Sports Gambling, Everywhere

Recently I was watching a baseball playoff broadcast–it might have been a pregame show, or it might have been one of the games themselves–when a little box flashed up on the screen with some of the bets you could place on the game. It wasn’t just who would win, either. Instead, you could bet on the final score, the spread, who would score first, and whether a particular player would hit a home run during the game. Time to pick up the phone and call your bookie, fans!

It’s not just baseball, of course, You can’t watch a pro football game without seeing ads for DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, or Caesars Sportsbook. The NFL broadcasts not only feature commercials telling viewers that they still have a chance to bet, the pregame shows include segments where specific bets are suggested. In the commercials, the wagerers always seem to win (although, in one particular point-of-view ad that is broadcast regularly, the bettor eats some pretty crappy-looking pizza while a player improbably scores to make his bet pay off, so maybe there’s an implicit gambling-isn’t-so-great message there).

The sports world is so associated with gambling these days that organizations like NASCAR have joined forces with the American Gaming Association, as shown in the picture above, to encourage fans to bet responsibly and “know when to pit.” Such ads seem like a way to have your cake and eat it, too: the sport is saying that some betting is just fine and perfectly natural and understandable, but can point to their ads as encouraging moderation rather than betting your bottom dollar. The problem, however, is that gambling addicts don’t know when to stop. They lose, and lose, and always believe that the next bet is a sure fire way to turn things around and get them back on the plus side.

In the last few years, gambling on sports has emerged from the shadows and come out into the daylight, and moved well beyond office college football or NCAA tournament pools. Sports betting is now legal in many states, and reports indicate that the amount of gambling skyrocketed during the COVID pandemic–with unfortunate consequences for some people who lost their shirts. It’s clearly a big-money business–which makes you wonder when the next sports betting scandal, with games being fixed and players tanking, might happen. Could another Black Sox scandal be just around the corner?

Thanks To Tito And The Boys

Regrettably, the Cleveland Guardians couldn’t quite get over the hump in their series with the Yankees. But that sad result doesn’t detract from the fact that the team had a fine season, shocked the baseball world, and made September and October a lot more interesting (and bearable) for Cleveland sports fans. In the process, this group of players, many of them rookies and unknowns, showed that they belonged in the mix of teams contending for the World Series title, and manager Terry (“Tito”) Francona showed again the deftness, leadership, and flexible thinking that make him the best manager in the game.

So I’d like to say thank you to Tito and the boys. Thank you for the 2022 Cinderella story. Thank you for the awesome September stretch run, for dashing to the AL Central title, and for winning the wild-card round in two wonderful nail-biter games. Thank you for giving your fans the incentive to wear SpongeBob Squarepants outfits to games and stay until the final out. Thank you for showing there is still room in baseball for teams that are built on good starting pitching, a well-managed bullpen, stout defense, smart hitting and baserunning, grit, hustle, and a dash of humility. Thank you for not cheating, and for playing the game the right way. Thank you for standing toe to toe with big-payroll teams like the Yankees and not wilting in the glare of pressure and media attention and the taunts of jerky Yankees fans. And finally, thank you for making baseball more innocent and fun again.

I’m sure the baseball bigwigs are happy that the Yankees moved on, and the New York City television market will remain engaged in the playoffs, but I wonder if the casual fans weren’t hoping that the upstart Guardians could knock off the Yankees and continue their magical and improbable run. As for me, with the Guardians going home I’m done with baseball for the year. I’ve heard enough of babbling Bob Costas and his ceaseless statistical chatter to last a lifetime, and there is no one to root for in the AL series between the smug, money-soaked Yankees and the ever-tainted Astros. That’s like making a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.

But I will enjoy some great memories. Thanks to Tito and the boys for that, too.

