Thursday November 11, 2004

BASEBALL LIKE IT OUGHTA BE. Hell no to video review for baseball.

For one thing, the game's gotten too damn slow already. Bad enough we got guys stepping out of the batter's box and fiddling with their gloves between every pitch. Add two or three breaks per game for umps to watch TV, and ballparks will have to start serving breakfast during the 7th-inning stretch.

Second, umpires are God (or at least Supreme Court justices) or they are nothing. You got to believe that they are standing tall on every call, even when they're wrong (unless one of the associate justices -- I mean line judges -- sets them straight). I don't want to see an umpire sheepishly trudging from the video booth to the first-base line to mumble "Upon further review..." Might as well let the players take swings at them, then.

And there are a dozen other reasons, all boiling down to I'm an old crank and I want players to wear baggy pants and have names like "Cap." Well, not really. But too much tech is too much tech, and baseball's threshold of too-much is lower than that of most other endeavors. Within a few years of this innovation, they'll be playing the game on a giant air-table and hitting the ball with their minds.

Bad enough we got this newfangled designated hitter foolishness.
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