Despite the turmoil
The Cubs are now a powerhouse, built by Theo Epstein, who earlier was the architect of Boston’s baseball renaissance. But only a few years ago, the Cubs were known as the Lovable Losers, whose chances of winning a title seemed as remote as, well, Donald Trump winning the presidency. Now they are favored to repeat, and the Cubs’ resident genius in the dugout, Manager Joe Maddon, must certainly be hoping that the champs get off to a better start this season than the new president, who has so far demonstrated a decided inability to hit the big league pitching thrown in the nation’s capital. Trump, of course, is far from the first rookie to have trouble with the curve. Welcome to The Show, kid.
Absent as the new season begins is the charismatic Red Sox slugger David Ortiz. After 20 years in the larger-than-life pursuit of Papiness, Ortiz is at liberty, having retired after last season while still at the top of his considerable game. He leaves a void in the heart of the Boston lineup and indeed in the game itself. Hey, don’t be a stranger, David. How about lunch some time?
In its never-ending quest to speed up the game, Major League Baseball has rolled out rules changes for 2017 that range from the good to the insupportable. The former include requiring managers to decide within 30 seconds whether to seek video review of an umpire’s call, and limiting that review in most cases to two minutes. In the awful category falls the decision to allow managers to simply signal from the dugout for an intentional walk, rather than requiring pitchers to actually throw four wide ones. Baseball thrives when chaos descends without warning on the commonplace. Anyone who has seen the rare wild pitch tossed during an intentional walk, or, even rarer, a batter swinging at an offering that strayed too near the plate has witnessed just such a moment of disorder.
Anyway, we doubt that shaving a few minutes off the average time of games is going to attract many new fans. Baseball rewards the spectator for patient attention to detail, something that does not seem the way of the digital world.
Another and more troubling manifestation of baseball’s unhealthy obsession with speed is its growing addiction to high-octane fastballs. As Daniel Brown of the San Jose Mercury News pointed out a couple of weeks ago in an article that appeared in the Sunday Valley News, a 100 mph heater can be a first-class ticket to being drafted and advancing quickly in professional baseball, but the consequences of throwing so hard so often can be catastrophic for young arms. The result has been an alarming increase in the rate of serious arm injuries suffered by pitchers, whose elbows then require major reconstructive surgery. The eternal truth is that big league hitters can hit a fastball no matter how fast it is. The better alternative is trying to destroy the batter’s timing by changing speeds on pitches. As Warren Spahn, the thinking man’s pitcher who won 363 big league games on the way to the Hall of Fame, memorably put it, you only need two pitches to be successful: One they’re looking for, and one to cross them up.
But the game always has issues, and somehow it always thrives despite them. No celebration of the upcoming season would be complete without a word about the Red Sox. (Like politics, all baseball is local.) Boston fans are entitled to optimism for at least two reasons: The young stars who emerged so brilliantly over the past couple of years are still rising; and another top-flight pitcher, Chris Sale, joins the rotation via trade. Adding zest is the fact that the New York American League team whose name temporarily escapes us is loaded with outstanding prospects who have arrived recently in the Bronx or soon will. This sets the stage for compelling baseball games between the ancient rivals for years to come, maybe as soon as this season. Let those games, and all the other ones, begin.