Baseball Dislikes

(sorry about the formatting of this page - I didn't do it and I'm too lazy to correct it)

As most of you know, I love baseball.  Basketball is my passion, but baseball is my favorite sport.  There is nothing I like more than to sit and listen to a ball game on the radio.  Watching on T.V. is ok, but to listen and have the game played out in your head is the best.  In the 70’s I used to travel to Southern California during the summer and one of my greatest memories is listening to ball games as we drove down the West Coast.  We could catch the Oakland A’s, the San Francisco Giants, the LA Angels (as they were called in those days), the Dodgers and finally the woeful Padres of San Diego.  If it was a good night you have your choice of three or four games and it was absolute bliss.  Baseball in the dark as you drove down a long highway. Nothing could be better.

Despite loving baseball, there are a few things that drive me crazy about the game.  I also have many things that I love that I will talk about after, but here are my dislikes:

•    1. Pitchers having long chains around their necks.  WTF?  Is it just me or doesn’t that seem a little grease-ball?
•    2. Players who have their pants down to the ground.  It looks like they are going to trip over their cuffs.  Looks ridiculous.  
•    3. Players wearing sunglasses upside down and on the brim of their hats.  Again, WTF is the use?
•     4. I really dislike the flat brim look that today’s players wear. Looks stupid and not what a baseball hats should look like.  Too much trying to look cool.
•     5. Guys wearing their hat brims a little cock-eyed.  Again, the only reason to do that is to look cool.  Fuck it!
•     6. Mullets.  C’mon.  Shouldn’t their trophy wives let them know that that looks stupid?
•     7. Umpires: I think that umpires in baseball are the best officials in sports; however, they do some things that piss me off.  Such as: 

•    8. Late calls.  Make your calls faster so people on T.V. know what is going on.  Tim McLelland is the worst home plate umpire in the world.  It takes him fifteen minutes to call a strike.  Despite that,  he is a great umpire.
•    9. Egging players on with arguments. Just shut up and let the player have his say and get on with the game.
•  10. Never admitting mistakes.  It is ok to say your wrong occasionally. 
•  11. Different strike zones.  Once you let refs decide what is their interpretation of the rules, caos ensues.  A common strike zone is necessary.  Just like in basketball: a foul is a foul.  Not each official’s interpretation.  The baseball strike zone is so fucking ridiculous that it is not funny.  It amounts to an area from the waist to mid thigh.  Jesus, is it any wonder that pitchers need to cheat to win games.  They don’t have a fucking chance with a strike zone that is eighteen inches high. And then you have every ump deciding the width of the zone.  Make it all the same or get robots, that’s my opinion.

•     12. Why is it ok for a pitcher to throw at a batter, or the next batter, if someone hits a home run off of him.  Is that not he batter’s job: to get a hit?  Maybe the batter should be able to throw their bat at the pitcher the next time he gets struck out?  Fair is fair.
•     13. Stealing signs.  What’s wrong with trying to steal signs from the other team?  
•     14. Really high stockings.  Baseball is to be played with stirrups and a little white showing underneath.  This is not a fucking fashion show.  High stockings look ridiculous.  
• 15. The neighbourhood play.  Middle infielders get to come close to, but not touch second base and get the out call.  Why?  Is there not rules that say a defender must touch the base to get an out?  Rules are rules. 

16. Blocking the plate or the base. This year, there has been a few incidents that resulted in high profile players getting hurt by a catcher blocking the plate.  Catchers and the runners both have been injured and questions have been raised about possibly no allowing this to happen.  I don’t understand why catchers, or any other position players are allowed to ‘block’ the base that a runner is going to.  Runners get called out if they try to avoid the tag by running out of the baseline, yet if they run directly to the base, the defender is allowed to block their path.  How is that fair?   Only at second base and home plate does this blocking seem to occur, which makes me wonder why the first baseman doesn’t block the runner on a close play.   Just sort of hip check him off the base as he gets there.

17.  Bean balls.  It you have ever been hit my a baseball anywhere on your body, you would certainly understand why getting hit in the head or face would scare the shit out of anyone.

18. Why do fans boo when the pitcher throws a pick off to a base.  Who the fuck cares?  Most of the time he is just getting a little rest, mentally and physically so shut the fuck up. 

19. The fake throw to third and wheel and throw to first.  How many times has that actually worked?  I am willing to bet that the over-under is 1/10 of a percent.  Just a fucking waste of time.  If the pitcher does it, the batter should be able to throw his bat at him (reoccurring theme of justice).

20. Begging for balls or autographs.  Jesus,  have some dignity.  What the fuck use is an autograph or a lousy ball?  Just watch the fucking game…

21.  Managers wearing uniforms.  All you have to see is Don Zimmer waddling around in a uniform to know that non-players shouldn’t wear a uniform.  Could you imagine Phil Jackson wearning a Laker uniform during the games.  Laughable. 

