When I Was a Sports Fan

...or, How the NFL and MLB Drove Me Away From the Sports I Once Loved

Feb 20, 2023

There was a time when I was quite a sports fan.

In my last post, I lamented what the woke religion, its high priests and priestesses, its zealots, and otherwise passive adherents has wrought vis-á-vis spectator sports through its proxies of each of the major pro sports entertainment leagues. I had laid much, if not all of the blame at the feet of each one’s commissioner and board of directors for allowing themselves to be bullied into submission. Even as I wrote that, I’m not at all certain that each wasn’t just waiting for the right opportunity to disrupt standard operating procedure to implement the more critical items of the woke agenda.

In 2020, once Covid-19 plannedemic fear had gripped every policy-making and regulatory body at federal, state, county and municipal governments as well as almost every governor nationwide, professional sports entertainment was free to do its part in letting every single citizen in this nation know that the old normal was finished, and that distant, global organizations would be dictating what would be the “new” normal. Government guidelines for this hoax of a threat were an all-too-convenient excuse for the leagues to act as they did.

While there has been a significant push-back on this, as long as there is at least one sheep wearing a mask outdoors in a ninety-degree plus summer in west Texas, the effort will have been successful, and will serve as a template to make it permanent, next time.

Overnight transformation

Literally overnight, every league had its own protocols for testing players, coaches, and administrative personnel, and if the result was positive, quarantine of said individuals. This resulted in not a few games being rescheduled (sometimes weeks) later, and in some cases not even on the same day of the week. For example, there were several instances of NFL games that ordinarily would have been played on Sunday, now being played more than a week later on a Tuesday or even on a Wednesday.

This was a travesty because there wasn’t nearly the attendance then, that there would have been on the scheduled Sunday. Yes, the tickets had already been purchased, but everyone who works those events, like the vendors, sustained a considerable hit to their ability to earn enough in tips beyond their wages to make the effort worthwhile. Fewer physical attendees means fewer sales, and I don’t recall the league, or the franchises, or their taxpayer-owned venues seeking to make them whole.

If one looks back, one can see evidence of pressure being brought to bear on these leagues to yield to the “righteous” mob whether the cause be domestic violence, breast cancer, or some form of social justice (whatever the hell that is – I always thought that there was justice, meted out through the courts) – and while there is much to be said on that topic, I’ll leave it to another post, another day.

What has done equally as much damage to two of the professional sports entertainment leagues are the leagues, themselves – the NFL, and MLB.

First, the NFL

There was a time when football was a much more dangerous game than it is today. In fact, that is what it made it alluring – that danger is what made it an appealing spectator sport. For some reason, safety has become the priority in a game that is violent and dangerous by its nature, and it has ruined the game I once knew.

Yes, the number of players suffering from CTE is sad, and the league has an obligation to do more than just contribute the equivalent of a rounding error in the footnote of its balance sheet to partially fund ongoing care for those players so suffering.

Nonetheless, since 1974, the NFL Rules Committee has been making the game so antiseptic with so many rule changes that the game with which I grew up is all but unrecognizable. Jack Lambert said out loud what everyone else was thinking, even then. Every new rule, or new interpretation was new grounds for a penalty or; a new rule was created to avoid the next bad call or non-call, and that made it difficult for the officiating to be done, even badly, even then. While I have no sympathy for the referees, it’s been a no-win proposition for the zebras.

The truth of the matter is there were far too many infractions that were the result of judgement calls instead of those from blatant commission. Everyone knew, theoretically, holding could have been called on every single snap – only the most obvious resulted in a penalty – this was the standard that ought to have been applied in every other instance.

Instant-replay (with challenges to the call on the field) was a bad idea, for much the same reason. All it did was interrupt the flow of the game and detracted from the ecstasy or agony of the moment. Fans of a certain age learned to accept that officiating was imperfect because it was performed by imperfect people who were going to make mistakes – occasionally, at the worst possible junctures – but they also knew that was life.

Whining about bad calls, and non-calls is a time-honoured tradition that will never go away. On December 28, 1975, in the final twenty-four seconds of the divisional playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Dallas Cowboys, the officials committed two atrocious mistakes – one bad call (a pass ruled a reception in which Drew Pearson was clearly out of bounds) that set up the non-call that cost the Vikings the game.

Watch from the 00:00:12 mark

That being said, forty-one years later, Drew Pearson finally admits what every single other Vikings fan (myself included) have always known – that he committed offensive pass interference right in front of the official who saw it, and refused to call the penalty when he pushed off of Nate Wright, causing him to trip and fall, and allowing Pearson to catch that cursed Hail Mary pass from Roger Staubach. Pearson’s admission does nothing to ease the sting of that humiliating loss, but as Vikings fans, we had no choice but to let it go.

It is for this reason that I have absolutely no sympathy for Saints fans:

Get over it, Who Dat Nation – your team isn’t the first to be robbed of a playoff-game victory by bad officiating.

Now, MLB

Like the NFL, MLB has been making changes to the rules of the game since 1857. Many of those changes were made as the game was evolving, and many were material changes such as standardizing the size of catcher’s mitts, the minimum dimensions of the playing area, size of the bases, and the height of the mound, but none of these changes altered the game in spirit – until 1973.

Even as a casual fan, what I most admired about the game of baseball was that players were required to play both offense and defense – a pitcher had to take his swings at the plate like every other member of the team on the field.

