Baseball fans find very little, if anything, to enjoy in The New York Times these days. I often hear from them when they complain about the absence of news of baseball. What do you want me to do, I usually respond. I don’t work there anymore.
Soccer has become the sport of record of the so-called paper of record.
On Saturday, though, a wonderful thing happened, courtesy of Joe Nocera, a new sports business columnist, who comes to the Times sports section from its op-ed page, where he was basically a business columnist. I don’t know why he switched locations for his columns and whether it was a smart move for him because I found him to be one of the Times’ most entertaining op-ed columnists.
Yes, columnists should be entertaining as well as smart and incisive, and Nocera provides intelligence and insight. Previously, Times sports business columns were filled with TV ratings and interviews with announcers who were going to “call” the big games, as if anyone cared what they had to say.
In one of his earliest sports business columns, Nocera wrote about injuries fans have suffered at baseball games as the result of foul balls and broken bats. The best part of the column was I didn’t agree with its conclusion and it didn’t matter. I was delighted to see it in the paper and I look forward to more Nocera columns.
In this column, Nocera concluded:
“Baseball likes to say that it puts fan safety first. When baseball mandates netting down the foul lines, and a leaguewide policy that bans open umbrellas while a game is being played, I’ll believe it. Not until then.”
Nocera referred to a fan who, sitting in a third-row box seat about 50 feet past first base at Yankee Stadium, was hit in the face by a Hideki Matsui line drive, which the fan never saw because it was raining and fans sitting in front of him had raised umbrellas overhead.
The 50-year-old fan suffered terrible damage to his face and an eye and is suing the Yankees and Major League Baseball. His lawsuit has to do more with the Yankees allowing fans to use raised umbrellas rather than failing to protect fans with netting in front of the seats, but netting and protection generally have become a significant topic of conversation in Major League Baseball.
Protective netting and other safety measures are part of the changing landscape in baseball. In some opinions, including this one, the modern changes are not welcome.
Some of the changes have already occurred, some will arrive in the near future and others will proceed more slowly. The question is when all of the changes are complete, will it change the game so much that someday we won’t recognize it?
All right, many of us won’t be around to see the modern game. Maybe that’s just as well. We like the game we grew up with and raised our children on. No protective nets at ball parks, runners knocking down catchers at home plate, runner taking out shortstop to avoid double play.
There is, of course, a common thread that runs through some of the changes. Protecting the catcher, the shortstop and second baseman and the fans is all designed as safety measures. Keep everyone safe.
What happened in the first 100 years or so? Baserunners ran over catchers and wiped out shortstops. Batters hit foul balls into the stands and had broken parts of their bats fly into the stands. Where was the outcry for new rules to protect everyone? Were players and fans dumber in those days and didn’t know any better than to accept their fate?
It’s too late to protect yesterday’s fans, but Major League Baseball is planning to protect today’s and tomorrow’s fans.
Commissioner Rob Manfred said after last week’s owners’ meetings in Dallas that it was “absolutely clear” that there would be changes in ball park protection. He declined to give details, saying more work needed to be done.
“In addition to a recommendation on the physical location of nets, there will be a broad fan education component to the program,” Manfred said.
I am not advocating injuries, but I am advocating letting the players play and the fans watch. The fan who sued the Yankees didn’t have to sit in that third-row box seat behind first base. He had three young teenagers with him. He could have purchased seats in a safer location.
I have sat in box seats, and you can have them. You can’t look away. You attention has to be focused in the batter every second. If you’re not comfortable doing that, sit somewhere else.
As for players, Joe Torre played in those ancient times when nothing and no one was protected. He was even a catcher for a while and got knocked over a time or two by a runner barreling home from third. Now he’s the chief baseball officer spearheading all of these changes from the safety of his Park Avenue office.
While he’s there, he’s reviewing rulings of official scorers and changing hits to errors and errors to hits. That never used to happen, maybe because the scorers were baseball writers with greater credibility than today’s anonymous scorers.
Replay, of course, holds far greater significance than scoring changes, which don’t alter the outcome of games. A replay that changes an out call to safe can directly affect the outcome of a game.
Better to get it right? Maybe, but I have always felt if managers and players can make mistakes, umpires should be entitled to make mistakes, too. Replay, however, is here to stay and will only be employed to review more and more types of calls until everything is covered and it will be only the managers and players who will be allowed to make mistakes.
Here’s one I will advocating changing. A player slides into second, pops up and for an instant, or less, his foot or hand comes off the bag. Infielders have learned from replay that if the runner loses contact with the base the umpires will call him out if the fielder’s glove, with the ball in it, is touching some part of him.
Umpires give middle infielders leeway to execute phantom double plays, the old neighborhood play. If they continue to call that play, they should give the runner his version of the neighborhood play.
A very visible change has been the steady employment of infield shifts. For a large part of the game, infields do not have the customary two fielders between first and second and two between second and third. Teams stack their infield, depending on who is hitting, placing three fielders, say, between first and second, one usually in short right field for a left-handed hitter from where he can throw him out and often does.
Relief pitchers have become a bigger part of the game. With managers using pitch counts to dictate their pitching decisions, starters need work only six or five innings, leaving the remainder of the game to the relief corps. More and more of these relievers are throwing 97 miles an hour or faster, if the ubiquitous radar guns are to be believed.
I have a friend who scoffs s at the gun readings, calling them an attention-getting gimmick. He may be right. Is it possible that all of a sudden teams are finding a platoon of pitchers who throw in the upper 90s?
I also find it ridiculous that teams accept only five innings from starters. That’s half a day’s work, not enough, in my opinion, to justify a pitcher’s existence. But if teams want to build pitching staffs in that manner, it’s their prerogative.
Teams have made another change in strategy that they won’t admit to although it has become too obvious to deny with a straight face. Teams are manipulating players’ major leaguer service time more than ever, keeping players in the minors longer than they need to be there.
The clubs say the practice is legal, but no one will admit to doing it to affect a player’s eligibility for salary arbitration and free agency. The Chicago Cubs did that to Kris Bryant this season, keeping him in the minors at the start of the season long enough – 12 days – that he was deprived a full year’s service time. Thus, they will have rights to him for seven years instead of six.
The practice not only affects a player’s service time, but it also raises a serious question about a team’s integrity. If a team keeps a good player in the minors longer than necessary, is it doing everything it can to win? Is it cheating the fans by not doing everything it can to win?
Bryant was asked about it when he won the National League rookie of the year award last Monday.
“Honestly,” he said, “I haven’t thought about it that much lately. I said how I felt earlier in the season. Things happen for a reason. I played with a chip on my shoulder this year.”
Was the chip there because of what the Cubs did?
“I always play with a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “There are always things that happen in your life that contribute to the way you play.”