Where have you gone … Bud Selig?
MIKE BURKE
Allegany Radio Corporation Sports
So what’s that zany Commissioner of Baseball up to now? Tell you what,
with this cat, if there are no more cookie jars for him to get his hands
into, he just fires up the kiln and creates a new one.
Does Rob Manfred even like baseball? He sure doesn’t seem to.
Pitch clock … Put a runner on second base to start extra innings … The
no-pitch walk …Too many home runs … Too many strikeouts … Robot umpires
(and hasn’t his watch involved enough technology to last a lifetime?) …
Relief pitchers face a three-batter minimum
… Eliminate Minor League teams … Now pick your own playoff opponent on a
canned We Want To Be Like Selection Sunday and NBA Draft Lottery
television show.
You don’t wear your XFL envy well at all, Rob. You’re merely trying to
create a mutated version of a game that 70 million fans still paid to
attend last season.
George Bernard Shaw wrote in Back to Methuselah, “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘why not?’ ”
Rob Manfred says, “I see the game of baseball as it’s been played for
over 150 years and say, ‘why?’ Then I dream of the baseball game I saw
on “The Jetsons” and say, ‘why not?’ ”
A utopian society is an ideal society that does not exist; a baseball
game is the closest thing to utopia in this society that does. The game
is not managed, timed, controlled or contrived; the game is timeless and
takes care of itself.
“You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill
the clock,” Earl Weaver once said after a World Series loss. “You’ve
got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his
chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game
of them all.”
Leave the game alone, Rob. Find another way to line your bosses’ pockets
without trying to destroy the pants. By the way, did you notice the
so-called small-market Kansas City Royals are about to be sold for
(please note the Dr. Evil “quotation marks” you are
not going to see) one billion dollars? So something must be working,
eh?
Thus, with all that is the evil of the autocrat playing commissioner, it
must now be assumed that all aspects of the baseball playoffs of the
future that were “leaked” (those are Dr. Evil quotation marks) to the
media late Monday evening will lead directly
to the demise of the game of baseball. Correct?
Not so fast, Chumley. Some of it, I’m actually okay with.
Though, to qualify, Trevor Bauer is right about one thing — Rob Manfred
is a joke. He doesn’t love baseball; he doesn’t even like it because he
doesn’t understand it. He just doesn’t get baseball.
All he — yes, the current Commissioner of Baseball — ever says about
the game of baseball is how bad it is, how slow it is and how boring it
is. He no more has the best interests of baseball at heart than I do
Duke basketball. But some of this “yet” to be
proposed playoffs plan, I’m okay with.
First of all, Manfred’s job is to fill the owners’ pockets, so the
postseason is going to expand, whether we like it or not. And, as the
Collective Bargaining Agreement with the players, as well as MLB’s
television deals with ESPN and TBS expire after the 2021
season, new and expanded playoffs become a very attractive lure for the
players to negotiate and for the networks and the streaming services to
bid for.
(Fox’s deal with MLB for the World Series, two Division Series and a League Championship Series runs through 2028.)
Seven teams from each league making the postseason — three division
winners and four wild cards — seems reasonable enough. Yes, that does
constitute nearly half of each league, but since postseason expansion is
inevitable, seven from each league will do.
But no more.
The teams with the best records in each league receiving wild-card round
byes works, and the two other division winners and the top wild-card
team hosting all games of three-game series in the wild-card round works
as well.
That, of course, would mean no more one-game wild-card elimination,
which, with no inevitable postseason expansion, I’ve always been okay
with. But (have you heard?) postseason expansion is inevitable, so play
best-of-three on consecutive days, with no travel,
and the divisional round begins at the same time on the calendar that
it always has. That works.
Now the part that doesn’t work is the part about the two other division
winners getting to pick their wild-card round opponents from three other
wild-card teams, with the top wild-card team playing the unpicked team;
for that, my friends, is sheer madness,
and not the kind of fake March Madness the yutz commissioner is
pretending to create.
Nobody is this stupid, not even Rob Manfred. Thus, look for the
select-your-own-opponent part of this “proposal” to be put on the table
for the purpose of being taken off the table in a fake show of
“compromise.”
Meanwhile, as Rome continues to burn at the hand of the Houston Astros
and, perhaps, the Boston Red Sox, Rob Manfred fiddles with a new
postseason proposal to distract us for yet another day.
Is this guy beginning to remind you of anybody?
Mike Burke writes about sports for Allegany Radio and Pikewood
Digital. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s County
Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in
1984. He was the sports editor of the Times-News for nearly
30 years. Contact him at [email protected] and
follow him on Twitter @MikeBurkeMDT
