2017-54
Two Unrelated Essays
1) What is that Catcher Doing?
Somebody has pointed out to me (I think. . .it was twitter, and it is often difficult to understand what people are trying to say on twitter). . .somebody has pointed out to me that at some point in the past, I may have advocated limiting catcher’s visits to the mound. I don’t doubt it. But this is the way I see it now.
I promise you, guys; limiting catcher’s visits to the mound is going to do no good whatsoever. None. They’ll just start wasting time some other way. The new one is bringing equipment to the players in the field. . .sliding gloves to the runners, etc. Now they’ll start doing that. People will start changing gloves when they go into a shift, and they’ll start holding up the game to bring out a new glove.
There are a million ways to waste time within a baseball game, including but not limited to:
1) Excessive visits to the mound,
2) Excessive and unnecessary pitching changes,
3) Pointless throws to first base,
4) Delaying the game for replays,
5) Delaying the game while you decide whether you need a replay,
6) Selling extra commercials between innings,
7) Going back to the dugout to get new equipment,
8) Fake injuries,
9) Arguments,
10) Stepping out of the box between pitches,
11) Pitcher taking excessive time between pitches,
12) Infield conferences,
13) Fans running on the field,
14) Umpires conversing to make sure they have calls right,
15) Stepping out to relay a signal from the bench to the coach to the hitter,
16) Going through the signals again,
17) Re-aligning the defense (shifts),
18) Waste pitches on 0-2 and 1-2 counts,
19) Deliberately fouling off pitches rather than trying to put them in play, and
20) Changing baseballs for no apparent reason.
I promise you that we are NOT going to solve the problem of slow games by regulating these things one at a time. It can’t happen that way. It’s a whack-a-mole strategy. The average time of a game will go down two minutes next year, and then it will go up four minutes the year after that.
The way to solve the problem is, either set up a system to reward teams for playing games briskly, or set up a system to punish teams (economically) for playing slowly.
Set a goal. I would suggest that games should ordinarily be played in two hours, but if you want to make it 2:30, 2:40, that’s OK. There is absolutely no reason why baseball games could not be routinely played in an hour and a half.
Whatever it is, you need to vary the expectation by the number of plate appearances in the game, and the number of half-inning breaks in the game. Let’s say that the standard should be one minute per plate appearance, plus two minutes per half-inning break, plus ten minutes a game. In 2017 that works out to two hours a game.
If a game meets that standard, each team might get. . . they might get an allowance to spend extra money in the amateur draft, or they might get points toward a better draft position in the second round of the amateur draft, or they might get a better position in the Rule 5 draft, or they might get money from the TV contract, or they might get the right to keep 41 or 42 players on their 40-man roster, or they might get home-field advantage in the post-season, or they might get the right to keep a computer in the dugout. They get some sort of meaningful competitive advantage, or some combination of meaningful competitive advantages. They might get an extra series at home. Two three-game series at the start of the next season are designated "flexible series"; whichever team has a better record of playing the game briskly gets to host those two series. If your games drag, you’ll wind up playing 25 series at home and 29 on the road. You’ll think twice about wasting time unnecessarily. (You’d need a provision in that rule that as long as a team meets a certain standard of timely play, they can’t lose a series, whereas if one team allows its games to drag and the other does not, then they can lose a home series.)
Or you could punish teams instead for playing slowly. Generally speaking, rewards are much more effective incentives than punishments. Many times you can accomplish more with a $20 reward than you can with a $200 punishment; that’s Parenting 101. The NCAA problems are largely created by the failure to recognize this; they distribute awards based on how good your team is, and enforce rules by punishments. Doesn’t really work. Anyway, that’s another argument.
2. What is that Quarterback Doing?
Or
A Pox on Both Your Houses
I am sure you are all tired of this controversy, but I haven’t seen anyone else who has exactly my take on the subject, so I’ll share. I believe absolutely all of the following.
