An idea has taken root among baseball fans in the last 40 years that baseball is a kind of “perfect machine” which maintains its form and balance through it’s own internal system of checks and balances. It is a form of nostalgia and delight in knowing that after 150 years of professional baseball, third-basemen are still throwing out runners by a half-step and a ball over the wall means a home-run. This nostalgia is what causes the fan-base as a whole to became angry at, say, the designated hitter rule.
It is founded on the premise that baseball, on the field, is a perfect-game , having it’s own scales and it’s own justice, and that no one has the right to change that. No matter how screwed up baseball is off the field, no matter how irrational its schedule, no matter how insane it’s salary structure, and no matter how bad its labor relations can get (1994), it remains, on the field, the same game it’s always been. I believe that it is the prejudice against deliberate change has become a burden to the game of baseball, and has become the enemy of needed reforms.
March madness for college basketball has already begun. Although I do not follow college basketball, I will occasionally watch a game if there is not other sport on television. It’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement from the students, alumni and die-hard fans during the games; the jumping, chanting, screaming, face-painting, and all around great time that people have from attending and watching a college basketball game. There is an excitement in the building which it not merely palpable, but visceral. One cannot help but be carried away by it with all the anticipation and excitement.
College basketball is a wonderful game, but baseball is a wonderful game too and I can remember times when we were all carried away in the sheer joy of being at a ballpark. College basketball remains a wonderful sport because those people who control the game are determined not to allow it to be trivialized by selfish strategies of those who play and coach.
In all sports the interests of one party are often at odds with the interests of the game itself. If the rules allowed it, some basketball coaches would instruct their players to just dribble around all game, never shooting except free throws. If the other team is better than you are, your best chance to win is with a game a very few possessions. Basketball has developed many ways to prevent coaches from turning basketball games into long displays of dribbling and free throw shooting. There is the shot clock, the half-court line, the guarding rule, and the rule that says that we don’t shoot the first few fouls in each half, unless the team with the ball is fouled in the act of shooting.
If you go back 60 years in college basketball, you might be amazed at how many rule changes have been added over the course of those years- not rules added to improve the game or to dictate strategy, but rule changes added to preserve the game, and to keep coaches from overindulging in ridiculous strategies. The general effect of these rules is not to make the game something new and different, but simply to stop people from using schemes and gimmicks, and to force them to just play basketball. So when they change the rules in basketball, like the rule designed to prevent a player from calling a timeout as he is falling out of bounds, they do so as a way of saying to coaches and players “just play basketball.”
The presumption that baseball is a perfect, self-correcting machine is so strong that it creates a giant blind spot. There are some rule changes that need to be made in baseball- obvious rules but changes not designed to make baseball into something new and different, but to restore baseball to what it is supposed to be.
For many years, I was often told that baseball was a “slow” and “boring” game; the millennial generation is too distracted and impatient to follow a game that is known as a “pastime.” The problem with long baseball games isn’t the time they take. The problem is that the wasted time inside baseball games dissipates tension, and this makes the games less interesting , less exciting, and less fun to watch. Baseball traditionalists are fond of pointing out that baseball is the only sport without a clock. What these people don’t understand is that, until about 1945, baseball did have a clock- the sun. Until lights were added to ballparks, games had to be played at a crisp pace in order to get the game in on time. In fact, this had to be done an hour sooner because daylight savings time was not widely adapted until the late 1970’s.
Umpires, until world war II, were very much in the habit of enforcing the attention to time. In fact, umpires who did move the game along were typically ridiculed and fined by their respective league. Even after the coming of night baseball, the habit of moving the game along was well established in the population of baseball umpires- in the umpires who pre-dated night baseball, many of whom lasted into the 1960’s. As those umpires retired, however, so did the idea of moving the game become lost.
New commissioner Rob Manfred has made it a priority to move the game forward by eliminating the wasted time during the game. These steps were discussed earlier in the week.
In part III of this series, which will post on Tuesday, March 17th, I will discuss additional rule changes that will enhance this process. Much like college basketball, changes not to improve the game but rather preserve it.
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