Get the Robots

I've seen it too much, and it's time to do something about it. I say, bring in robo-umps for calling balls and strikes in baseball.

It appears to be working in the minor leagues. In the one AAA game I saw live in Columbus, Ohio last year, they were used on appeal; the umpire was overruled each time but one. I get it: they're human. But if part of sportsmanship is getting the calls right, we need to take that human element away.

We have appeals now anyway; why not on balls and strikes? The umpires themselves should be in favor it, quite frankly. It would make them more anonymous and take pressure off. It would help the integrity of the game.

As it is, I'm seeing far too many bad calls, balls and strikes both, to not as a fan want the change. When we actually know and rue an umpire's name being announced (looking at you, Angel Hernandez) and Aaron Judge being tossed after nine years without being told to leave a game, something's wrong. And the fix is easy.

To be Fair to Football

A good friend of mine, one who's a huge football fan, posted a meme on Saturday which said you can't trust someone who didn't watch at least ten hours of college football that day. Well, I guess I can't be trusted. But for better reasons that than, I assure you.

I am less and less of a football fan every year. Yes, I still watch a few minutes during the course of a season, and I'm happy enough Michigan won Saturday, even against a patsy. I sincerely hope the Detroit Lions turn themselves around in my lifetime. But the game is just too brutal, folks. I've read far too many stories of my own old football heroes from 40 years ago who've ended up dead by suicide or severely incapacitated simply because I wanted to be entertained. Don't give me that tired old 'nobody made them play' nonsense. We did, by promising them fame and fortune. Or at least college scholarships for often silly, useless degrees. That in itself is a whole 'nother screed.

I don't want to go off on football only today, because I really don't want to make too much out of a surely humorous meme. I mean, it was intended to be funny, right? The sharer didn't really mean it, did he? I feel that I have to ask, because I wonder that about strident football fans quite honestly. They seem to take themselves insanely seriously. But in fairness to football, part of my attitude towards it has little (I hope) to do with the actual game. Sports in general are becoming less sportsmanlike and far too, shall we say, in your face.

I was watching the Little League World Series last month and was honestly appalled at the number of twelve year old players doing fancy bat flips after hitting home runs. That used to be a no-no, because it was, correctly, I will argue, interpreted as showing up your opponent. Look at what I did, you losers, it's saying to the other bench. Dare to challenge me, will you? Yet it was simply accepted as part of the game this time around, to the point where the broadcast commentators were praising the acts. ESPN was rerunning them for our, I suppose pleasure. We're apparently expected to be impressed by the disrespect.

I don't like it, and there's too much of it in too many of our sports and games. I see it with my beloved Detroit Tigers, an embarrassingly horrible squad this season, where players hit meek, ground ball singles and then in triumph mime silly messages back to the dugout. They have no right being so impressed with themselves. Yet what have we been told, how are we typically sold on the importance of sports for youth? That it teaches sportsmanship, the idea of learning integrity and respect in how and what we play. It used to be you didn't 'show up' the other team. You played your best and let that speak for you.

Sports are becoming too much about bravado and too little about respect. I do think it's particularly glaring with football, where the degree to which players seem to need to 'fire themselves up' before and during games is downright garish, if not flat out ostentatious. But it's becoming part of our sports in general, and I do not believe it is a good thing.

Bad sports

I didn't golf last night. To be sure, my league was on, despite the very certain rain which was coming. But I don't play golf in rain. Period.

I wasn't alone in this as my golf partner bailed too, on the same grounds. Which brings me to my point today: while I care less about sports less every day that doesn't mean I never enjoy them. It doesn't mean I don't have a philosophy about them. A very big part of that philosophy is that we shouldn't play in bad situations, situations unsuited for fair play.

I reject out of hand the argument that everyone is playing under the same conditions. I argue instead that the conditions should be good for everyone because good conditions allow us to play whatever game the best way it should be played. For example, curling on bad ice, ice where the stones run straight maybe, is not fun. You aren't curling: you're playing against the point of the game and begin thinking in wrong ways. It's called curling because you make the stone curl. If the stone ain't curling, you ain't curling.

Baseball isn't played in heavy rain because it affects the sport too much. It slogs down the runners and the ball and the defenders, and the argument that everyone has to deal with it does not address the very real way the conditions change the game. When I want to play baseball I want to play baseball, not slide around on a field of mud puddles. Football quite frankly should not be played in bad weather either, for much the same reasons.

And golf as well. I want to play as the course was made to be played and not around casual water and across soggy greens. I want to curl when the stone curls because that's the whole point of the game. If field conditions are bad, let's stay inside and play euchre. We can play whatever other sport on better days.

What if they played a football game and nobody showed?

This afternoon, as I write in fact, there is a big football game in Ann Arbor between in-state rivals Michigan and Michigan State. At one point in my life I would have been drooling over the match up. Today, I have no intention of watching a single down. I won't say I don't care, but I don't care nearly so much as I once would have.

I've watched very little of my beloved Detroit Tigers this past season, and I saw very little of the Red Wings last year or so far this year. I've watched hardly any of the Major League Baseball playoffs which are currently going on, and baseball is the greatest game there is by far. I only pay enough attention to the NFL to see how my fantasy league picks are doing, and I'm not sure I should be bothering with that. I've missed the last two Super Bowls, and probably will not watch the next one unless I like one of the teams playing. I'm not sure I'll watch even at that. Even curling, a game I've played for thirty years now and whose season for me begins October 26th, doesn't have the appeal to me that it has in years gone by. I love the curlers, of course, and everyone I've met through the game; they're my greatest friends as a single group. Hell, they're my greatest friends, period. Only family is closer. But the point is that I find increasingly that sports are, well, a waste of time and energy.

Some of it has to do with the games as they now stand. They need improvement, and could make themselves better with a little effort. I've complained about that before, primarily about football, yes, but they all could use a heaping dose of integrity quite frankly. Why can't baseball give Armando Gallaraga his perfect game? It would be so easy to do, no one would argue, yet MLB doesn't do it. How can we expect sports to teach sportsmanship if the powers that be won't serve simple justice? Justice very easily served, I might add.

I've gotten tired of game officials blowing calls where the response is, essentially, oh well. That isn't fair play. And shouldn't sports be about fair play? Unless winning is indeed everything, at which point, damn the whole lot of it.

I've blogged before about my Grandpa Joe's attitude: drop the ball for all it matters. He's right to the point that sports shouldn't be so dominant in our culture although wrong, to be sure, so far as you should play your best if you do choose to play. But I've reached the point where the only games I care about were the ball games with my kids as the grew up, and pitching, catching, and batting with my granddaughter now. Tossing the ball around with Pops back in the day. The rest? It's just kinda become noise.

A lot of the fault is with me. I know that. Sports meant too much to me for too many years and it may well be that I'm overcompensating in this reaction. Still, that doesn't mean that I and the world as a whole haven't reached the point where sports and games have become bread and circuses, especially at the highest levels. That idea works fine in a completely secular world.

And that, perhaps, is what bothers me the most. I fear sometimes that we've become too much of an eat, drink, and be merry world, and that that's becoming institutionalized through sports. I can't help but wonder if we'd be better off if they become mere diversions rather than passions. Because as it is, and as I've said it before and recently, I feel that anymore the games play us more than we play the games. That speaks ill of both us and the games we watch.