I WANT Bud Selig to attend a World Series game in New York the same way most everyone else must. I’m talking, door to door, hand to wallet. Seriously. I think it’s imperative, that the Commissioner of Baseball know exactly what it’s like to be a postseason patron of the business he has been entrusted to lead.
A Subway Series and other recent remarkable local sports events can only do so much to hide the fact that this has been the most absurd October in New York area sports history.
Tuesday, the day after the Dolphins-Jets game ended at 1:20 a.m., Game 3 of the Yanks-Mets began at 8:35 p.m. and, 8½ innings later, a 4-2 game ended well after midnight.
Since the postseason began with Mets-Giants and Yanks-A’s, similar conditions, once the exception, have become the rule. In fact, these conditions have existed during baseball’s postseason over the last 20 years.
And that leads me to question whether Selig and his merry band of bottom-liners understand, in a tangible, let’s-trade-places fashion, the inherent dangers they have facilitated.
I wonder if Selig would want you or me, after a day’s work then a long and active night/early morning at the ballpark, to drive his family down the highway at, say, 2:15 a.m.
So here’s the deal, Bud: Throughout this World Series, with roughly 60,000 people to deal with in order to get to a train in order to get to their car, thousands of fathers, were on the move on a worknight, starting after midnight.
After nearly 20 consecutive hours of activity without sleep, fathers were on the highways, driving home with sleeping kids in the back seat, at 2 a.m. It’s no quirk, Bud, no aberration. It’s an institutionalized reality. Created by your institution. These are the conditions dictated by MLB.
Consider that for all the thousands of baseball fans at home who are fighting sleep or have fallen asleep in the eighth and ninth innings while watching the World Series – the World Series, for crying out loud – there are thousands more at the games who still have to hit the road, and won’t be doing that for another hour or two.
Beyond the obscene ticket prices attached to post-season tickets and concessions, MLB has created a clear, present and recurring danger among those, like me, still foolish enough to patronize baseball.
Is baseball so bereft of common decency that it now, by design, would place children in automobiles driven by the sleep-deprived? A preposterous notion, yet that’s exactly what baseball has done.
Come on, try it with me, Bud. Give the limo driver and your VIP parking spot a night off. We’ll go to the game together. We’ll take the kids. You take care of the tolls. I’ll drive.
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FOX’S World Series telecasts are vastly improved for one reason: Lots of the clutter is gone.
This year, as a prime example, that scene-swallowing, multi-colored, computerized grid graphic known as the “Hit Zone” has been deleted.
Ostensibly designed to show where batters best like pitches, the “Hit Zone” made no allowances for fastballs, curves, sliders change-ups or line drives caught at the fence. It made no allowance for the talent of the pitcher. It showed that 1/92nd of an inch higher, lower, left or right turned Babe Ruth into Dr. Ruth.
But, hallelujah, it’s gone. Fox, after several years of strongly suggesting that the “Hit Zone” told a significant story, now realizes that it was worthless. Time spent looking at the “Hit Zone” is now spent watching the game.
One thing, however, we’d like to see more of within the game is how the outfield is shading certain batters against certain pitchers. With Orlando Hernandez, for example, the Yanks played the Mets either straight away or slightly to the opposite field. That kind of applicable knowledge is worth knowing before the ball heads toward the outfield.
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THE Blare Music Project: Shea Stadium, like so many ballparks, is now so pumped up with artificial noise that we lose out on the real stuff, the good stuff.
Robin Ventura’s second-inning homer in Game 3 hadn’t yet hit the ground when the Shea p.a. system began to blast the Beatles’ rendition of “Twist and Shout.” Lost to this intrusion was the natural and spontaneous sound of tens of thousands of fans erupting in delight, a sound that, no offense to the Fab Four, should be allowed to speak for itself.
Furthermore, to sit anywhere within 50 yards of the scores of speakers attached to Shea’s innards is to be unable to conduct a conversation with the person seated next to you without turning to the side and shouting in each other’s nearest ear.
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GAME 3, top of seventh. Dennis Cook is pitching, runner on first. Let the gamesmanship begin! There was so much checking the runner, stepping off the rubber and stepping out of batter’s box, that it took two minutes for Cook to throw one pitch.
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I’LL never understand TV people. Why do sportscasters, 45 and older and blessed with a full head of hair, suddenly show up with in-yer-face dye jobs ranging from day-glo orange to jet black?
They don’t look any younger, they look silly. If they think we don’t notice the difference, they’re wrong. It’s another one of those TV things that’s copied for no good reason.
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EVERYTHING that isn’t nailed down will be sold to suckers by MLB as Subway Series collectibles. In the case of the bases, changed every few innings in order to maximize the merchandise, even things that are nailed down will be sold.