Posted on 07/13/2011 3:14:20 PM PDT by EveningStar
How can we improve Major League Baseball?
I'm sure we all have our own ideas. Here are some of mine:
Come up with a realistic method of capping a team's payroll.Well, those are some of my suggestions. How about yours?
Eliminate inter-league play. If you want to watch the other league, use your TV.
Have only two divisions in each league. The top two teams in each division would play each other. The wild card would thus be eliminated.
The All-Star Game:
The winner of the All-Star Game would no longer determine the home field advantage in the World Series. Thus the All-Star game would no longer "count."Determining the home field advantage in the World Series would revert to the alternating mehod used before 2003. The American League would have the home field advantage during odd-numbered years and the National League would have the home field advantage during even-numbered years. Why not let the team with the best overall record get the home field advantage? Unlike the NBA, NFL, and NHL - these are two separate leagues.
Since the All-Star Game would no longer count, games that are tied after 9 innings would end in a tie. No more extra innings in an All-Star Game.
Get the National League to give the Designated Hitter rule a three year tryout. Most amateur leagues and most minor leagues use it.
Eliminate the Bus Selig White Liberal Guilt rules. Selig is another white lib who thinks it's still 1963.
The Dodgers retired Jackie Robinson's number 42 in 1972. Robinson was still alive and attended the ceremonies (he died later that year). Allow the other teams to use the number 42 again. Besides, 42 is Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.
Eliminate Jackie Robinson Day. Please, Bud. Why not just rename Major League Baseball "Jackie Robinsonball"?
The Civil Rights Game? Are you kidding? The Jim Crow era is over. We don't need no stinkin' Civil Rights Game.
I love softball, I live for softball. I play softball four mornings a week from early Spring when the snow finally melts off the field to late fall when the snow finally covers the field. Unfortunately I hate baseball.......it is so damn boooooooooooooooorrrrrrrring.........
A better way to shave game time is to call the strike zone as it's written in the rulebook.
Some people keep trying to make baseball what it's not. They want 13-11 'excitement'. I like games where scoring means something -- the best baseball game I ever saw was the seventh game of the 1991 World Series which was 1-0 in ten innings and the most gripping sports event I've ever witnessed.
Baseball is pastoral. During the summer, it's for people who aren't in a hurry and in the fall, it's for people who sense drama in every pitch.
Haha - you write as if you are serious but I don’t believe you are. And, I was kidding about female coaches - if someone was a great coach and happened to be female, I’d be fine with it, but not quotas - not requiring female coaches, etc.
I played softball for many years - I never understood why girls have that big ball to throw and boys have the smaller one - a baseball fits my hand so much better than a softball!
A BROKEN bat? Oh,lawdy, save us.
Could put somebody’s eye out. It’s always fun until somebody gets hurt.
Thanks! We still need them for calls on the bases, and to decide if a batter checked his swing, to determine if a fly ball was caught or trapped, to invoke the infield fly rule, to call balks, and the like. For balls and strikes, it should be done electronically. The home plate ump should have an earphone that beeps if a ball passes through the strike zone. Then, he could stick his right hand up and everyone could think he's a genius. I don't want to know about high strikes or low strikes or pitchers who work the corners and then get the ump to "extend the strike zone." Define a strike and stick to it.
No matter what - somebody is going to get hurt. Will they get rid of cleats too? Or have they already done that. Just askin.
I stopped following baseball after the work stoppage in 1994 and have a distant interest now. Too many teams are patsies. That said, a drastic realignment based on geography would be a wise step. End the inconsistencies of today’s scheduling. The AL and NL are barely recognizable in today’s world so stop the pretenses. Put NYY, NYM, BOS, PHIL in a division for starters. Then alternate the remaining teams’ schedule by years. Cut down on the amount of games, too. 148 or 154 games. Baseball should end in mid-to-late October at the latest.
Thankfully...it’s not about what you want.
You suggest crazy stuff........frankly.
The way you make umps call balls and strikes the best they can is to implement the electronic detection around the plate, and then stipulate the umps have to be so close to the actual calls or they are fired. Make the strike zone actually conform to every hitter somehow, big guys have taller strike zones. This keeps the tradition of live umps, and makes sure the umps are really trying to get it right. Also makes it so the high strike is called and these wider zones aren’t. If the ump’s union doesn’t like it, threaten to go all electronic for determination of strikes/balls. If the umps can’t get close to being right within a few seasons then get rid of the ump behind home.
As far as close plays on the field, I think there was a study done recently that showed the umps only get calls “close enough to want to look at replay at” right four out of five times.