Enjoying The Ride With A Likeable Crew

I stayed up late last night, reveling in the Cleveland Guardians’ amazing comeback win over the mighty New York Yankees. Any time you score three runs in the bottom of the ninth to gain an improbable win, it’s worth relishing the moment. The fact that, by doing so, the Guardians ruined an outlandish Yankees playoff record just made the win all the sweeter. According to ESPN, before last night, the Yankees were a perfect 167-0 in postseason games where they entered the ninth inning with a multiple run lead. Not any more!

But as I experienced the surge of post-win joy, I also reflected on why this Guardians team is such a pleasure to watch. They are underdogs, of course, and as with any Cleveland sports team the expectations are low. They play a vintage, scrappy, hustling brand of baseball that is totally out of step with the power-dominated modern game–so much so that the guys in the broadcast booth can’t help quoting statistics about how the teams with the most homers usually win, and reminding us that the Guardians often need multiple hits to scratch out a run. Never mind that, for years, many great baseball teams succeeded by playing exactly the way the Guardians play the game, relying on strong pitching, good defense, speed on the basepaths, and timely hitting. The broadcasters would do well to remember that the fact that modern teams have chosen not to follow that formula doesn’t mean it won’t work. Cleveland manager Terry Francona, steeped in baseball history, knows this, even if the statistic-obsessed guys in the broadcast booth don’t.

And another appealing element to this Guardians team is its humility and likeability. These aren’t a bunch of showboaters who strike a pose when they get a big hit. A big difference between the Yankees and the Guardians was seen in game one, when a Yankees player thought he hit a home run, immediately went into an all-about-me home run trot, and then got thrown out at first when the ball hit the top of the fence rather than leaving the ballpark and the Guardians’ outfielder made a great throw to the infield to catch the Yankee player off the bag. That embarrassing blunder would never happen to a Guardians player–they would keep their eyes on the ball and be focused on sprinting around the bases.

It’s been a fun baseball postseason so far, with some improbable results–like a team that won 111 games, and the defending World Series champs, both being knocked out early, and two long 0-0 extra-inning games. It would be good for the game if the Guardians continue to make the 2022 playoffs interesting, and this likeable gang and their wizard manager keep showing that there is more than one way to win baseball games.

“Bloop hits“

Pay no attention to the Yankees fans who say only shots knocked over the fence should be counted. If you want to play the shift, as the Yankees did, you need to accept the consequences. That’s the game, boys!

Talking Too Much

I watched the Guardians-Yankees division series playoff game last night on TBS. By the end of the broadcast, I was left with two unshakeable conclusions.

First, it’s hard to beat a team that has spent huge amounts on player contracts. Every player in the Yankees batting order seemed to have hit at least 20 homers, knocked in at least 70 runs, and either won an MVP, a batting title, a World Series title, or a Golden Glove award before they went for the big money in the Bronx.

And second, Bob Costas just talks too much. Way, way, way too much. So much that his partner in the booth, Ron Darling, was hard pressed to get a word in edgewise, even though, unlike Costas, he often had something interesting to say about what was happening on the field. By the end of the game, I felt like hitting the mute button, just so I wouldn’t hear Costas rip through another set of weird statistics and seemingly pointless anecdotes.

There’s nothing to be done about the payroll difference. Regrettably, it’s just part of the big-league game these days and something that you need to accept when you root for a small-market team against one of the cash-rich big boys. All you can do is hope that lightning strikes and your team can somehow prevail despite the stacked deck. But the broadcast booth blabbing is jarring. You’re used to listening to your hometown TV team, and then suddenly you’re dealing with a national media personality who apparently feels compelled to gush out verbiage like a fire hydrant on a hot summer’s day.

Baseball is a slow-moving, pastoral game. Part of its appeal is the sights and sounds and rhythms. A chatterbox announcer interferes with all of that. Make your occasional point, and call the action, sure — but there is absolutely no need to fill every precious moment of silence or background crowd noise or the organ sounding the notes of the “charge” call with mindless yammering about in-the-weeds data analytics or curious back stories that really don’t have anything to do with the game.

Bob Costas has had a storied career in broadcasting, but in my view his approach really interferes with enjoyment of the game. Take a breath now and then, Bob — won’t you?

