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The last days of baseball

The boys of summer are taking their ball and going home. As far as I’m concerned they can stay there.

Unless a major breakthrough occurred, the Major League Baseball Players Association went on strike today, ending yet another snoozer of a season. It will be as unsatisfying a conclusion for baseball as the All-Star game, which inexplicably ended in a tie this year. But in a way it’s fitting.

Football has already started. Hockey starts soon, as does basketball.

The highlight reels may be a little boring for a couple of weeks, but by the time the strike is in its second week, few of us will be missing the game of baseball.

Talk to people about the game, and you’ll hear a hundred different opinions of what’s wrong with the game – the players are greedy, the owners are greedy, there are too many games, the game is too boring, the games are too long, the best players are on steroids, the players change teams too often, little cities can’t compete with big cities, there are too many teams, not enough teams make the play-offs, it costs fans too much for tickets… the list goes on and on.

It’s been a long time since I heard anybody say anything positive about Major League Baseball, or defend the game as things currently stand.

Owners and players can’t come to an agreement because they are both so far from reaching middle ground that it’s impossible for them to come together without a gigantic leap of faith – and even bigger concessions on salaries, arbitration, contraction, and all of the other issues plaguing the sport.

What to do? The sport is dying for many disillusioned fans.

While there will always be diamonds, and little leagues, and slo-pitch and both varsity and professional baseball teams, will there always be MLB?

I don’t think so. And I don’t think it’s in anyone’s best interest to try to resurrect this particular beast.

The boom times are over for North America, at least for a little while. People who have lost their jobs honestly don’t care if players already making millions think they’re being shortchanged by the owners.

And the owners? They used to rule their teams like their own personal empires, but those days are long gone. Many clubs are losing money, and the majority are just breaking even. They have been backed into a corner by the players and the wealthy teams to where it probably makes better financial sense at this point to sell out than to stay in. It might be a profitable game for many, but it’s also a constant headache.

I believe that the only way to fix pro baseball, is to destroy it. Dissolve the league and throw out the rule book. Cancel next season. Close the parks, and retire the teams. Declare insolvency, and void all contracts with the players and all deals with the players association.

In the last few months we’ve seen billion dollar companies like Enron, WorldCom, and K-Mart collapse‚ why shouldn’t the same thing happen to MLB? Shut it down, and start over.

Create new teams, with a minimum and maximum salary for players and a salary cap for teams. Give the players the limited ability to choose where they want to play, then limit their ability to move from place to place so that the fans can actually get to feel that their home team is really from home.

Current players would be allowed to enter the draft for the new league on the condition that they do not bring the union with them, give up the steroids, and agree to the changes. If they don’t like it, they can go play in Japan or Mexico.

To prevent the owners from taking advantage, limits should also be placed on ticket prices and the price of hot dogs at stadiums across North America. Money from shirts, hats, and television deals could go into a stadium maintenance pool, player pensions, and towards programs to fund little league programs. Teams should open their books to the public, so that the players and fans can see that they are not being cheated.

To make every game count they should cut the number of games in a season by half, to around 80.

To make the games move quicker, they should have a pitch clock like the play clock in football. And rather than allow the pitcher to throw to first 10 times to keep the runner from stealing, they could create a lead-off box that limits how far a player can inch their way to the next base. It changes the game but honestly, how many times have you seen the pitcher throw a runner out?

Another idea might be to stop allowing teams to change pitchers in mid-inning. I understand that it’s part of the strategy, but maybe if a pitcher is getting tired they should call for a reliever between innings and save the fans a boring exchange.

This also prevents managers from swapping pitchers with every batter, playing the left-handed/right-handed percentages and otherwise holding up the game.

Baseball enthusiasts have to realize that the next generation of fans was brought up on MTV and video games – kids today don’t have the attention span for America’s pastime, the grand ol’ game of their fathers and grandfathers. They have to make it exciting, and to make it exciting the players should actually be moving out there. Viewers should be afraid to take their eyes off the field for fear of missing something.

These days you can get up, go to the bathroom, make yourself a sandwich, grab a beer from the fridge, and come back to find that you’ve missed all of four pitches. If anything happens it will be replayed several times over, because, let’s face it, not much is happening out there.

Another way to make baseball more exciting is to put more teams into the play-offs. People want to see do-or-die, not meaningless double headers between two teams that were statistically eliminated from the playoffs back in July.

They should follow the example of hockey, and allow 16 teams into the post-season. That way more cities and more fans get into the action, and even the more mediocre teams have a chance at the pennant.

Of course, all of this is just my idea of how to save a sport that I used to enjoy watching, once upon a Joe Carter. It’s unrealistic because it asks that players and owners put the good of the sport and the fans ahead of their own self-interests, and I don’t think either side is ready to bend quite that far.

They’ll strike, resolve a few issues in a new contract, play a few more years until that contract runs out and then they’ll strike again. By then I and millions of other fans will no longer care what happens.

Football anyone?