Unless you are just returning to consciousness from a comatose state – – welcome back, by the way – – you must have heard/seen/read about the Charles Oakley incident at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday evening. The whole thing was a mess and there appears to be no conclusive video evidence that would justify Oakley pushing and shoving security guards at the arena. However, being that this happened in NYC and that it involves the Knicks and their owner, James Dolan, the simple and preferred way to deal with the situation was off the table from the outset. There was a moment when – if all parties could just STFU – this mess could have receded into dim memory in about 2 hours. But, no…
Oakley was arrested and charged with a bunch of stuff. The Knicks’ PR staff issued a statement saying that the team hopes that Oakley “gets help soon”. Players around the league and commentators in various cities have expressed contempt for the way the Knicks treated one of the franchise’s former star players. All this could have been avoided but now it is out there and it will fester because one of the actors is James Dolan.
A former colleague at work was a graduate of West Point. He would often say that every group or team of people benefited from having a “s[p]it magnet”. That is a person who – whenever anything went wrong – attracted all the blame and accreted all the s[p]it that came as a result of the error. My colleague used to say that the presence of this “magnet” allowed other team members to go about their business efficiently and effectively and that made the “magnet” a valuable member of the team. When I asked him if he ever ran into those sorts of folks at West Point, he said that he had and he was glad to have them in his squad.
Among the NBA owners, James Dolan is a “s[p]it magnet”. I doubt that he ever aspired to that status, but there he is…
Moving along to baseball – as pitchers and catchers are starting to pack up their gear to head to Spring Training – the Commish announced that baseball will propose a rule change to the MLBPA and will try out two other new rules in the low minor leagues. The purpose here – nominally – is to increase the pace of play for games and/or to make the games more exciting. Here they are:
- Intentional Walks: No more four pitches to the catcher standing there with one arm out like a school crossing guard; the umpire simply waves the batter to first base. Yes, this removes the possibility of a wild pitch that could dramatically change the game strategy. No, that does not happen sufficiently frequently to matter. By the way, I do not think intentional walks happen frequently enough that saving the 30 seconds that it takes to throw those four intentionally wide pitches matters very much. Baseball purists may not like this but I don’t think this matters one way or the other.
- Raise the lower limit of the strike zone: Instead of the lower limit being the “bottom of the knee” change it to the “top of the knee”. The idea here is to make the pitcher put more pitches in the “hitting zone” with the intention of having more balls put in play making for more action/excitement. I read a stat somewhere that 30% of the plate appearances last season resulted in a walk or a strikeout meaning 30% of the plate appearances did not put the ball in play. If I were convinced that this was a problem that needed resolution, I would do it differently. I would raise the upper limit of the strike zone and have the umpires call strikes on pitches as high as the armpits. What that would do would be to get batters to swing at more pitches instead of waiting out the pitcher for every at bat. But that is just me…
- Put a runner on second base to start each extra inning game: The idea here is to make the extra innings more exciting and to avoid the “marathon games”. MLB’s chief baseball officer, Joe Torre, said that it is not fun when a team has used up its pitching staff and has to bring in a utility infielder to pitch in “marathon games”. Here is the problem and here is a hat-tip to the Washington Post for these data. There just aren’t that many “marathon games”. In 2016, 2,243 MLB games were played in 9 innings or less; 176 games were played in 10-14 innings; 8 games went 15-18 innings and 1 game took 19 innings to play. Only 8% of the games went to extra innings and only 0.4% of the games could possibly be called “marathon games” (longer than 14 innings). This is a solution desperately seeking a problem to resolve…
I would object to the new “extra inning rule experiment” on two grounds in addition to the fact that it would only come into effect a few times a year for most teams. First, it gives an even bigger advantage to the home team – batting last – if the visitors do not score in the top half of an extra inning. They would start with a man on second and can bunt him to third base and win with a sac fly. That does not add loads of excitement to the game but it does provide an added home-team advantage.
My other objection is parallel to my dislike for the way the NHL and the FIFA World Cup games resolve ties. The shoot-out is a different game than the one that led to the tie situation in the first place. Reverse the process and you will see how dumb this is. Imagine that the sport of hockey or soccer consisted of a whole bunch of penalty shots/penalty kicks and at the end of that competition, the score was tied. How dumb would it be for the teams now to resort to playing hockey or soccer as we know it to resolve the tie?
The baseball game that produced the tie situation at the end of 9 innings did not involve starting each half-inning with a runner on second base. So, why should the winner of that game come from this newly imposed game situation? I will not go so far as calling this idea a “crime against humanity” but it is about as useful as the reinvention of the flat tire.
Finally, here is a comment from Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times about long baseball games:
“A report says that, 180 million years from now, the pull of the moon’s gravity will make days on Earth 25 hours long.
“And MLB games will be 6½ hours long.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………