV is THE revenue stream of the modern sports age and the notion that teams in huge metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles and, yes, Dallas, can use huge sums of that revenue to outspend less-fortunate teams is a black mark on competitive fairness. New York will always make more TV revenue than Kansas City, but you won't have a product to put on that New York sports superstation without a Kansas City to play against you. Why is this not obvious? Greed blinds but even the National Football League understands the necessity of sharing television revenue. Baseball seemingly never will.


7. No Real Doubleheaders

Greed strikes again with the elimination of the real doubleheader. Now doubleheaders are almost never intentionally scheduled and those that do occur are separate gates-affairs in which fans would have to pay twice to attend. A weekend doubleheader on a lazy summer day was a great way to connect with fans but the money machine that is MLB today cares not for such bon mots to their supporters. They see you as sheep to be fleeced for all they can get.


8. Too Many Fans at Every Game

Which brings a similar complaint: Who are all these fans attending all these games? As recently as the late 1980s, you could go to the park for, say, a Tuesday night game against a team worth seeing, buy a cheap seat in the bleachers and stretch out and enjoy a relaxing evening at the park. Now, except for in struggling cities, the stadiums are always filled, with often the only seats that are empty being those corporate rip-off "field" seats that ring home plate. The charm of going to the park and saying "Give me the four best you got" are long gone. It's a mystery to me just as it's a mystery that the local Applebee's parking lot is always completely filled when I drive by. Why? I DON'T KNOW. It also reminds me of the old Yogi-ism: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."


9. Tony La Russa

The man who more than anyone has single-handedly destroyed the modern game. Retired now from the St. Louis Cardinals, his micromanaging, especially with pitchers, and his coldly technical approach to the game has given us the birth of the 4+ hour baseball game. Not 30 years ago a National League game would routinely end in two hours. AL games, which had the designated hitter, were considered long if they went past the 2:30 mark and approached 2:45. Three-hour games were rare and undesirable.

Then La Russa comes along with his situational matchups for EVERYTHING. This 1983 article on his Chicago White Sox staff shows how he robbed the starting pitcher of his manhood:

Two of the things that don't count for nearly as much as they used to are virginity and complete games. As La Russa says, "We don't pay off on complete games here." Of course, in most other places the banner of complete games must be kept waving. A CG remains a goal so that when pitchers fall short, as invariably they do, they will feel guilty and, as well, suffer one more black mark should they ever come to arbitration. Also, it is psychological. [Dick] Tidrow, who used to be a starter, explains: "It's hard to tell a starting pitcher: give me six good innings, and then I'll get you out, because then the starter's liable only to think in terms of six and he won't go but four."

After reducing the starter in stature, La Russa proceeded to re-make the bullpen into an exercise in tedium. Pulling the righty who's mowed down the first two batters because the lefty batter is coming in, despite the fact that he's only hitting .207 lifetime against the righty - doesn't matter, the charts say it's the right move - one change leading to another... and another.... and another. Extending the game, making a starting pitcher feel like he's accomplished something by going five, then using six pitchers to close out the last four innings, and, not the least, adding to the insufferably egotistical idea of the manager as the guy who wins games, as opposed to the players on the field.

The great Sparky Anderson was the ideal manager. What a marvelous quote for a skipper to make: "A baseball manager is a necessary evil." Sparky knew it took talent to win games. You get the talent and then you put it out there to do what it does best. Then guys like La Russa came along and said they were deciding games. Four-and-a-half hour games are the legacy this monumental destroyer of the simple game that is now gone has left for us all.

Thank you... no. I'll pass.

Again.