#MIDDLEBURY
By Mark Vasto
I have a friend who runs a high-end retail business. Every day, one of the things she does is check the rungs inside of the clothes racks. Occasionally, she will find an article of clothing stashed behind, say, a rack of dress shirts. The next time the sneaky person goes to check on the item, there’s a post-it note with the word “NOPE” in its place.
Major League Baseball is sneaky, too. It’s the only game where you’re allowed to steal – the other manager’s signals, the catcher’s signals … an actual base or two – not to mention all of the even sneakier stuff some guys try to pull. Vaseline under the cap, nail files in their back pocket, spit and rosin, to name a few. But nothing is more egregious than when baseball tries to sneak in a new rule.
Home-field advantage being decided by the winner of the All-Star Game? Stupid, when it’s a game based upon mutual participation and can theoretically end in a tie. The new one-game play-in playoff games? The worst. The designated hitter – good idea in theory, kind of worked out for guys like David Ortiz, Reggie Jackson, Jim Thome and Edgar Martinez, but really hasn’t made watching games any more enjoyable. The most exciting plays in baseball are the defensive ones anyway.
But now they’ve come up with a real doozy. The proposed rule change would affect extra-inning ballgames. The proposed idea is start an extra-inning game with a runner on second base, in scoring position. Now just think about how idiotic that rule would be for a second.
The Sabremetric guys will tell you that with no outs and a man on second, a team has a very good probability of scoring a run. With nobody on base, your chance of scoring drops to about 40 percent. That’s a pretty big swing … except it isn’t a swing at all. The player never earned the right to be on the field.
So the manager picks a player, more than likely his preferred base-burning pinch runner. Does he get a hit for that? A walk? No. That’s not fair to the pitcher. Does it affect his on-base percentage? It would have to … how would you account for the run? And why should the pitcher be given such a handicap? If that guy scores, is it an unearned run? Hey, why not just have ghost runners?
And get this: The smart people at Forbes just did the math and figured out it would shorten only about 6 percent of extra-inning games.
The Major Leagues should have stopped when they got it right: banning the spitball and the infield fly rule (the game’s only flaw). If you want to shorten games, you make the batter stay in the batter’s box, period. You’re up there to hit. If the pitcher takes too long to throw, you give him two warnings, and the third time he stalls you boot him from the game.
But trying to ruin the game with that sneaky little second-base runner rule? Nope.
Mark Vasto is a veteran sportswriter who lives in New Jersey.
(c) 2017 King Features Synd., Inc.
