They're back. Images of burgeoning young plutocrats in softball shirts and pajama pants cavorting under the sun in Florida and Arizona have lately returned to TV screens all over America. Major League Baseball is preparing for its richest season ever, thanks to new contracts with the various TV providers; ESPN, Fox, and TBS.
With a $500,000 mininum salary and no maximum, the pajama-pantsed wizards of the diamond are being enriched beyond the wildest imaginings of grey-beards who can remember bleacher seats for a buck. In 2014, thirty MLB teams will cut up $1.5 billion in TV money before they even open the gates. Because of their union, players, regarded by owners as unavoidable annoyances, will share the additional prosperity.
Sports are the easiest and cheapest mass appeal programs to produce. TV wants more, and MLB is only too willing to accommodate. TV equates audience interest to scoring, so football and basketball have changed their rules. Football dazzles with finely tuned passing attacks and field goals kicked half the length of the field or more. Basketball giants sprint up and down the court, shoot 3-pointers from everywhere, and commonly score a hundred points a game. Both are timed games and have rules that require frequent stops. Those are all TV commercial opportunities. They have been expanded at will and both sports have become rich.
Baseball noted the appeal of lots of scoring almost a hundred years ago when Babe Ruth began knocking home runs into the seats and over the walls. The fans ate it up, but there's never been another Babe, so baseball changed its rules. The pitcher's mound was lowered, the ball was souped up, the strike zone was shrunk, and outfield fences brought in. All that produced more homers (not at the rate PED's did), but didn't leave baseball with much more to manipulate.
Even so, the canny MLB owners. impelled by the smell of money, were never daunted. For the 2014 season, MLB, with a straight face, will broaden its version of Instant Replay to include 13 different
plays, but not balls and strikes. Fair or foul, over the fence or not, fly balls caught or trapped, stolen bases safe or out, fan interference, tag plays, things like that. Each manager gets as many as three opportunities to ask for Instant Replay. If he gets the first one right, he gets two more asks. Otherwise, zilch. Judgments will be rendered by a panel of three umpires watching games on TV at
MLB Headquarters in New York. The field umpires who make the original calls will be neutered, with no part at all in the judging process.
Empowering a set of supra arbiters is more than silly. MLB's Instant Replay impugns field umpires' competence and authority and thus the very foundations of the game. Up in Ump Heaven, Beans Reardon and Old Bill Klem must be vomiting into their cups.
Who needs it? Certainly not the fans at home and at the park who now sit through endless trips to the mound by old pitching coaches who look uniformly awful in their uniforms, only to be followed a few pitches later by the manager, who orchestrates an endless parade of relief pitchers.
Who benefits? The team that gets the nod from the studio umps, of course. Same with the manager, of the team the umps favor, because he avoids strenuous arguments that might get him tossed out of the game, and the hefty fines that go with banishment. Never mind that arguments and ejections are woven into the fabric of the game.
MLB Commissioner Selig avers that fans in the stands watching the Jumbotron will love the drama of seeing three judges deliberating in front of a battery of cameras. Maybe he's right. What if the three cannot agree? Does it become a majority of two? Does the dissenter get thrown out and fined?
Throw his cap on the floor? Say naughty words? Could this be part of the plan?
On the other hand, why shouldn't fans at Target Field follow Instant Replay? As it is, they spend most of the game watching cameras pan the stands, hoping to see themselves making funny faces, thrilling to the Wave, sighing over the Kiss Kam. The Jumbtron is almost always more fun than what's happening between the foul lines.
According to MLB, Instant Replays average 2 minutes 38 seconds. That's time enough for five 30-second TV spots, plus a station ID. Meaning, obviously, that if there are six Instant Replays, a game could carry thirty more commercials.
TA DA! Instant Replay is the game-changer that will keep Baseball's gusher gushing, spewing more bucks on the owners, the guys in softball shirts and pajama pants, even the umpies. Money, more than ever is the name of the game, and TV is the fount.
For money, MLB will alter its rules and cede control of the game to TV, just like the NFL and the NBA.
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Our home town heroes, the Minnesota Twinky-Dinks, (rhymes with Rinky-Dinks) have lost nearly three hundred games over the past three seasons. To become competitive, they need seven position players, and at least one high caliber starting pitcher, a stopper. They have signed three or four cast-offs, nonentities. They will rely on young prospects to develop into major league talents, but that won't happen in 2014.
Conversation about the Twins this year will center on their young pheenoms in the mid to low minors, and the MLB All-Star Game coming to Target Field in July.
Following the All-Star break, Manager Ron Gardenhire will be fired and replaced by Paul Molitor,
who will neither pitch nor hit, field nor throw.
The Twins will be lucky to lose fewer than 90 games in 2014.
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