For 40 years or so I have heard doomsayers proclaiming that the end of baseball was near. In 1975, for example, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn warned that the advent of free agency would destroy baseball as we know it. Bowie, wherever you are, know that the game has flourished since you uttered that warning, exceeding $9 billion in revenue.

Since Kuhn, others have predicated doom and gloom for one reason or another. The most recent reason offered is the games are too long and fans will no longer tolerate the time it takes to play nine innings.

Commissioner Rob Manfred and his chief baseball officer, Joe Torre, have heard these complaints and seek to do something about them.

Torre recently issued an edict to managers advising them they are not to argue balls and strikes with umpires. I don’t know if concerns about pace of game motivated his memorandum, which was uncovered by Bernie Wilson of The Associated Press, but it was followed shortly after by bizarre ideas from …

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Terry Ryan is as decent as any man I have ever encountered in baseball and more decent than most. It is impossible to forget his selfless act in 2001 when, as captain of the Minnesota Twins ship, he remained on the deck of their sinking ship when he had a chance to abandon the ship and go elsewhere while his shipmates drowned.

Now the Twins, struggling with the American League’s worst record, have shoved Ryan overboard and are looking for a new captain, or general manager. While I regret Ryan’s departure, I welcome it as an opportunity for Commissioner Rob Manfred to get it right.

Manfred will not be hiring Ryan’s replacement, but he can …

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When the Hall of Fame announces results of the baseball writers’ vote each January, the successful candidates are made available to writers in conference calls that day. The next day the Hall brings its new members to New York for a news conference at a midtown hotel. A week or so before the July induction ceremony, the new members are again made available to writers on conference calls.

Some writers, maybe most, see these opportunities as celebratory events in which they are privileged to participate. They are not my kind of writers. I didn’t grow up in the business learning to toss softballs at people I am interviewing and writing about. If there are tough questions to be asked, I was taught, ask them, whatever the circumstances. If I have the opportunity to question Mike Piazza or Donald Trump, I am going to ask the toughest, most relevant question I can.

I raise this issue now because in a conference call last Friday I had the audacity to ask – with the first question yet – Mike Piazza about the long-time speculation about him and steroids and how his long-time back acne (a common sign of steroids use) disappeared when steroids testing began. I have long written about Piazza and his magical back, but this was my first opportunity to …

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