At this time of year, I’m reminded of a video from a couple years ago. It’s a bunch of guys sitting around a dinner table, what looks like a Mafia-style meeting. But keeping their business aside, one guy asks the crowd, “What am I most enthusiastic about these days?” His answer was the same as mine: baseball. Steve Schirripa of Sopranos fame rightly adds, “Who doesn’t love baseball?”
It’s March, which means Major League Baseball’s spring training is well underway. It’s a glorious time of year, as our national pastime gets into form in preparation for another long, sure-to-be interesting season. Indeed, it could be made even more interesting if Budweiser’s campaign has any success. They created an official White House petition, seeking 100,000 signatures to make Opening Day a national holiday. Considering the importance that baseball holds in our country, I would be all for that.
As for the action taking place on the field, this has been perhaps the most controversial offseason of rule changes I’ve seen in a long time. Commissioner Bud Selig, who is entering his final season on the job, has seen the league institute the long sought-after expansion to the instant replay system as well as creating a new rule to govern home-plate collisions that have caused some devastating injuries in recent seasons.
The changes to the instant replay have taken far too long to institute. Any baseball fan will surely remember Jim Joyce’s horrific missed call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game a few seasons ago. I’ve got nothing but respect for Joyce after his show of class after the incident, and I’m sure he’d be the first guy to be a proponent of this system. Indeed, a safe/out force play is now something that can be reviewed.
The new review system is not unlike the NFL’s replay rules. Basically, a manager will have one opportunity to “challenge” a given incident—with some exceptions—in the first six innings of a game. If they are successful with the challenge, they can get a second challenge for the game. The crew chief of the game’s umpires can call for a review after the sixth inning, as well as review a home-run call or non-call at any time. Calls that can be challenged include fair/foul calls, force plays, tag plays, outfield catches (if they were “trapped” or caught), fan interference and ground-rule doubles.
This encompasses a pretty good range of disputable calls we tend to see in a given day of baseball. Of course, ball/strike calls won’t be reviewable, since those are judgment calls. It’ll be left to the armchair umpires like you and me, given the benefit of high definition television, to make those decisions ourselves.
Another aspect of the replay system that could arouse some debate is the time factor. I’ve heard a lot of chatter in recent years on how people want to “speed up the game,” and delays like this certainly won’t help that matter. But isn’t it more important for the calls to be made correctly than for things to be done quickly? Plus, there’s the notion that “human error” is just part of the game. I can certainly appreciate that, but for the sake of fairness, there’s nothing wrong with technology helping you out.
The second major rule change involves collisions at home plate. Marlins fans will surely look fondly back on Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez getting rammed into by San Francisco Giants player J.T. Snow and holding on for the last out in their 2003 playoff series. But they might also remember when former outfielder Scott Cousins barreled into Giants catcher Buster Posey in 2011, leading to a gruesome leg break for the Florida State product. While the rule doesn’t ban collisions completely, it enforces the idea that runners can’t go out of their way to run over the catcher—slides are fine—and that catchers can’t stand right in the path to the plate without having the ball.
In some ways, this adds a bit more excitement to the play for me. Sure, it’s cool to see a guy running at full speed crash into another guy just to get to home plate. But I think that the strategy of both players in cases like this makes things more interesting. The catcher has to gauge how far away to position himself to get the ball and try to make a tag, while the runner has to try to avoid the catcher but still be in a position to touch home. Two split-second decisions coming together leads to dives and slides of desperation, and generally a lot of intrigue. No iconic photos like “Pudge” holding up the ball, but hopefully no Posey-like devastating injuries.
And then, of course, we have the impending retirement of one of the game’s greats: Derek Jeter. The player who has manned the shortstop position for the New York Yankees for nearly 20 years is finally calling it a career after this season, coming on the heels of the retirements of long-time teammates Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte. You have to wonder if Jeter will get the same treatment as Rivera did last year, or even Chipper Jones of the Atlanta Braves a couple years ago, where basically every team gives him a parting gift. Given the shortstop’s illustrious career and classy nature, “The Captain” would certainly deserve it.
No matter what your opinion is on any of these matters, this MLB season is sure to be an interesting one. Can the Yankees’ free-agent signings jell quickly to get them back into the playoffs? Can Mike Trout finally take over Miguel Cabrera’s post as the best player in the game? Will the Marlins lose less than 100 games this year? We’ll certainly get answers to these questions and more over the next seven months.
