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player ready...Here’s an idea that will serve both baseball and the other national pastime. Planned parenthood, exercised to its utmost practicality, means you should raise your son to be a pitcher. And while you’re at it, maybe your daughter too.
This free advice is applicable especially in Chicago, where the Cubs have blown more leads than Lt. Frank Drebin, the gumshoe who stars in the “Naked Gun” film series. But it is gleaned after watching two months of fireworks throughout the major leagues, such as they are.
Baseball, however scarred and diluted it may be, stands as the most perfect sport on the planet. But just as replacement players were once considered as a tactic by management to subvert job actions by labor, we now have foisted upon us a substitute game, T-ball.
This endeavor is popular among the youth of America who are spared the problems of hitting a moving object thrown by a live body from a mound. In time, of course, real pitchers are added as our children grow.
What has happened, however, is the most gifted athletes who qualify for the big show find that, at the supposed zenith of baseball, they, in effect, return to the womb and resume playing a game with pitchers again removed from the equation. The result is chaos, 1999.
Only one summer ago, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were properly hailed for resuscitating baseball by smacking all those home runs, 70 and 66, respectively, and also sharing their joy with fans. McGwire was chided for taking a suspicious, albeit legal energizer, and Sosa lately has had to tolerate this hilarious suggestion that he’s too fat.
Still, McGwire and Sosa accomplished incredible feats that will last for the ages, or until Ken Griffey Jr. collects 80 homers this season.
What might we think then? Records are made to be broken, but every year?
True, Americans love offense, so you ask, where’s the beef? But we choose to turn it around and wonder: Where’s the balance? Baseball is the only sport where the defense has the ball, and the numbers suggest strongly that something is seriously out of whack.
According to Stats Inc., which so adeptly monitors this madness, almost one-fourth of the games this season have concluded with one team scoring in double digits. Runs per game are up significantly, and the record for most grand slams in one season–141 in 1996–will disappear, maybe by August.
Major League Baseball officials dismiss the theory that the ball itself is livelier than ever, but pitchers have another story. It feels and travels like a Titleist, only without the dimples. Which reminds us. The winning Masters score last April was the same as it was 20 years ago, but the golf industry still frets how technology might render some classic courses obsolete.
Meanwhile, in baseball, where the parks become smaller and the strike zone shrinks accordingly, authorities look the other way.
Greg Maddux’s earned-run average looks like Jaime Navarro’s, yet we are told nothing is amiss. Grand slams are cyclical, but why are all those runners on base? Can’t anybody pitch anymore? Have they lost their control? Worse yet, is the arm no longer connected to the spine?
Regrettably, Chicago recently had a front-row view of the wimpy new world in which pitchers neither receive nor earn respect when the New York Yankees, a real team, rallied to beat the White Sox with the help of a balk by Bill Simas. The bereaved Sox right-hander accused Derek Jeter of yelling at him from third base and inducing the balk. Oh, horrors.
Simas should be embarrassed to be duped into balking because he was distracted. You learn that in Little League, or T-ball. But we are in an era when players are more loyal to their union than their uniform, so perhaps Simas was genuinely surprised that an opponent would dare speak out of turn and try such a transparent trick.
Evidently the ball has gotten harder and the pitchers softer. But we all know what the solution will be. Expansion.