Will baseball never change for the better?
Baseball used to be my favorite sport. That was way back when it really was the national pastime. Pro football has that distinction now. The NFL gets it. I doubt the MLB owners ever will.
I haven't seen a baseball game since my retirement from WLS-TV (Ch 7) nearly four years ago. The sport no longer exists for me, although I covered it for some 40 years, and was a fan long before that. Cubs centerfielder Andy Pafko was my boyhood idol. I have many fond memories.
I cut school so I could watch the NL playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants in 1951. Got to see Bobby Thomson hit the "home run heard 'round the world." I managed an exclusive interview with Casey Stengel upon the Mets first visit to Wrigley Field in 1962. I was studying journalism at the University of Illinois at the time.
Years later, I felt like I was stealing money by getting paid to cover games and be around some great players and great people in and around the game. But money, greed, and cheating has changed all that.
The last straw for me was when the players struck the 1994 World Series. The owners, in an effort to lure fans back to the park, juiced the ball and brought in the fences. It worked. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa led the home run barrage.
Later, we learned that they were juiced as well. People in baseball knew what was going on, but nobody wanted to kill the golden goose. Attendance went up along with the TV ratings and ticket prices.
The owners played the fans for suckers and the majority of fans didn't seem to mind. They had become addicted to baseball and had to have it no matter how much the owners jacked them around.
It was an article on my "home page" that prompted this rant. It had to do with yet another blown call in last night's World Series game. Blown calls have been a part of baseball since its beginning, but we didn't have the technology to recifiy some of them.
We do now, and every sport other than baseball is making use of it (other than home run calls). It seems baseball doesn't want to break with tradition.
Of course, the owners didn't mind breaking with tradition by enabling a bogus home run derby that erased the legitimate records of Hank Aaron and others. But then that was deemed "in the best interest of baseball."
This is why I no longer consider MLB a legitimate enterprise. The umpires still make up their own strike zone and call their phantom double plays. As for the uniform code, that's gone by the board, too. Today's players look more like a bunch of guys in a beer league than professional ballplayers, wearing their pantlegs down around their shoes. You don't see that in the NFL.
I suppose part of the allure baseball still holds for people is the ball park settings and the camaraderie that goes with attending a game. I can identify with that. I just can't identify with the game itself.
Maybe I could if I was much younger and didn't have anything to compare it to. It's not the game I once knew and probably never will be. But then I once said that about hockey.
What a surprise to tune into last season's Stanley Cup Playoffs and see teams that could skate and make plays. I thought the days of clutch-and-grab and dump-the-puck were here to stay.
Share this entry
Recommended for you
2 Comments
Chicago Expatriate said:
Too many teams, a season that is too long, watered down NFL style playoffs that last into November. 3 and a half hour games painfully called by Joe Buck and the insufferable Tim McCarver. Yeah baseball sure ain't what it used to be.
Brad Palmer said:
AMEN.
Leave a Comment?
What your comment will look like:
said: