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Sunday, June 11, 2006

Ways to Fix Baseball

I'm sure some of you are laboring under the notion that baseball is this great sport. I'll admit is has its points but it could use some help; and who better than me (someone entirely unfamiliar with baseball) to do the helping.

1st - put the name on the uniform. If you want encourage new viewers make it easy on them. I know that lots of teams have away jerseys with names, but come on! All names all the time.

Baseball needs to be converted from a 54 out game into a 54 minute game. Each side gets three minutes every inning. The pitcher has a 20 second pitch clock from the end of the last "action". The game clock would stop at the end of the action/play/pitch Batters would be simply s-o-l if they weren't ready when the pitch was thrown. The game clock would start when the pitch was thrown and stop when the pitcher got the ball again. Stealing, and checking base runners would also take time off, but you could only check a runner twice (after that it would be a license to steal) There would be three 90 second time outs in a game. A single pitch out would walk a batter instead of 4.

Base runners should be able to do more than run bases, If the runner wants to he should be able run from 1st to home to take out a catcher so that the guy coming from third scores. A batter (if he gets wood on the ball) should be able to also sprint over to third to help the runner from second. I suppose there would be no reason not to just charge the mound, but hey a few fast balls inside fixes that problem. In fact if a fast hitter can confound the outfielders there no reason why he cant just stay out there and cause trouble if they choose to let him be and continue the game (but I don't see why they would).

Rainouts are for wimps.

Baseball has developed some cool visuals over the years to help understand things like the nuances of pitching at batting but still... no reason to dally longer than 20 seconds between pitches. There is just only so much that can be said about ball two high and away. Some will say that it will burn out pitchers. Who cares? Athletes are an expensive but ultimately discardable commodity. Since the sacrifice play wouldn't be a huge sacrifice it would better to pitch to all the batters, regardless of how many steroids they take. And what makes baseball players so special. They should be allowed some real contact now and then. And I'm talking more that the freak event a catcher happens to be in the base line.

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# posted by Max : 6/11/2006 01:38:00 PM  
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