The Payroll Playoffs

To the astonishment of many baseball pundits, the Cleveland Guardians’ improbable season is continuing. The Guardians swept their wild card series against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, winning two thrilling games by classic Guardians-like scores: 2-1 and 1-0. The Saturday game was a playoff baseball classic that featured brilliant pitching and defensive play, producing a scoreless tie for 15 innings before Oscar Gonzalez hit a walk-off homer to allow the Guardians to celebrate, as shown above, and advance.

Now the Guardians’ road gets tougher–and more intriguing–because next up are the fearsome New York Yankees. The two teams are at the opposite ends of the spectrum in many ways. The Yankees have the third-highest payroll in major league baseball, at $211.2 million, while the Guardians had the lowest, at $29.1 million. (In fact, the Yankees have one player, Gerrit Cole, whose $36 million salary in 2022 is greater than the Guardians’ entire team payroll, and the Yankees’ Giancarlo Stanton’s $29 million comes close.)

What’s more, the Yankees aren’t called the Bronx Bombers for nothing; they hit the most home runs in the major leagues this year, with 254–twice as many as the Guardians’ 127, which came in second to last. Aaron Judge’s 62 alone is almost half of Cleveland’s total dinger output. And the home run statistic should be a bit daunting for Guardians fans, because ESPN points out that in last year’s playoff, the team that hit the most home runs went 25-2 (there were 10 games where the teams had an equal number of homers).

And finally, the Yankees dominated the season series with the Guardians, winning 5 of 6 games by a combined score of 38-14 and mashing 12 homers. If this playoff series turns into a slugfest, it could get ugly. Incidentally, the Yankees not only have power, they have a fine pitching staff, too. Their team ERA for 2022 was 3.30, which was good enough to finish third in the big leagues. (The Guardians finished sixth in team ERA, at 3.46.)

In short, this Yankees-Guardians series presents just about every storyline you could want: the big payroll team against the lowest-paid team in the league, the power team versus the small-ball team, the experienced lineup versus a team with lots of rookies, the team that was expected to dominate matched up against the scrappy underdogs who have overachieved all season. Guardians fans hope that their team, and its pitching staff, has righted the ship since those drubbings at the hands of the Yankees earlier in the season–they last played on July 3–and can put up a fight. We think our team has one of the best managers in baseball in Terry (aka Tito) Francona, who has done a fantastic job this year and who can be trusted to put the Guardians in the best possible shape to match up with the Yankees.

The series starts tomorrow, with Yankees’ ace Gerrit Cole–the $36 million guy–taking the ball for the Bombers. Cleveland’s starter is expected to be Cal Quantrill, and if the game is close we’ll see a lot of the Guardians’ bullpen, too. I’ll be watching and rooting hard for the Clevelanders, who have supplied their fans with many wonderful memories already this season. We’re just hoping that the magic continues, and the Guardians find a way to scratch and claw and pitch their way past the Damn Yankees.

The Guardians Of The ‘Land

Something pretty amazing happened yesterday. The Cleveland Guardians beat the Texas RAngers, 10-4, and clinched the American League Central division title. It’s Cleveland’s first division title since 2018, and it is a pretty amazing development because no one–except perhaps the Guardians themselves–thought they had even a remote chance of winning the division. Many pundits picked the Guardians to finish last, with a record below .500.

The reasoning of the baseball know-it-alls was easy to understand. During the off season, Cleveland didn’t really make any significant free agent signings or other big moves. Instead, the Guardians made the decision to give the kids in their farm system a chance, and came out of spring training with the youngest team in the majors and a roster filled with rookies. The Guardians’ management then wisely entrusted the team to the capable hands of Cleveland manager Terry (“Tito”) Francona–who has a rare talent for spotting a team’s strengths and playing baseball in a way that accentuates those strengths.