22. Next game, watch the players in the dugouts; they take a drink and then throw thew cups on the ground.  Can’t we have a little tidiness for once.  Someone has to pick them up at some point.  A little help please…

23.  Baseball fights are a joke.  No one ever lands a punch and it becomes a scrum, not unlike rugby.  It is so stupid. And then they suspend people. 

24. Drafting pitchers in the first round.  I have a whole blog on the futility of drafting a pitcher in the first round.  A complete and utter waste of time and money.

25 Steroids inflated stats.  To me the greatest thing about baseball is in the numbers and statistics, and what they represent.  This has now been completely and utterly fucked up by steroids.  I don’t think that steroids were necessarily cheating because there were no rules against it at the time, however; it has made all the number moot.  I still consider statistic records to be from the pre-steroid era, which means Henry Aaron, Roger Maris etc, are still the leading hitters in my opinion.  The steroid era made the playing field completely uneven.

26.  Balks.  This is the most difficult area of baseball to understand for most fans.  A balk is called when the pitchers does something (not always seen or known by the fan) to deceive the runner of the batter in some way.  I don’t understand what is the difference between deceiving a runner by making a little funny movement to get him out that to throw a funny pitch that deceive a hitter.  Fuck the balks.  Nobody knows what the hell  they are so fa-get-about-it. Nobody cares. 

27.  Artificial turf is the devil.  No stadium should have it.  As Tug McGraw once said “ Grass is for smoking and playing baseball on”. 

28.  Intentional walks.  Don’t mind them, just hate having the pitcher go through the motions of throwing four wide pitches.  Just tell the ump your walking the fucking guy and put him on the base. 

29. John Stirling.  He is the Yankee play by play guy.  He is disgusting.  Talk a bout a Yankee apologist.  And his home run calls are ridiculous.  “An A-bomb by A-Rod”.  Yuck.  And his sidekick; that women.  Turns my stomach. Another reason to hate the evil empire.  

30. Shaving cream in the face.  Ha-ha.  Very funny.  How lame is that?  After the first time seeing it, it gets old real fast.  Can’t you come up with a better way to play a joke on someone?

31. The old hot foot.  Great gag…let’s light someones shoe on fire and let it burn.  Maybe if it lasts long enough, you can cause first degree burns. 

32.  Bubble gum on the hat.  Clever.  What a sight gag.  Funny…  Seems like as waste of a good piece of gum to me. 

33.   Gatorade dump.  Another clever gag.  What could be funnier than getting drenched with a sticky liquid.  Hardy-har-har!

34. Dog piling on the hitter of a walk off home run.  How many guys have to injured before the rocket scientists of baseball figure out it may not be good for twenty-four guys to jump on one guy. 

35 Broadcasters making baseball more difficult than it really is.  It is a pretty simple game: throw the ball, hit the ball, catch the ball.  Anything more is bullshit.

36.  Batters walking in and out of the batters box.  Either in or out.  After leaving the batter’s box for the second time, the pitcher should be able to throw at him once.  Fair is fair. 

37. Batter’s box.  Why bother?  The first guys  scratches it away and it no longer is relevant.  Why bother? 

38. Tony LaRussa:  What a pompous, self-important, no sense of humour, overrated, bag of wind. And he is a red-neck on top of it. All he ever does it try to show everyone how smart he is. I fucking love when he loses.  

39. What ever happened to announcers being unbiased?  It is gross to listen to announcers piss and moan about ‘their’ team losing of getting ripped off.  Isn’t an announcer supposed to just tell the audience what is happening on the field.  Don’t give opinions, don’t evaluate, just tell me what is going on. 

40. Bats breaking.  WTF is up with the bats these days?  You used to see a guy use the same bat for a month, now you we ten bats a game get broken.  I even saw a guy hit a home run and his bat broke in half.  How long is going to be before someone gets shish kabobbed by a flying bat? Then there will be hell to play.  41.  Pitch counts.  This is the ruination of pitching. Not allowing a pitcher to throw over 120 pitches in a game is a joke.  Babying pitchers has lowered the bar for success over the last twenty years.  You will notice that in the past twenty years, only one really great pitcher has been produced (Greg Maddox), and he was the kind of a pitcher that didn’t ever throw many pitches.  Pitch counts weaken pitcher’s arms and eventually they crap out.  Did Nolan Ryan ever have a pitch count?  How about Warren Spahn or Sandy Koufax?  The greatest pitchers in history threw as many pitches as it took to win games.  And three days later they were out there again.  Three days, not four days. Today’s pitchers are pussies.  

Next: What I love About Baseball