Things I Would Change If I Were King
April 25, 2018 at 4:33 p.m.
By Roger Grossman-
Today is a third installment of the “If I were King of Sports, I Would Change …” series. It’s stuff that I would change if I could fix something that needs fixed in sports.
The first thing that needs changing is the length of the baseball season. Anthony Rizzo is right, the regular season is too long.
Baseball is a warm-weather sport, and it should not be played in sub-freezing temps … ever. Think of it this way: if you are a season ticket holder for a team that plays in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis etc., the value of what you buy is almost guaranteed to diminish immediately because the first eight to 10 home games (at least) will be played in weather below 50 degrees.
If you have four tickets for each of those games, you are out as much as $1,500 before the calendar flips over to May. SOLUTION: Shorten the season to 140 games. Eliminate 10 games from the start of the year and 12 from the end of the year. You start the second week of April, and start the playoffs in September. From a marketing angle, it would allow people to get entangled in the baseball playoffs before both college football starts conference play and the NFL would only be a week into their season.
The second change is also baseball related.
Baseball fighting started early this spring. Normally we see guys staring out at pitches up and in, or in their ribs, in July and August, but we have already seen benches empty several times this season.
Baseball fights are dangerous, not just because of the fighting itself but because of guys falling into other guys’ legs and stepping on each other. Every time the benches empty, there is a risk that a team’s season could change. SOLUTION: Baseball should look closely at how hockey has significantly slowed down fighting on the ice.
Fights still happen, but not once a period anymore. What changed? The size of the fights. When two hockey players want to drop the gloves, those two fight and everyone else stands and watches. If a third man joins in, he automatically is ejected from the game and is likely to get a phone call from the league office about a fine and/or suspension.
If a pitcher hits a batter and the batter wants to the charge the mound, then the second base and home plate umps break up the fight and the first and third base umps make sure that everyone else minds their own business.
Pitchers would think before just plunking people if they know they are on their own when the batter charges out to him.
I have fought, and will continue to fight, against the shot clock in high school basketball. However, I would like to see one clock-related rule added to high school basketball – the stopping of the clock after made baskets in the final minute of a game.
College sanctioning bodies and the NBA do this, and it serves a purpose. When a team that’s losing makes a basket with 10 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the team inbounding the ball often doesn’t have to even bother throwing it in at all.
They wander around until the clock gets to :04, and then someone grabs it and steps out of bounds with it. Officials are supposed to start a count, but you just never see it. SOLUTION: A made basket in the final minute of a game that has a margin of less than 10 points after that basket goes through the net stops the clock. The clock restarts when the ball is touched in play like it would on any inbounds pass in the course of the game. Yes, it means something new for the clock operators to worry about, but 95 percent of them can handle it and the other five percent should probably have been replaced already anyway.
I think the IHSAA should institute a tournament rule that says the host school at each site can never get a bye. Doing that would accomplish a couple of things. The first would be to lessen the advantage of the host school being at home in the tournament.
Not having to travel and playing in the comfort of your surroundings is huge. Also, from a money standpoint, the home teams tends to bring more fans for the obvious reasons. So, during basketball for example, having the home team play a weeknight game with the potential to have them play three games instead of two will improve the tournament’s bottom line.
If we don’t get that, then I would like to see the basketball sectionals become four-team events on Friday and Saturday nights. The regionals would remain as four team tournaments, but the semistates would expand to four-team Saturday tournaments.
With the ever-expanding travel in class sports, those Tuesday and Wednesday night games mean leaving earlier and getting home later on school nights for more and more kids (and aging broadcasters). We should work to end that as much as possible.
One last thing: Can we make a rule that everyone who attends a sporting event has to wear a shirt? Maybe we could put a body fat rule into it, so if you are over so many pounds based on your height, you have to wear a shirt covering your torso.
Too many people at the Cubs games and football games don’t wear enough clothes and they clearly have no sense of self-awareness about their own bodies.
I mean, really, the 6-foot-3, 375-pound guy whose had five brats and twice that many alcoholic beverages before entering the stadium and screaming in his meanest-looking face is not where I want the camera to pan to after a big play by the home team … or any team … ever. Please make it stop!