Francona recognized that the Guardians had a core of good starting pitching, and he has always been a wizard at putting together a good bullpen, fitting the pitchers into designated roles, and then employing the staff to minimize scoring by the opponent without exhausting and burning out his stars while building the bullpen’s collective confidence. Francona teams also traditionally play sound defense, to complement the pitching.

On offense, though, the challenge would be scoring runs. These Guardians don’t have players (other than stalwart Jose Ramirez) who bash home runs by the bushel. Instead, they developed into a team that, from rookie leadoff hitter Steven Kwan on down, plays a classic brand of small ball that emphasizes patience at the plate, stringing together singles, speed and theft on the basepaths, and constantly looking to put maximum pressure on the opposing defense. You’ll see an occasional home run, but what you’ll also see are Guardian players routinely going from first to third–and then perhaps scoring on an error due to a bad throw from an outfielder or catcher. It’s the kind of baseball that players like Tris Speaker or Honus Wagner from the early 1900s would have understood and appreciated.

Lately, as the Guardians have played their division rivals the Twins and the White Sox, the combination of pitching, speed, and stout defense has worked like a charm. The team has won 18 of its last 21 games and sprinted to the unexpected division title. And behind it all, Tito Francona must be feeling an immense sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in melding a young, rookie-filled roster into a pretty darned good team that seems to be peaking. Francona should win the American League manager of the year vote, hands down.

The playoffs loom ahead, and it will be interesting to see how the Guardians and their “small ball” approach fare against teams like the Astros, Rays, and Yankees, with rosters filled with well-known stars and lots of post-season experience. Cleveland has struggled against the better teams this year, in match-ups that came earlier this season. But regardless of how the playoffs come out, this year has been an amazing performance by an exuberant and energetic young team that is fun to watch, and their brilliant manager who has carefully put the pieces together to find a winning combination.

I’ll be rooting for them, as always. Go Guardians!

The New Parenting Mendoza Line

Baseball has its “Mendoza line.” That’s ballpark slang for a .200 batting average, named for Mario Mendoz, a banjo-hitting shortstop who played in the big leagues decades ago and who frequently failed to reach that line. If you are a professional baseball player, you don’t want to be anywhere close to the Mendoza line, much less below it.

On Ozark, Marty and Wendy Byrde have established a parenting version of the Mendoza line–and with each new season they amazingly manage to lower it. Their parenting approach is so pathetically incompetent that they have somehow managed to fall below the pitiful parenting shown by the Donovan clan on Ray Donovan, a show that was the previous frontrunner in the “how not to parent” derby. In fact, the Byrdes make the Donovans look like the fantasy families on Father Knows Best , Leave It To Beaver, or The Waltons.

The Byrdes haven’t exactly been great parents before, primarily because their money-laundering exploits routinely put their two kids in great physical peril. In fact, every time the family turns out the lights on their sprawling, window-laden home on the bucolic shores of the Lake of the Ozarks, you expect a truckload of Kansas City mobsters, local opium growers, and Mexican drug cartel members–or perhaps all three, acting together–to drive up, leave every member of the Byrdes riddled with bullets, and firebomb the house for good measure. Carefully providing for your children’s physical security is Parenting 101, and the Byrdes have always failed dismally at that basic, threshold step.

Warning: Ozark parenting spoilers ahead!

But this season the Byrdes’ parenting has gotten much worse, no matter how many times Marty might plead for the kids to come around for a “family dinner” to enjoy “Mom’s chicken.” Their smart, bike-riding 14-year-old son Jonah is not only guzzling brewskis on his off-time, he’s pedaling away every day to launder money for opium growers. And he clearly hates his mother with a deadly passion and will never forgive her for killing her brother. Jonah hates his mother so much, in fact, that he would rather spend time with an obviously deranged, murderous opium-growing lunatic who wouldn’t blink an eye before killing him if she thought it served her interests. Marty’s response is to try to get Jonah to come home for family dinners. Wendy still thinks she can command Jonah to do what she wants, and when that doesn’t work she concludes that flagging Jonah’s money-laundering scheme for the feds is the appropriate parenting response, because it will teach Jonah a valuable lesson and any juvenile conviction will be expunged when Jonah turns 18.