All the ideas about speeding the pitcher and batter up are good too.
Freegards
I believe MorningStar is on the right track.
I haven’t been a baseball fan since Cal Ripkin broke the
iron man record.
why does baseball have two teams that are able to spend two, three, four, five times more than the rest of the league. And no revenue sharing. What is the point?
Football does have it right. Everybody has a chance every game, every year. It only gets better and better.
Look for the highest rated programs on TV for any given year. Superbowl is right up there. Where is the World Series, down down down and still falling. Nobody outside of Yankees and Redsocks fans gives a S**t.
Problem is you talk to any Yankee fan or Redsock fan about this and they deny that there is any problem at all. Its like they are plugged into the Matrix and they just don’t want to be unplugged whether it would help save the sport or not. They are willing to take the sport completely down because they are hooked.
Their usual reponse is “Well you must be a cubs fan” or worse “What, do you want socialism” The best resonse they can make is that the rest of us are communists? Boy are they hanging on by a thread.
Personally, I prefer alittle more competition in the sports I watch. I don’t know, maybe its just me.
Yes, they should go back to a 154 game season.
The season should not start before April 15th, so they can have a better chance of avoiding cold spring weather.
They should play Sunday doubleheaders sometimes, as was common in the past.
They should play doubleheaders on Memorial Day, the 4th of July, and Labor Day.
They should eliminate most of the off days during the playoffs.
The regular season should end by Sept. 20th so that the World Series can end by about Oct. 15th, and avoid the coming of cold weather in fall.
All players named to the All-Star team should be required to attend the game.
They should change how tickets are sold. I understand that many teams sell most of their tickets as season tickets, which in turn are sold on sites such as Stub Hub. This artificially restricts the number of tickets available for the walk up crowd. You can build more of a fan base if people can go to a game on the spur of the moment, if more walk up tickets were available.
They should ban all the super loud rock and roll music from the ballparks. Bring back the old fashioned organ music. Some of the music is so loud you can’t talk to your friends who came to the game with you. And some of it is actually rap, which should be banned just because it’s rap.
And I agree with suggestions to speed up games. The average length of a game is about three hours now, isn’t it? That’s too long for a nine inning game, unless it’s a slugfest.
And on TV, just show us the game. Remove the clutter from the screen, especially advertising crawls for another show on the same channel on another day.
>>Eliminate inter-league play.
Makes them money. Pittsburgh sold out 3 games vs. Red Sox
Mike Hargrove the “human rain delay” was the worst and the starter of all that baloney.
How about we make the AL go back to the way it used to be pre-1973?
Hey, we can remove the hoop from the basketball backboard and have a ref decide if a shot counts as a "basket" or not.
No, because the hoops have always been a part of basketball.
Yes, goal posts have always been a part of football. And they have always been on the end line, ten yards beyond the goal line.
Oh, wait! My bad!! The goal posts were actually on the goal line until 1974. Then, someone figured that if they moved them back to the end line, three things would happen. The first was that receivers would no longer be able to use the goal post to “pick off” a defender. The second was that players would stop running into them, thus avoiding concussions. And third, field goal attempts would be ten yards longer, thus encouraging teams, in some instances, to try for the first down instead of a long field goal, thus adding more excitement to the game.
As for basketball, hoops were not always used. The name of the game that Dr. Naismith invented was called “basketball,” and not “hoopball” for a good reason. At its inception, a peach basket was actually used as the target, and some poor guy sat on a ladder and would retrieve the ball from inside the “basket.” It didn’t take very long, nor was it an amazing act of cognitive insight, for someone to suggest that they cut out the bottom of the basket. This, of course, eventually led to the familiar metal ring and netting that is now used.
There have been rules changes and other evolutionary improvements in every sport, as experience and technology became available. The instant replay is the greatest example of the use of technology in sports, although tennis has made use of the “Cyclops,” which utilizes a beam to determine whether a serve, often in the range of 125 mph, has landed in or out of the required target.
So, if your argument is that changes should never be made because a particular game has “always been played” a certain way, I would suggest that both history and common sense are on the other side of that argument. If you believe that human error by a home plate umpire, while completely avoidable thanks to modern technology, is preferable to the sterility of 100% accuracy, that is certainly your right. I happen to think that it is fairer to the players to get the call correct, and to use whatever means necessary, short of severely impacting the waiting time, to get that call correct. Clearly an automated ball/strike caller would be instantaneous, and 100% accurate. But, we’ve never had them before, therefore, we should never have them.
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