Fixing Our Pasttime

This has been a post that I've been holding in my back pocket ever since I started doing Confessions of a Sportscaster. Given the news today, I figured today was the best opportunity to write it.

While I think football is easily now the #1 sport for most people in the United States, baseball remains an old classic that a lot of people love. But I have had a couple rule changes in mind to help improve the competitive balance of the game. I think one or two of these are no-brainers, but there's one that's definitely a controversial one.

Institute a salary cap
This has long been an argument that I think a lot of fans have been pushing when you look not only at how much it costs to go to a ball game nowadays but what baseball salaries are escalating to. Here is a list of the 25 highest paid players from this past season. There's a lot of great players on this list, but also a lot of overpaid and/or overrated players. Avoiding these sorts of backbreaking contracts can help keep you from crippling your franchise... or at least make your GM think twice before offering a 32 year old first basemen with bad knees a 5 year, $80 million deal. But this is just part of the deal.

Institute a salary floor
Here's one that kind of gets overlooked, but gave me the idea to write this post. Today Twitter blew up with reports of a massive trade between the Blue Jays and the Marlins that gets rid of 5 of Miami's highest paid players. When you consider that a couple guys on that list were already gone... there's virtually no one left on their payroll. That's ridiculous. From a business standpoint, I get that the idea is to maximize your profits (accomplished with their new ballpark). But if you're the owner of a sports franchise, the product you're selling is the team on the field. At least make it seem like you care. Spend money on your roster. With the combination of the cap and the floor, you can try to guarantee a distribution of the talent fairly evenly amongst the majors. Parity hasn't been a huge issue in baseball, with only 2 teams winning multiple World Series titles since the 21st century began and all but 3 teams have even made the playoffs over the past 12 years. The idea here is just to make sure one team isn't stockpiling talent and trying to buy a title while other teams aren't trying to put a sham on the field for the fans.

Obviously money doesn't tell the whole story. Looking at how much each team spent in 2012, spending tons of money didn't necessarily equate to a playoff spot, but you were much less likely to make it if your team didn't spend money (Oakland was the exception of teams that spent less than $80 million on players). Miami's trade here is a disgrace unless you're a Blue Jays fan.

Abolish the designated hitter
This is my controversial argument, but hear me out. With the 2013 season bringing a balance of 15 teams in each of the 2 leagues, interleague play will span the entire regular season. While I can take or leave that prospect, if you're playing between 2 different leagues more, the rules need to be uniform. The AL and the NL are like 2 separate professional leagues as it is right now.

So why get rid of the DH? My first reason is more of a fan intrigue perspective. You normally assume that when your pitcher is facing the bottom of the order, that includes the pitcher and is usually an automatic out. Given that pitchers normally don't hit well, that's usually a safe assumption, but some pitchers actually hit well. Carlos Zambrano comes to mind (of course, when he wasn't being an absolute headcase), but I went to a game in Milwaukee between the Twins and Brewers, and I think both starting pitchers got base hits in that game. It happens, and it can be a major momentum swing if your pitcher can hit. (I also saw Kerry Wood hit a home run at a game in 2003, so maybe I'm a tad biased).


The bigger reason for it is purely strategic. Managers in the American League now barely have to do anything other than decide when to take pitchers out, and that is based solely on how they're pitching. I love how in the National League, much more strategy is involved with how you use your bench and when a good time to double switch would be. It puts a lot more weight on these decisions and how long you want a pitcher to go and how quickly you want to empty your bench while thinking about future scenarios. It's a much more mental game in the NL, and I think makes the game more intriguing.

Someone get this man out of baseball. Now.

Obviously with all these issues, given the nature of the sport and how much money is involved, this is not something that can be instituted overnight. You'd probably be looking at 2 or 3 years down the road, but Major League Baseball should at least consider this now and announce that it will happen down the road so teams have time to prepare for it. You have DH's on American League rosters that would need to have their contracts come off the books so you don't completely screw those teams over. The other problem is that it would shorten careers of some guys, but I think having an impact in more ways than just stepping up to bad a couple hundred times a year without taking the field is important. More importantly, don't let a greedy owner ruin baseball in your town. Or just contract the Miami Marlins, since their entire history is based around fire sales anyway, 2 World Series titles be damned.