People often ask me about my favorite sport, both as a follower and as a broadcaster.
I usually say I preferred whatever I was announcing at the time.
Since there were many sports I broadcast, I always felt the one I was doing, was the one I liked best at the time.
Most of my last seven years were NFL contests, and that was the one sport that had seven days between games, the schedule was shorter than the other pro sports, thus the only one where you would feel butterflies before kickoff.
After all, there was a week-long buildup, and every game carried a special significance. There was no quick turnaround after a defeat. It would sting for seven days.
Everything in the contest was magnified, including the effects of a win or a loss.
But two years after retiring, I have a different outlook.
Much of it has to do with what drove me as a sports fan, then, as a sports reporter growing up.
That sport would be baseball.
In my early years, all the others, including pro football were fillers around the baseball calendar, which started with spring training and the exhibition games, into the six-month regular season and World Series which followed.
Baseball is what I lived for.
And that is why what I’m about to say hurts to some degree.
I believe all the changes to the rules, including replays, clocks, positioning of players, size of the bases, you name it, has made baseball a sham.
Remember when it was said, that the unique aspect to baseball which separated it from all the other team sports, was the fact there was no clock.
Time would never run out.
Teams would have their times at-bat, and when the final batter was retired after nine innings, or however the game lasted, the game would be over.
Baseball was a perfect geometrical sport.
There was a diamond shaped infield, with the bases 90-feet apart. The distance from the pitchers’ rubber on the mound to home plate was 60-feet, 6-inches. Home plate was 17-inches wide. It worked beautifully for over a century, regardless of how players became faster or grew bigger.
Ironically, the size of most baseball players have been consistent. There are bigger players today, such as Aaron Judge, but let’s not forget Frank Howard, who was a 6-foot-8 former basketball player, or Gene Conley, who was even taller, and did play pro basketball with the Boston Celtics, while he was still a major league pitcher.
Most of the distances I have listed still exist, but the bases will be larger this season in an effort, they say, to reduce base running injuries and promote stealing.
They now also limit the number of throws a pitcher can make to first base to keep runners close, which has opened up considerably more base-stealing.
Why do rules have to be changed to encourage strategy?
Why can’t the game be played in natural form that worked to perfection, and let the chips fall?
Baseball is unnatural now.
They have made moves to limit shifts of infielders against left-handed pull hitters(those who hit to the right side), to end the dull practice of those batters hitting sharp, would be singles to the right side, only to have a second baseman playing in short right field field the ball and throw the batter out.
Why haven’t those hitters learned to hit to the left side assuring getting on base every time?
I could go on and on and get technical about some of these changes but I sense boredom in reading this.
So why don’t I get to the two most inexcusable aspects to the way baseball is now played.
The first, is the practice of putting a runner automatically on second base at the start of each extra inning until the game is over.
You play the game a certain way for nine innings, and then in the crucial extra innings of a game, you give the offense a gift, that years ago, would assure victory.
How about the Yankees, Dodgers, Orioles, Cardinals of yesteryear with a runner on second, nobody out.
How about a sacrifice moving the runner to third, and a fly ball to bring him in. No need for a base hit.
That’s not the way the game was meant to be played.
But we all know why they institute these ridiculous rules changes.
The game’s too slow.
It drags on forever.
Young kids are turned off.
So there is now a clock. Automatic balls and strikes are called when pitchers take too long to deliver a pitch, or batters aren’t in the box ready to hit.
So here are the rules, and please excuse what’s to follow.
Bear with me.
Pitchers have :15 seconds to deliver a pitch with no one on base. They have :20 with runners on.
Batters have :09 to step in, and must be in position with :08.
Now get this!
Catchers must be in the box, not necessarily in their crouch with :09 left.
Batters must have their eyes toward the pitcher with :08 left.
Are you kidding me?
When I followed baseball growing up, the games rarely lasted beyond 2-and-a-half hours.
Some were barely 2 hours long.
Many were under 2 hours, believe it or not.
That’s because hitters stayed in the batters box after each pitch and didn’t step out to adjust their wrist-bands.
Pitchers would fire way, step off the rubber, and get ready for the next delivery.
Umpires would tell the hitters to stay in the box, or pitchers to get ready quicker and they would have to listen.
What really has used up time, are the long commercials between every half-inning.
Cut them down.
I know that might affect the money owners make, but if the game is quickened that way, perhaps more younger fans would be more interested.
And maybe, just maybe, times change.
Maybe today’s youth would rather play video games, and be mesmerized by their cell phones, than sit down on the sofa and watch a baseball game. Or other sports on TV.
Maybe people don’t have the patience that was necessary to watch sporting events.
Maybe that’s why viewership has dropped precipitously in every sport but the NFL.
As a youngster I loved baseball.
It was a rhythmic, ballet of sorts.
It contained the drama of a pitcher trying to stop a lineup from scoring runs. With the help of the infielders and outfielders making the plays in the field to make that happen.
It was a question of whether a team’s batting order could get runners on base, and deliver a clutch hit to drive in runs. Or whether a home run driven over the fence, into the crowd would, be the key blow to decide the outcome.
When the last man was retired, or the game-winning hit was executed, the contest was over.
Nine innings or beyond.
It was a beautiful thing.
But times change, and tastes change.
I understand all of that.
What I don’t understand, and never will, is forcing changes within a sport, that ruin its very fibre.
That ruin what a sport was meant to be in the first place.
For me, it’s tragic. And that’s why I don’t watch it anymore.