Baseball has returned, with the broadcast of Spring training games. I do admit that I don't miss baseball as much during the off-season as I once did because I don't like the current trends in the game: home runs and strikeouts for hitters, fastballs and Tommy John surgery for pitchers. Once again there are some feeble attempts to speed up the game with visits to the mound limited to six a game and intervals between half-innings being enforced by requiring batters and pitchers to be ready. (intervals for commercials are supposed to be limited to 2 minutes and 5 seconds on locally televised games but often run three minutes or more). It remains to be seen whether umpires will enforce the rule that a batter has to keep one foot in the batter's box at all times.
The pace of the game is not the problem; rather it's the mania for home runs and the resulting strikeouts and the constant changing of pitchers that can make things tedious. When I watched the first Mets Spring training game the most exciting moment was when Atlanta Braves player Danny Santana put down a beautiful bunt for a base hit. Perhaps we will see some changes with the new Mets manager Micky Callahan, new pitching coach Dave Eiland and new hitting instructor Pat Roessler. The batters may learn to bunt and the pitchers to throw more curve balls, but I'm not optimistic. Mets announcer Ron Darling even suggested that pitchers might begin to be limited to two times through a lineup, making it even less likely that a starter could go five innings to qualify for a win (now considered by some an irrelevant statistic).
But it's Spring and I am hopeful; you can find me listening to games on the radio or taking public transportation to see the Brooklyn Cyclones and the Staten Island Yankees.
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