Three Things To Improve Baseball.  I’ve been a baseball fan my whole life.  I was never a great player, but they never kept me from imagining (like millions of kids before me) being the hero in the bottom of the ninth inning.  I must say, however, that today’s game suffers in comparison to some of its sports competitors.  NFL games move much more quickly.  College basketball is much more passionate.  Even NHL playoffs, with their low scores, rate higher on the “action per minute” dial than major league baseball these days.

At the risk of showing my ignorance, I will suggest three things to improve the game for its many viewers; both in the parks and at home on the screen:

1.      Speed the game up.  How you do it is up to the folks who write the rules.  The constant stepping in and out of the batter’s box; the eternity between pitches; the deep thought processes that seem to occur between plays…all of this is dragging the game out.  Baseball is a game of anticipation leading up to action to begin with; we need more action and less anticipation.

2.      Implement instant replay.  Now how you do this, once again, is up to the rules makers.  There might be a replay official in the booth to view the film; there might be a limited number of challenges per team; it could even be discretionary for the umpires.  Whatever the circumstances of the process, there is far too much invested in potentially critical calls to rely on the fallible judgment of umpires who are not always that reliable; especially when a better system is readily available.

3.      Finally…what is up with the strike zone?  I swear there are some umpires who call more strikes balls than strikes strikes.  As I understand, the umpires have long claimed their unalienable right to call balls and strikes according to their own strike zone.  What possible purpose is there for having a strike zone in the rule book if it going to be adjusted by each and every different umpire that calls a game?  Whether or not the strike-trackers that we see on television are accurate, they clearly show that each umpire has their own ideas about high, low, and off the plate.  In my humble opinion, the game would be much improved by an increased effort to uniformly enforce a universal (see rule book) strike zone and to grade umpires on how accurately they call balls and strikes.

America’s pastime is still the great game it always was, but it has taken some hits over the last few years with strikes, lockouts, prima donna players, and Gordon Gecko owners.  A bit of tweaking around the edges might serve to bring some lost love back to the game that this type of drift has resulted in.