If only I were king.
Today is a third installment of the “If I were King of Sports, I Would Change …” series. It’s stuff that I would change if I could fix something that needs fixed in sports.
The first thing that needs changing is the length of the baseball season. Anthony Rizzo is right, the regular season is too long.
Baseball is a warm-weather sport, and it should not be played in sub-freezing temps … ever. Think of it this way: if you are a season ticket holder for a team that plays in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis etc., the value of what you buy is almost guaranteed to diminish immediately because the first eight to 10 home games (at least) will be played in weather below 50 degrees.
If you have four tickets for each of those games, you are out as much as $1,500 before the calendar flips over to May. SOLUTION: Shorten the season to 140 games. Eliminate 10 games from the start of the year and 12 from the end of the year. You start the second week of April, and start the playoffs in September. From a marketing angle, it would allow people to get entangled in the baseball playoffs before both college football starts conference play and the NFL would only be a week into their season.
The second change is also baseball related.
Baseball fighting started early this spring. Normally we see guys staring out at pitches up and in, or in their ribs, in July and August, but we have already seen benches empty several times this season.
Baseball fights are dangerous, not just because of the fighting itself but because of guys falling into other guys’ legs and stepping on each other. Every time the benches empty, there is a risk that a team’s season could change. SOLUTION: Baseball should look closely at how hockey has significantly slowed down fighting on the ice.
Fights still happen, but not once a period anymore. What changed? The size of the fights. When two hockey players want to drop the gloves, those two fight and everyone else stands and watches. If a third man joins in, he automatically is ejected from the game and is likely to get a phone call from the league office about a fine and/or suspension.
If a pitcher hits a batter and the batter wants to the charge the mound, then the second base and home plate umps break up the fight and the first and third base umps make sure that everyone else minds their own business.
Pitchers would think before just plunking people if they know they are on their own when the batter charges out to him.
I have fought, and will continue to fight, against the shot clock in high school basketball. However, I would like to see one clock-related rule added to high school basketball – the stopping of the clock after made baskets in the final minute of a game.
College sanctioning bodies and the NBA do this, and it serves a purpose. When a team that’s losing makes a basket with 10 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the team inbounding the ball often doesn’t have to even bother throwing it in at all.
They wander around until the clock gets to :04, and then someone grabs it and steps out of bounds with it. Officials are supposed to start a count, but you just never see it. SOLUTION: A made basket in the final minute of a game that has a margin of less than 10 points after that basket goes through the net stops the clock. The clock restarts when the ball is touched in play like it would on any inbounds pass in the course of the game. Yes, it means something new for the clock operators to worry about, but 95 percent of them can handle it and the other five percent should probably have been replaced already anyway.
I think the IHSAA should institute a tournament rule that says the host school at each site can never get a bye. Doing that would accomplish a couple of things. The first would be to lessen the advantage of the host school being at home in the tournament.
Not having to travel and playing in the comfort of your surroundings is huge. Also, from a money standpoint, the home teams tends to bring more fans for the obvious reasons. So, during basketball for example, having the home team play a weeknight game with the potential to have them play three games instead of two will improve the tournament’s bottom line.
If we don’t get that, then I would like to see the basketball sectionals become four-team events on Friday and Saturday nights. The regionals would remain as four team tournaments, but the semistates would expand to four-team Saturday tournaments.
With the ever-expanding travel in class sports, those Tuesday and Wednesday night games mean leaving earlier and getting home later on school nights for more and more kids (and aging broadcasters). We should work to end that as much as possible.
One last thing: Can we make a rule that everyone who attends a sporting event has to wear a shirt? Maybe we could put a body fat rule into it, so if you are over so many pounds based on your height, you have to wear a shirt covering your torso.
Too many people at the Cubs games and football games don’t wear enough clothes and they clearly have no sense of self-awareness about their own bodies.
I mean, really, the 6-foot-3, 375-pound guy whose had five brats and twice that many alcoholic beverages before entering the stadium and screaming in his meanest-looking face is not where I want the camera to pan to after a big play by the home team … or any team … ever. Please make it stop!
If only I were king.
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