Structural Defects in Professional Sports – Part 1, Major League Baseball

Big sports in the United States are a joke in how they are packaged and spoon-fed to the gullible and overly condescending American public. Those sports worth examining for merits and demerits include college football and basketball, NASCAR, the PGA and LPGA tours, horse racing (the sickest of all), and maybe tennis, but for now the focus and diligent criticism will turn to the “big four” of Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, beginning with baseball…

Major League Baseball has one significant and attractive quality that the other three major sports lack, which is the fact that the game is played without all the ingenious rule changes of the last days, and just horrible fundamental rules that plague to the other sports. Only one minor flaw in the way the modern game is played can be attributed to baseball: the designated hitter rule, implemented by the American League in 1973, and the National League continues to resist, when it comes to its adoption, all they are intervening years.

The hit to the DH rule is subtle, meaning AL starting pitchers generally throw deeper in their games than their NL counterparts, given that because they don’t win, AL pitchers never They are taken from a game. in favor of a pinch hitter. The problem here is the fact that in this age of over-expansion there is a huge shortage of quality pitchers in the majors, and the burnout factor is so prevalent these days that pitchers are now limited to around 100 pitches, releases. account, as a partial remedy and solution to your overwork and stress. The problem here is that there will always be a contingent of managers who wear down their starters, like Billy Martin in the early DH days, who pretty much wiped out his entire young Oakland starting staff and more recent “old school.” minded managers like Dusty Baker, who is without excuse given his tenure as NL manager over the years, are still with us.

Problems considerably more serious than “DDH Burnout Syndrome” plague Major League Baseball, and now let’s consider the most glaring ones, beginning with the “championship format.” To wit: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey don’t even have a championship format. They all have a “made for TV” playoff format.

Before the monopolistic parasite that calls itself “television” completely took over modern society, two major professional sports, baseball and football, had legitimate championship formats. In baseball, he won his eight-team regular season pennant, advanced directly to the World Series vs. his counterpart from the opposite league, who did the same. Best of seven games, winner declared, season over. Sadly, with the commercially vulgar and artistically insulting playoff format that baseball was sold to in the expansion year of 1969, some of the best teams of the past few decades haven’t even made it to the World Series. Most notably, the Cincinnati Reds, who won 99 games in 1973 but bounced back from a World Series appearance by losing three of five games to a mediocre New York Mets team that compiled an 82-79 record, so baseball suffered the embarrassment of having a .509 team winning percentage in the World Series that year, except baseball was too busy counting the windfall generated by network television to care.

Also a victim of this absurd system that completely nullifies superior results and achievements in 162 games was the Seattle Mariners team in the young A-Rod era who won 116(!) regular season games but lost to the Yankees in what was perhaps the “fact.” for TV” fabricated playoff series joke of the century in professional sports in this country. And in 2010, the Philadelphia Phillies, with the best record in baseball and by five complete games as the best regular-season team in the League National, they didn’t make it to the “big dance.” Hard to believe that the above examples represent results toward which baseball has a callous and indifferent attitude.

It doesn’t seem to concern our professional sports leagues that they rarely show the best teams in their respective final rounds of the championship and, in the process, disappoint the public in terms of the quality of the product they present. Let me offer more than a compromise solution, rather, a real solution to this continuing source of consternation…

Baseball, go back to all four divisions. Have the winners of all four divisions play a World Series round-robin format, say, four games against two. each opponent, a total of 12 games, or until one team wins the championship outright, with significant financial incentives increasing for teams that also ran and have been eliminated from world championship contention, during this format. In that way, it eliminates the “wild card” abomination, which allows runner-up teams into the championship playoff mix and sometimes sends the wrong teams to the postseason, like the Padres who earned a berth in the 2005 playoffs, when the Phillies compiled a better regular-season record than the Padres, playing in a stronger division.

Given its reduced importance, the regular season desperately needs to be shortened to a reasonable 154 games, like in the pre-expansion era, so that it never starts in the month of March, like it did in 2011. And so that never the second week in April that it brings the World Series into November, with its Northeast “monsoons” making it a real mudslide-and-belly joke, as it was a part of the 2008 World Series.

Also annoying is the excess long-term contracts that clubs are paying out to elite players, to prevent them from jumping ship any time soon, in deference to the “free agency” monster. This ballast around his neck is not the work of MLB, we can thank the courts for that, and yes, in professional sports in America today, billionaire players are actually viewed as “slaves” and “victims.” ” of the property. greed and exploitation. His own politics dictate where he stands in the arena of contentious labor-management relations, just understand that the tail has been wagging the dog for quite some time now, to the detriment of the best interests of the sport.

Other problems plaguing baseball include endless games, the result of excessive pitching changes and crude trade delays between half-innings, and much more to tell, but this is a good place to desist from the effort and reminisce about a good old time. Country music song title that read: “In the good old days, when times were bad.” How you miss those simpler and more sensible times.