1) Colin Kaepernick has every right to protest, and no one should try to deny him the right to say what he has to say in this form or any other,
2) Other people also have every right to be offended by it, and people who are offended by what he does have every right to discriminate against him because he has offended them.
3) I’m not offended. I’m fine with it. If my team signed him, I’d have no problem with it. Whether an athlete stands for the National Anthem is a trivial non-issue to me.
4) Kaepernick is a jackass.
5) He threw away his career, and now he wants somebody to save it for him. I’ve got no sympathy. I mean, if somebody needs him and somebody signs him, then I wish him luck; I wouldn’t boo him and I won’t root against him.
6) Kaepernick has to accept that there are expectations for behavior for an NFL quarterback that go far beyond the written rules, and well beyond the rules that apply to the rest of the team. You cannot start a fight that divides your team; you can’t do it. It doesn’t matter whether you are right, wrong or otherwise; it doesn’t matter whether you are fighting for justice or fighting because you like to fight. You can’t do it in either case.
7) I really don’t get why any sportswriter would not understand that. It seems to me that they must be pretending not to understand it, because they want to Stand Up for what is Right. They want to salute the flag of anti-racism. I can’t believe that they are actually so dense as not to recognize that being an NFL quarterback is an extremely privileged position, and, as such, has very high expectations as to how one should behave.
8) The President has every right to weigh in on this controversy if he chooses to do so, and I have no problem with what he has said. It’s his opinion; he can say what he has to say, just as Kaepernick can. And he’s a jackass, too, and he doesn’t seem to recognize the expectations that go along with his position, either, but he still has a right to his opinion.
Kaepernick isn’t a jackass because he is protesting; he is a jackass because he wants to lecture the rest of us about why he is protesting, and he is a jackass because he wants to whine about other people being mean to him about his protesting. That’s part of the deal, buddy.
9) We’re overlooking the root of the problem. The root of the problem is enforced patriotism. Forcing people to go through patriotic gestures has always been a poor idea.
10) And we’re doing way too much of it. My understanding, which could be wrong, is that singing the National Anthem before a game only dates back to World War II, which was just a few years before I was born. Now we have four patriotic ceremonies a game. There is a flag presentation ceremony (somebody in uniform comes out and displays the colors before the National Anthem is played), then there is the National Anthem, then there is the playing of God Bless America, then there is the soldier who has served his country that we are all supposed to stand and salute. It is too much. KNOCK IT OFF. Stop ramming this stuff down our throats, and the whole problem will go away. Keep force-feeding us patriotism, and we’ll be fighting about this for the next 30 years.
11) And stop telling veterans to salute the flag when everybody else is standing with their hands over their hearts. I didn’t like saluting when I was in the Army; I don’t like it now. I don’t WANT to be singled out for my service.
12) Patriotism is taken by one group of people to mean respect for the services and sacrifices of our soldiers, and by another group to represent tolerance of our failures to do justice for all citizens. And you’re both wrong. Patriotism is not about the soldiers. It is not about the veterans. It is about the country. And it is not supposed to imply, and it does not reasonably imply, that we are a perfect country that has no failings.
13) I don’t think that patriotism is either of the things that the partisans in this group are trying to make it, but that’s up to you. If "patriotism" to you is tolerance for racism and you wish to protest that. . .well, OK, protest it. If "patriotism" to you is only about the soldiers. . .well, OK, respect the soldiers. Salute the flag all you want to; I’m not offended. My view is: you all have the right to say what you have to say.
But none of you are actually advancing the causes for which you believe you are fighting by acting like jackasses. Colin Kaepernick and the other flag protestors are not actually advancing the cause of racial justice; they are actually pushing it backward, forcing us to fight about things that we could all perfectly well agree on and would be perfectly happy to agree on. And Donald Trump and his associated flag wavers are not actually doing a damned thing to advance patriotism or patriotic feelings for our country by staging empty rituals at sporting events, or by criticizing those who choose to sit them out. Are you sincerely trying to unify the country around the flag, or are you trying to divide the country by fighting about the flag? Because it is pretty clear which one of those is happening.