That’s not the kind of approach that Dr. T. Berry Brazelton or modern parenting experts would endorse.

Jonah’s total estrangement is troubling enough, but in some ways the Byrdes’ parenting of their high school-aged daughter Charlotte is worse. Charlotte has totally bought in to the Byrde criminal enterprise. She works at the family-owned casino as a kind of floor boss, she walked out on her SAT exam and has seemingly given up on going to college, and Marty and Wendy casually enlist her to convey threatening messages to her friend who might otherwise rat them out. Wendy evidently thinks it is a good idea to bring Charlotte a big tumbler of bourbon when it’s time for a mother-daughter chat. And, worst of all, the Byrdes seated their teenage daughter next to a ruthless thirty-something wannabee drug lord for the Mexican cartel at a restaurant and got to watch as the guy cozied up to Charlotte, slurped oysters with her, and made his disgusting interests all too plain. Any rational parent would have yanked her out of there and run screaming, but Marty and Wendy stoically accepted it because it furthered their long-term schemes.

The bottom line is that, when it comes to parenting, Wendy Byrde is soulless and delusional, and Marty Byrde is able to clinically rationalize pretty much any and every bad thing so long as the family sits down to dinner and he can still believe he’s somehow going to be able to extricate his family from the mess that he’s made.

The “Byrde line,” like the Mendoza line, sets a ridiculously low standard. Ozark should make every other Mom and Dad on the planet feel like Superparents by comparison.

Guardians Versus Guardians

The Cleveland Indians are no more, as of the end of their mediocre 2021 season. The new name for the baseball club, announced with some fanfare earlier this year, is supposed to be the Cleveland Guardians, apparently named after the titanic “guardian” figures, one of which is shown in the photo above, that are found on one of the bridges spanning the Cuyahoga River.

Now it’s not clear whether the former Cleveland Indians will be called the Cleveland Guardians after all. It turns out that the Cleveland roller derby team also is called the Guardians, and it had the name first. The Guardians roller derby team has sued the Guardians professional baseball franchise in federal court, arguing that the baseball team should be blocked from using the name and asserting claims under trademark, unfair competition, and deceptive trade practices laws.

I had no idea that roller derby, with its blockers and jammers, still existed as a sport, much less that there was a roller derby team in Cleveland named the Guardians. The lawsuit alleges, however, that the baseball team did know about the roller derby Guardians and chose that name anyway. So now Cleveland will get to watch as the Guardians fight it out with the Guardians in court while the real guardians on the bridge bear silent witness to the whole sorry spectacle.

That’s Cleveland sports for you in a nutshell. Nothing is ever easy.

Astrophobia

Some of us–poor, benighted souls that we are–believe that there is some kind of equity in sports. Even after years of painful experience tells us that no higher power could possibly be paying attention to the sports world, we cling to the notion that if we behave like a good person, help with household chores without being asked to do so, follow a particular routine, and wear a lucky shirt, or socks, or hat, or some other item of apparel, the fickle sports gods will notice and tilt the karma in our favor. A key belief, underlying all of the superstition, is that someone somewhere will notice that we are doing those good things and displaying our commitment to our team and reward us with wins and, we hope, championships.

If you ever needed proof that there is no equity whatsoever in sports, here it is: the Houston Astros have made the World Series for the third time in five years.

The Astros engaged in a one of the worst sports cheating scandals since the Chicago Black Sox threw the World Series in 1919. The team intentionally stole signs in 2017, when they won the World Series, and for part of 2018 until their scheme was uncovered. The Astros–who some people dubbed the “Asterisks,” as in the logo above, to reflect that the franchise won the championship by cheating–were fined $5 million, lost a few draft picks, and fired some of their front office personnel. But the team’s owner remained in place, the Astros hung their championship banner, and no punishment was meted out to the players who participated in the cheating. Remember that the next time you hear somebody in organized baseball talking about needing to do something to protect the “integrity of the game.”

