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Reactions: Future of baseball Users have a list of changes for MLBPosted: Monday July 10, 2000 06:28 PM
Baseball is far from perfect, according to many CNNSI.com users. From profit sharing to larger parks, users shared their ideas of how to make the game a little bit better. A collection of some of our users' most interesting comments follows: I wish everyone would just shut up about the current and future state of baseball. As long as I can remember, people find reasons to complain about baseball and life in general. I guess it keeps sportswriters in business but everyone needs to realize this is a game of cycles. If you want to tweak something, raise the mound a couple of inches. Is it really bad to hit 60 homeruns and have 20 runs scored in a game? If it is, it's just as bad if EVERY game is 1-0. Pitcher's duels are only interesting if they happen infrequently. Look at the NY vs. Boston game with all the hype with Pedro and the Rocket. Now that was fun! But if Jeff Fassero and Gooden were pitching against each other, that 1-0 score isn't as interesting. So everyone, stop your whining and just enjoy the game!
The game needs to be reverted to where it was back in the sixties! So much of the game is missing in this new error of powerball. Moving runners, base stealing, pitchers duels, etc. Give the pitchers a chance! I don't like all games to be 1-0 and 2-1, but I also don't like to see balls being hit out of the park like base hits. Also get rid of fields like Enron field in Houston and make them move the wall back!
I'd make a lot of changes to baseball. Raise the mound two inches. Scrap the DH (pick up a glove Edgar!) Add two more expansion teams in cities that allow for intelligent alignment. And then put a ban on expansion for the foreseeable future. Put a cap on individual salaries. Not a cap on what a team can spend, but a cap on what an individual player can make over a given contract. Put an inflationary percent raise on this cap every year so that it increases with the economy. That way, one player can't eat up all the budget of a team, that way players will be forced to chose the team they play for based on factors other than money.
DH position is a joke! It's an excuse for anybody who can't play defense at any position. Also it's a wrong way of protecting pitchers. The pitchers can throw at anybody's head and get away with it. They're not the one who will be batting later in the game!
Baseball needs to take a cue from the NFL -- profit sharing. Soon all we'll see is the Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, Braves, Red Sox, and a handful of other large-market teams playing each other in the playoffs. The regular season won't even matter. It's nice to see my Reds putting up a good fight, but they can't do it financially when Stienbrenner is running the league!
There are too many homeruns being hit. The copious amount of longballs might attract new "fans", but its destroying the tradition and integrity of the game. MLB needs to enforce its rules concerning field dimensions. Enron Field is only slightly bigger than a tee-ball field and completely ignores baseball's minimum fence distances. Get rid of the DH. Put some strategy back into managing in the American League. Pitchers aren't completely helpless at bat. In the NL, pitchers sacrifice, squeeze, and occasionally help their own cause. I think a pitcher contributing to manufacturing a run is much more exciting than an out of shape slugger at the end of his career hitting a homerun.
The biggest problem with the game today is the length of the contests. Three hours for a nine inning run-of-the-mill game is just too long. The problem does not lie with batters stepping out of the box and pitchers taking too much time between pitches (although neither situation helps matters any!). The fundamental problem today is the ridiculous number of meaningless pitching changes! Who says that the entire pitching staff needs to be engaged on a regular basis? How about a return to the badge of honor that a complete game bestows instead of this hollow banter about quality starts!
Baseball's last two quick fixes, interleague play and homeruns, have already become booorrring. The real problem with baseball right now, other than arrogant star players (the All-Star Game snubs are sickening), is the need for real revenue sharing. Oh boy, it's real exciting seeing one small market club per year trying to compete with the big guys. Someday we might have 32 teams playing in six or seven cities. That sounds exciting, doesn't it?
In my opinion, many things need to be changed in order to help MLB march into the 21st century. First, baseball is not an offensive game. The best baseball is 3-2, 2-1 ball games, where the manager actually has to manage his players and map out strategy. So let's start with getting rid of the DH. It was always a bad idea. All the DH does in most cases is give a fading player a few more years in the bigs; of course certain cases are different (Martinez in Seattle). Also, STOP EXPANSION! It is killing the talent pool, and will eventually, if unchecked, destroy the game. That would put at least two more frontline starters and at least five legitimate big leaguers back into the gene pool.
There should really be a salary cap on all teams. Only then would small market teams like Minnesota compete with teams from New York. This seems to be such a simple thing for the improvement of the game that I am really surprised that it has not been implemented yet. Otherwise, baseball is bound to be overtaken by NFL and the NBA.
Instead of four teams from each league for the playoffs, how about a six team effort in which the top two teams get a bye in each league. That would make a lot more news and there would be more fight for the championship.
Being in Canada, I believe that I have an interesting perspective on the economics of baseball. Both the Blue Jays and Expos, on the field, appear to be blossoming young teams. The truth of the matter is that they are both likely to be priced out of serious contention in the near future. Baseball either needs to implement a salary cap in which teams like the Yankees would have significantly cut their payroll. Or introduce some sort of cost/revenue sharing program to aid small to mid market clubs. No player is worth $15 or even $10 million. The players own contract sizes have proven to hurt baseball in so many cities.
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