Being up later than I should be watching the NHL playoffs I noticed while flipping through the guide that Mr.Baseball was on. A subpar movie at best about a washed up MLB player who gets traded to a Japanese team. As you can imagine hi jinx ensue, we are confronted with cultural differences, a love triangle, etc. This got me thinking about the current problems that plague baseball. Should players be forced to captivate audiences by growing glorious mustaches like Tom Selleck’s? Do we need more fire ballers in the mold of ‘Wild Thing’ Ricky Vaughn? I would welcome either of those suggestions (pat on the back time) but I think there are some larger issues at play.First and foremost games are too long. This takes the casual fan out of the experience and hinders the game from growing at a grass roots level. If a game starts at 7.30pm few kids are able to last until the end of a game. The average time between pitches in an MLB game is 26.4 seconds. WAY TOO LONG! Consider that a player can inbound a ball from the opposite end of the basketball court setup a play and then take a shot in only 24. I am not talking about speedsters such as Derek Rose but even hapless sloths, uh hum Anthony Johnson. In 1954 The NBA introduced the shot clock on the back of a suggestion by Danny Biasone, who was the owner of the Syracuse franchise. This visionary deduced that the most entertaining games included 120 shots per game. He then took 48 minutes - 2,880 seconds - and divided that by 120 shots. The result was 24 seconds per shot. This was genius and improved the game exponentially. No longer could people run a clock out. Baseball needs to introduce the same. I go for 12 seconds. Secondly, without a man on base pitchers should not be able to step off the mound. Correspondingly batters should be forced to stay in the batters box. I don’t need to see former juice pigs (see Arias, David) play with their junk a million times a game. Lastly, MLB needs more playoff teams. It makes no sense to play 162 games and have 27% of the teams make the playoffs. NHL and NBA lead the way with 53% of teams making it with the NFL coming in the middle at 38%. I would love to see baseball breakup the NL and AL and go the conference route. East v. West. Increase the number of teams that get into the playoffs from 8 to 12 and decrease the number of regular season games. The first rounds should be a best of 5 and subsequent best of 7. I know baseball fights change more than my 85 year old Grandma but I am delusional, as a result I will hold my breath until all my suggestions are incorporated into MLB.