If there were justice and equity in sports, the Astros wouldn’t be going to another World Series, and making people wonder whether those guys who figured out a way to cheat before might somehow be cheating again. But they are. The Astros owner says he thinks the scandal is in the rear view mirror, but there are many of us who remember, and who think the lack of accountability for flagrant cheating is a continuing black eye for baseball.

I can’t do anything about equity in sports, but I can do one thing: not watch any game the Astros play. I therefore won’t be watching the World Series this year.

Back To The Spiders

The New York Times and other media outlets are reporting that the Cleveland professional baseball team will be changing its name. After more than 100 years of being known as the Indians — and several years after getting rid of Chief Wahoo on their uniforms — the team will now be changing its nickname.

There’s a pretty heated debate going on already about what the new team name should be. I’ve always thought the “The Tribe” would be a pretty good alternative, since many of us already call the team by that name and “tribe” is defined as “a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader.” Those of us who have followed the Cleveland baseball franchise for decades would fall within that broad definition; we’re inextricably linked by years of suffering and frustration.

“The Tribe” doesn’t seem to be getting much traction, however, and many of the potential team names identified in the story linked above are pretty dismal. The one option that seems to be getting a lot of support is to call the team the Spiders. It would mark a complete break from the “Indians” and would also link the team back to the 1890s, when Cleveland had a National League baseball team called the Spiders. According to Wikipedia, the team was called the Spiders because the players who wore the team’s black and gray uniforms had a spidery look. The Spiders were decent for a while, finishing second in the National League several times, and included players like future Hall of Famer Cy Young, but also had a year that featured the worst won-loss record in major league history.

The Spiders seems to be a popular choice, and already people are designing logos and uniform concepts with a spidery look. If it can’t be The Tribe, I’d be fine with the Spiders. With the blog name Webner House, how could we object to supporting a team of arachnids?

A Summer Without Baseball

Major League Baseball is tying itself in knots over the decision whether to have some kind of baseball season this year.  So far this summer — and we’re more than two-thirds of the way through June, the third full month of the normal baseball season — we’ve had no games, and the baseball coverage has been all about fitful negotiations between the players and the owners.

It hasn’t exactly been a rewarding season for a baseball fan.

The current proposals don’t really resemble baseball as we know it.  The players and owners are debating a season that will have somewhere between 50 and 70 games, whereas the normal season has 162 games.  The owners apparently have withdrawn their proposal for expanded playoffs and also are offering a universal designated hitter for 2020 and 2021, which means National League fans won’t be able to watch pitchers at bat or the managerial strategery that flows from the fact that most pitchers can’t hit worth a lick.  And all of the wrangling is happening against a backdrop of the country opening up after the coronavirus shutdowns, with some states experiencing increases in the numbers of cases and hospitalizations.  Already there are stories about how some players are testing positive for COVID-19, and we can expect to see more of them.  Ultimately, if the players and owners can’t negotiate their way out of a corner, baseball’s commissioner may have to unilaterally impose a dramatically shortened season — which some players could simply refuse to participate in.

It’s a mess, and it raises a fundamental question:  should there be a baseball season at all this year?  What’s the point of playing a truncated, gimmicky season that will amount to a small fraction of the normal season?  On the other hand, can baseball afford not to play, when viewership and attendance have been declining for the past few years and the stench of the Houston Astros cheating scandal remains in the air?  If there is no Major League Baseball this year, will the sport be able to recover in 2021?

I enjoy baseball and follow the Tribe, but I find I am not missing watching games or following the team this year.  2020 has been such a weird year already that not having baseball just seems like another, easily accepted feature of this masked and misbegotten period we are experiencing.  We can expect that money will call the tune — it always does in professional sports — but if I were the Commissioner I’d just call the season off and plan for baseball’s return, for a real season, in 2021.

