A Time Of Change – – Both Good And Bad

As more parts of the US begin to “re-open” despite a still large number of known COVID-19 cases, I thought it would be worthwhile to look back and see if there might be a bright spot or two that will emerge from the country’s lockdown – – at least as it may apply to the sports world.  It is hard to imagine that anything organic to individual sports like MLB or the NBA or the NHL which had schedule disruptions could have been a “bright spot”, but maybe if we look just a bit more deeply, we can find a nugget or two.  The danger here is that as we dig more deeply, we might find some fetid remains as well.  We shall see…

When sports went dark back in March, the TV networks had to scramble to avoid having test patterns [Google is your friend, youngsters.] and/or dead air fill the screens nationwide.  They resolved that issue by following Warner Wolf’s directive:

“Let’s go to the videotape.”

That solved TV’s immediate problem, but it left execs and producers with time on their hands to think up “innovations”.  Those good folks came up with three of these and I want to put them into three familiar categories:  The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

• The Good:  The idea of putting microphones on baseball managers/coaches could be an interesting innovation providing added insights into game strategy and dugout atmosphere.  There will need to be attentive monitors of that audio feed and it will be important to silence those microphones when a manager/coach goes nose-to-nose with an umpire over a “blown call”.  [Aside:  Dr. Fauci would not approve of that sort of face-to-face shouting even if the participants were wearing masks.  Just saying…]  I do not need to hear any “commentary” from players or among players, but from managers and coaches it might be interesting.
• The Bad:  The idea of using mannequins – or worse yet blow-up dolls – as faux fans in the stands so that it “looks better on TV” is more than just a bad idea.  It is a stupid idea.  The collective of humankind saw its total intellectual capital diminished when that idea was first vocalized.
• The Ugly:  I assume you are wondering at this point what might be worse than something that drains the inventory of human intellectual capital.  Well, the idea of piping in crowd noise because there are no live fans to provide spontaneous crowd noise would fit that bill.  The compelling thing about sports is that it is real; what is happening on the field or the court or the pitch or the ice is not some fakery or fantasy; it is there and it is happening in real time.  Piping in “fake noise” destroys that compelling element.

There was a time 60-70 years ago where there was a thing called a “reconstructed baseball game” as a radio program.  If you saw the movie Bull Durham you saw an announcer sitting in a studio getting a news feed pitch by pitch from the stadium and using sound effects and fake crowd noise to make it seem to the listener that they were hearing a real broadcast.  Those reconstructed games were commonplace until about the early 1950s in MLB but it was always easy to tell which games were “live” and which were “reconstructed” – even to a kid who just wanted to listen to a game on the radio.

• Memo to TV Execs:  Do not screw around with the reality and the authenticity of the sports you are paying to  televise – unless you lump pro ‘rassling in with the concepts of “sports” and “authenticity”.  The only analogy I can come up with here if you do that is that you will be pissing in the soup.

Along similar lines, the NFL – a sport whose regular season/playoff season was not immediately impacted by all of the COVID-19 trauma – made some changes to the way it did its business and made some rule changes that will go into effect when the NFL returns to live action.  It would be ever so convenient if I could categorize those changes in the same three categories as above – – but I cannot honestly say that any of the changes classify as The Ugly.  So, I will have to settle for a simple delineation of good and bad.

• The Good:  I really liked the “decentralized NFL Draft” better than the huge convocation of folks into a single venue.  I doubt we will see that very often down the line because of the revenue the mass convocation produces, but it was a great innovation.
• The Good:  The NFL got rid of the rule allowing replay to be used to review pass interference calls – or non-calls – which had been in place on a one-year trial basis in 2019.  The problem with the rule was not its intention; the problem is that the rule was not enforced well at all and created more animosity league-wide than did the Saints/Rams playoff incident that engendered the rule in the first place.  Good riddance…
• The Bad:  For the second year in a row, the NFL tabled a rule change that would eliminate the onside kick and replace it with a single play of 4^th and 15 to determine if the “kicking team” would retain possession of the ball.  The league is on a dilemma here; they changed the previous onside kickoff rule to enhance player safety; that is a tough terrain on which to beat a retreat.  The problem is that the current rule makes it almost impossible for an onside kick to work.  The NFL needs an infusion of imagination to change things here.

With regard to onside kicks in the NFL, I ran across this stat attributed to Michael Lopez who is the Director of Data and Analytics for the NFL.  I figure he is an authoritative source…  According to his stats, over the last two years since the new onside kick rule has been in effect teams that have tried an expected onside kick in a regular season NFL game have a combined record of 0-104.

Obviously, teams trying an expected onside kick are trailing when they do that; one should not expect the results to be anywhere near .500.  Nonetheless, with the new onside kick rule in effect, the onside kick has been relegated to a status politely described as “Useless”.

• Memo to NFL Owners:  Find a way to modify the current onside kick rule; it’s not working…

Finally, here is a comment from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times about a baseball story that has receded into memory as the league and the players continue to squabble over money:

“Three teams — the Astros, Red Sox and Mets — fired their managers in the aftermath of Houston’s sign-stealing trash-bangers.

“Or, more precisely, they canned them.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………