They’re Ruining the Game I Love
Any life-long baseball fan has no-doubt seen the 30-second or so grainy black and white film clip a hundred times. More specifically, the Yankees and Dodgers are matched up in yet another late-1940s, early 1950’s World Series game. Daring Jackie Robinson, the man who changed the national pastime forever, has managed to get all the way around to third base and is now dancing up and down the line, threatening to steal home. Will he, or won’t he? All the excited fans really know is that just about any other player from the Golden Era of New York City baseball would have never even attempted such a low-percentage dash for the plate in such an important game. But as Hall of Fame pitcher, Whitey Ford, slowly rocks into his classic over-the-head windup, off sprints Robinson, his arms and legs almost pumping sideways as he gets up to full speed. Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra sees him coming, catches the thrown pitch, and lowers his glove as fast as he can, trying to get a tag on Robinson at almost the exact same moment that he arrives at home plate in a cloud of dust. Is he safe or is he out? The umpire, bent down and in good position to make the call, thrusts both of his arms out like giant Turtle flippers, signaling that Robinson is safe. Yogi simply can’t believe the call! He throws off his mask and jumps wildly up and down, his arms flailing around, and gets right in the face of the umpire, screaming at him, while at the same time following him around and not allowing him to escape his rath. The Yankee fans are just as irate as Yogi, as are Ford and the Yankee infielders, who quickly gather at home plate to join in on the brouhaha. And to his dying day, Yogi would tell anyone who would listen, “Robinson was out at home!”
Nowadays, do you know how that historic, iconic play at home plate in Yankee Stadium on a long-ago October afternoon would have gone down? Yogi would have simply taken off his mask, looked into his dugout and cupped his hands over his ears, signaling that the play needed to be dispassionately reviewed by umpires not even in the stadium, looking at videotape monitors that had recorded the play in question. No jumping up and down, no fans screaming for the scalp of the umpire, no never-ending argument to continue down through the ages. Talk about taking the fun and excitement out of the game.
Umpires, and the human element that they bring to the game, have always played a vital role in the sport, and like the players that they share the field with, they make errors from time-to-time. “Kill the umpire!” is a cry that wasn’t all that uncommon down through the ages, yet nowadays the men in blue simply stand around, not really bearing down on their calls, knowing that they have videotape replay to bail them out should they get things wrong. And with automated ball and strike calling only a few years away, highly respected umpires and all they have meant to the sport will have gone the same way as the dinosaur. They will have joined great managers like John McGraw, Billy Martin, Earl Weaver, and Bobby Cox, just to name a few, whose famous arguing of missed calls, real or imagined, are simply no longer needed.
As I understand it, the powers that be have decided that fans want accurate calls, not Billy Martin and Earl Weaver kicking dirt on umpires. Really? They also want the games to be shorter, to better capture the ever-shorting attention spans of today’s younger sports fans. They want both pitchers and hitters to be clocked, so that the game can be sped up. Three and four-hour games are looked down upon now, as if fans who have spent a small fortune to attend them are in a real big hurry to get back out in the traffic and go home. They even want to put ghost runners out on second base to make sure that the extra-inning games are nipped in the bud, which is probably the worse of all the so-called “improvements” that have recently been made to the game.
It is true that baseball is no longer the national pastime, that title now belonging to fast-moving and hard-hitting professional football. But it is still wildly popular with fans who loyally support their local teams, which is why owners can afford to pay their players ridiculous amounts of money.
Some tweaks to the game have been positive, like arguably the designated hitter, better safety equipment, and some of the new alphabet-analytics, although I can still pretty much know what is going on with players and pitchers by simply knowing such traditional stats as batting averages, home runs and RBI totals, wins and losses and ERA’s.
Radically changing the game in the name of getting more young people interested in it ignores the simple reality that very few new fans (young or old) fall in love with the game without having played it, and that if we really want to grow the game, it has to start with Little League, or even earlier, and in high school and college, not trying to convert young video game enthusiasts who rarely go out-of-doors. When I was young, my friends and I played baseball every chance we could get, be it organized or just to hit sock-balls over our bicycles which served as fences. And at night I would go to sleep listening on my transistor radio to the games of my favorite triple-A team, the Sacramento Solons. So, if baseball fades away, it will be because kids have changed, not because the game needs drastic changes.
Finally, and most importantly, baseball has always been a game for fathers and sons, and like most fathers and sons, my father and I were rarely on the same page. We had little in common, and his life was dedicated to his never-ending work on the Southern Pacific Railroad and making enough money to support his family, while all I wanted to do was play baseball and someday be the starting shortstop for the San Francisco Giants, which brings me to my little story.
It was a hot August night and I had somehow talked my busy father into taking me to a Solon’s game at old Edmonds Field, a small but lovely triple-A stadium that was torn down ages ago to make room for a Target parking lot. The Solons were playing the Portland Beavers, and it turned out to be a great pitcher’s duel with the game still tied at 0-0 going into extra innings. Since the game hadn’t been too exciting in terms of hitting, my father and I were able to spend lots of time chatting and catching up on what was going on in our very separate lives, something that we rarely did.
Now my father wasn’t really a baseball fan, and he spent much of the night complaining that no one was scoring any runs and that he needed to be up early to go to work. But still he sat there, as the 10th inning turned into the 11th, and the 11th turned into the 12th, knowing that I was hanging on every pitch, and that the two of us were actually enjoying the rarest of all things, a fun time together.
When Harry Bright, the popular Solon third baseman finally hit a long home run in the bottom of the 12th to win the game, me and the few fans that were left began jumping up and down with excitement. My father was even happy, an emotion that rarely came to him, although maybe he was just relieved to be escaping the discomfort of our concrete bleacher seats. But to this day, it is probably my fondest memory of time spent with my father, made possible because there had been no ghost runner to start extra innings to end the game as soon as possible, and that when the 12th inning was finally over and the Solons had won, he hugged me almost as tightly as he did when I left for Vietnam.