What I found I enjoyed most about baseball was that a day at Wrigley Field was magical in many respects, chief among them was that time seemed to stand still from the first pitch to the last out. In fact, Bogey said it best:

This would prove to be no longer the case in 2023 – it was just the latest twist of the knife which began nearly fifty years prior.

The American League’s use of the designated hitter ushered in specialization that has proven to be a most egregious violation of the spirit of the game. Its adoption on an “experimental” basis was little more than a fig leaf as it became the norm for all teams in the American League after 1975.

There is an excellent history of the designated hitter rule and how it came to be, here.

The DH may have been a revolutionary concept, but it was by no means a new one. The idea of a player hitting for the pitcher every time his turn comes up had its roots in the late nineteenth century. The seeds were sown in 1887 when rule changes permitting substitutes in the game were explored.

Further:

While the suggestion of a designated hitter was made by Connie Mack in the early 1900s, in 1906, Sporting Life, published the following:

The suggestion, often made, that the pitcher be denied a chance to bat, and a substitute player sent up to hit every time, has been brought to life again, and will come up for consideration when the American and National League Committee on rules get together.
This time Connie Mack is credited with having made the suggestion*…
Against the change there are many strong points to be made. It is wrong theoretically. It is a cardinal principle of baseball that every member of the team should both field and bat. Instead of taking the pitcher away from the plate, the better remedy would be to teach him how to hit the ball.
A club that has good hitting pitchers like Plank or Orth has a right to profit by their skill. Many of the best hitters in the game have started as pitchers.¹

The argument is still the same in the twenty-first century!²

In the National League, the spirit of the game was preserved – for the next forty-seven years, anyway.

A conspiracy theory – for now…

However, using almost militant compliance with dictates from virtually all levels of government vis-á-vis the almost completely harmless flu variant known as Covid-19 as its justification, MLB, in cooperation with or the sanction of more nefarious global forces, took it upon itself to all but rape the spirit of the game by implementing, on a “temporary” basis, the following rule changes for 2020:

A shortened season
A runner on second base for games going to extra innings (Huh? We don’t have the patience for one of the teams to get a runner on base by getting a hit?)
A pitcher must face a minimum of three batters in an appearance or pitch to the end of a half-inning
Seven-inning doubleheaders (Short Attention Span Theater)
An expanded postseason of 16 teams (can you say, participation trophy?)

And the worst of all:

A universal designated hitter

In 2022, the NL finally gave up the ghost, and now the game of baseball is as unrecognizable as is the game of football – and for that, the owners are to blame. The character of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson as portrayed by the late Ray Liotta nails it at the 00:04:57 mark.

In 2023, the rape continues with the banning of defensive shifts – apparently batters shouldn’t have to adapt their offensive strategy to counteract a defensive adaptation to the hitter (pussies!) – might this be a result of the suits in broadcasting that want more scoring – more excitement – to make the game viewed on TV and other devices more appealing to millennials who need to be almost constantly entertained?

As for the use of pitch clocks (also new for 2023), I can only conclude that the weak-minded execs in the league office would rather yield to the up-and-coming millennials who don’t have the attention span or mental capacity to tolerate an absence of action, and so the game will advance through force rather than doing so organically. To add insult to injury, electronic robotic umpires will soon make their appearance in major-league ballparks. They are already in use in the minor leagues – why the umpires union is not fighting this more vigourously is beyond me – but it’s not.

Bad calls, and non-calls by umpires are as old as the game, itself – look, Milt Pappas was robbed of a perfect game by bad non-call. Decades later, Joe Mauer was robbed of a crucial extra-innings double. Had it been ruled as fair, the entire trajectory of that series might have been markedly different, but there’s no overcoming home-cooking when in Yankee Stadium. Phil Cuzzi just had to be resigned to serving as the object of Twins fans’ wrath for the rest of his life. No matter – see the above comment re: bad calls in the NFL.

Aside from all else, there are other anecdotal considerations to take into account. For instance, playing both offense and defense required pitchers to maintain a minimal standard of physical fitness and conditioning. This would be most advantageous in the event that the pitcher found himself a baserunner that may need to beat a throw to the plate and score a critical run.

Outside of the player’s own personal pride or self-respect, any given pitcher no longer needed any measure of athletic prowess or athleticism. As a result, we ended up with fat hurlers like Bartolo Colon, Terry Forster, and CC Sabathia, who were only on the mound every fifth day.

These were not the athletes of the era of players like Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, or Don Drysdale.

Yes, baseball has always had its share (maybe more than its share) of fat or overweight players – guys like Cecil Fielder, David Ortiz, and John Kruk immediately come to mind.

To be even-handed, it is true that the game of football has been all too accommodating to the player who was a far cry from being an athlete. Offensive linemen are qualified to play simply by virtue of their size, and weight (300+ pounds, on average)³ – who in the world can move that much mass out of the way in time to get to the quarterback? On defense, nose tackles are typically ~320 pounds (at the low end)⁴ and require double-teams by the offensive line. Neither league as the market on fat players, cornered.

As for me, having played football in high school, myself (though, my career was not nearly as storied as Al Bundy’s)

…if one was playing on the varsity team, one was expected to stay in shape, and maintain one’s physical condition in preparation for the start of two-a-day practices, usually beginning approximately three weeks before the first game, and the start of term.

This likely is not true at the professional level, even if the players union is on strike...

Yes, I realize that anyone reading this can only conclude that I’m this guy

…only not quite as handsome, but I don’t care.

In any event, thank you, dear reader, for your time and your indulgence.

Cultural Orphan

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