Why are baseball (and baseball) fans so resistant to change?
Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of baseball. I appreciate the strategy involved, but it’s too slow for my liking. However, I like all sports to some extent. The beauty of all sports is that, unlike many Hollywood movies, you never know the end of a particular game, match, season, or series, or which team (or who) is going to win the championship that year (or that event). The unexpected can keep you on the edge of your seat in any game or match, whether it’s because you’re not sure who’s going to win or because a great athlete makes a spectacular play. However, I see no reason why the journey to get there has to be identical to what it was over 100 years ago.
Tradition has a place in everything in our society, including sports; But, there is always a balancing act between the sacredness of tradition and the improvement that change can make. Baseball and baseball fans, in my opinion, have always overemphasized tradition and continually failed to see the advantages of change. For God’s sake, it’s a sport, not a religion (yes, even if you’re a fan).
Soccer and basketball are constantly adjusting their rules, schedules, playoffs, conferences, leagues, and anything else they can think of to keep their sport fresh and more exciting. They may know from studios, attendance, and TV ratings that their fans enjoy a certain amount of ratings (for example) for their optimal viewing pleasure, and they adjust their rules slightly to do this. Soccer is as popular as ever and has replaced baseball as our National Pastime. Basketball is also doing well, and I suspect the NBA Finals that start this week will get high ratings because of the ideal matchup between Boston and Los Angeles.
As for hockey and soccer, don’t even get me started on your problems. Yes I know soccer fans that soccer is the most popular sport in the world but it is the fifth most popular team sport in the US and soccer will never succeed in the US until change the rules to allow more goals. Who wants to watch a sport where a 2-0 first-half score is an insurmountable lead? Enough talk. Hockey, by allowing grappling, grappling, holding, tripping, elbowing, controlling, and most of all, fighting, denies its athletes the opportunity to display their exciting athletic skills (eg, stick handling and skating). A bigger track, like the one in the international game, would also help.
Baseball and its fans resist any change no matter how small, reasonable or advantageous the proposed change may be. For example, some fans were going to commit suicide simply because he was planning to play between leagues. And baseball itself added interleague play at least 50 years after it should have, and for no good reason. How about we negate some great natural rivalries (eg Yankees-Mets, Cubs-White Sox) by not allowing them to play? That makes a lot of sense. The interleague has only been good for baseball and it was fought with nails and tools.
The same can be said for the addition of the wild card team and thus the extra round of the playoffs. There was a lot of resistance at first and now pretty much everyone loves it. However, I think baseball is wrong: the first round of the playoffs should also be the best of 7 games. It seems unfair and frankly silly that you get eliminated in fewer games simply because it’s the first round. Basketball realized its mistake and corrected it. I wonder how many centuries pass before baseball corrects this mistake.
The Designated Hitter is more complicated because it is not so clear whether this is good or bad for baseball. I know some of you have strong opinions on this, but for once, I don’t. However, it seems silly to have him in one league and not the other. I know technically MLB is two leagues, but it’s actually more like one league. And if baseball and its fans stopped caring about tradition for a second, maybe they’d find it more productive to be a league.
If you need more examples, how about how slow it was for MLB to allow African-Americans to play? Was that tradition too? How about how long it took them to start testing for steroids and even longer to have any real penalties for a positive test? I think the last couple of weeks (4 Wrong Home Runs) has shown that baseball has been too slow (again) to add instant replay to hit certain calls. The moment three referees decide to meet, then they really meet, discuss who saw what wrong, and then make the wrong decision; they could have watched instant replay and guessed right. Oh, God, how terrible, traditionally, the call was always made in the field. As with the examples above, I guarantee none of the baseball gods will roll over in their graves if you make this change.
Aside from making changes too late for no good reason, baseball doesn’t change the things it should change. How to speed up the game to make it more exciting. How about not allowing the batter to walk away from the batter’s box, or enforcing the rule about how long a pitcher has between pitches? Something, anything, to speed up the game. How about making all the ballparks (ie fields) the same size? I can’t imagine playing football on a 100-yard field one week and on an 88-yard field the next week. How about a 10-foot basket in Boston and a 9 1/2-foot basket in Los Angeles? Yes, to me, this tradition, for lack of a better word, is stupid.
And while we’re at it, can we get rid of all that disgusting tobacco chewing/spitting and excessive crotch grabbing that baseball players like to partake in? Baseball players touch their crotches more than an episode of The Sopranos and a Michael Jackson video combined. The last thing a person who is trying to enjoy their hot dog needs (they need something to do, after all, the batter just walked away from the box again) is to see a grown man regurgitate brown saliva from his mouth at the same time. who is proving his manhood (or lack thereof), all the time on national television (and/or in front of 60,000 fans). Sorry, this is a tradition everyone can do without.