And by the way, there is still some baseball being played in 2020.  My Facebook feed features pictures of little kids’ games.  If you like summer baseball, there’s still a way to get your fix.

South Korean Baseball

Because there are no live American sports to be broadcast — and people can only watch that Michael Jordan documentary so many times — ESPN has decided to start broadcasting games from the Korea Baseball Organization, the South Korean major leagues.  ESPN is hoping that American sports fans who know nothing about the Korean league or teams will nevertheless tune in to provide that taste of live sports they have been craving.

I don’t know beans about the KBO, but I enjoy reading about sports teams in other countries and, especially, the team names.  My favorite foreign sports name is the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, a Japanese team that doesn’t contemplate battling hams, but instead is managed by the Nippon Ham company — which is the cause of the curious name.  The Korean league apparently has a strong corporate element, too, with team names that include Samsung and Hyundai.

If you’re inclined to watch a game and are trying to decide who to root for, here’s a list of the teams in the league:  Doosan Bears, NC Dinos, Samsung Lions, Lotte Giants, LG Twins, Kiwoom Heroes, KIA Tigers, SK Wyverns, Hanwha Eagles, KT Wiz, and Hyundai Unicorns.  I like the rugged confidence of the Kiwoom team self-describing its players as “heroes,” and I also was intrigued by the Wyverns, the Unicorns, and Wiz, who obviously don’t care that they have the same name as an old Broadway musical and movie starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.  But if I’m going to watch a game I’m going to be pulling for the NC Dinos, just because their mascot is a formidable, long-necked dinosaur who looks like a cross between Godzilla and a bodybuilder.

Will American sports fans tune in the KBO — where games, apparently, will be played in empty stadiums with banners stretched across the seating area that depict fans wearing masks?  I’m guessing yes.  Baseball is baseball, and South Korea has produced a number of players who have made it to the American major leagues, so the talent level is undoubtedly pretty good.  And the players might be trying even harder than usual if they know that American fans, and American scouts, will be watching.

Go Dinos!

 

Thinking Baseball Thoughts

The other day I got a welcome ping from my cellphone.  My ESPN app — after providing countless NBA-related “alerts” and “news” that I didn’t really care about — reported on the score of a Cleveland Indians spring training game.  The Tribe lost, but I didn’t care about that, not really.  I was just happy to see that spring training had begun and progressed to the point that games were being played.

If spring training has begun, spring itself can’t be far behind.

Baseball is changing.  I ran across a story about how Major League Baseball has entered into an agreement with the independent Atlantic League that will allow MLB to use the league to try out modified rules and equipment changes.  Under the deal, the Atlantic League will implement new rules at the request of MLB and then provide data and feedback on how the rules changes work out so MLB can decide whether to adopt the changes at the big-league level.  And get this:  the rules changes that supposedly are being considered include moving back the mound and having Trackman — in effect, a robot umpire — call balls and strikes.

As the article points out, the Atlantic League has been an innovator in baseball, including initiatives to speed up the game and to force umpires to call the high strike — i.e., strikes that are within the strike zone but above the belt.  Now they can use Trackman to ensure that the true strike zone gets called.  And because the Atlantic League is full of veteran pitchers, many of whom have MLB experience, it is thought that they will be better able to adjust to proposed changes in the location of the pitcher’s mound.

To be sure, baseball has changed over the years — it’s hard to imagine bigger changes than the introduction of the designated hitter in the American League and adding layers of wild card and divisional playoffs leading up to the World Series, for example — but it’s still all about nine players on a field and a guy with a ball throwing to a guy with a bat.  For spectators, though, the use of a robot ump would really change the experience.  How in the world do you effectively heckle a robot ump?

Take Me Out To The Ballgame

The Tribe is playing the Red Sox in a day game today, so Russell and I decided to head down to Boston and catch a game at Fenway — the iconic ballpark where all of the greats have played. It’s pretty cool to be here, and if you’re a baseball fan who knows the history of the game, it doesn’t get any better than a game at Fenway or Wrigley Field.

Go Tribe!