Ranting About the Home Run Derby...
As anybody who knows me knows, I'm a baseball fan. I may go on and on about other sports -- football (both NFL and soccer varieties), hockey, MMA, pro wrestling (not a sport, I know), and more recently I've discovered a real affinity for Aussie Rules Football and cricket -- but my first sporting love has always, always been baseball. Not even my loyalties to the Mets and, to a lesser degree, the Cubs have been enough to scare me away. I've lived through two work stoppages (in 1981 and 1994), the Pete Rose-Bart Giamatti debacle, Marge Schott, BUD FREAKING SELIG, the All-Star Sister Kisser of 2002, the Barry Bonds circus, and the Steinbrenner clan... and none of it has changed my love for the game.
This Tuesday, as you may have known, is the traditional "midsummer classic," the All-Star Game, which in the past several years has gone from one of my favorite events on the baseball calendar to an absolute joke of a spectacle. First, interleague play (which I otherwise completely approve of) has severely watered down its original allure; it used to be, this was the only game of the year where you'd see players from opposite leagues on the same diamond other than the World Series itself. Secondly, I am not a fan of the "winning league gets home-field advantage in the World Series" deal, a gimmick I find both silly and pointless (home-field advantage does help a team's chances, but not so much that it should be something that's earned). I have some strong opinions about the size of the teams, as a 26-man roster works for a full season of games but is nothing less than overkill for a single contest... especially when egos are such that everybody has to get on the field for at least some official part of the game. (Pitchers, okay, I understand that one. But do we really need eight or nine outfielders?) That is in part how the infamous tie in 2002 could take place -- player lineups being shuffled so constantly so that everybody gets on the field, resulting in a major shortage of available players when it started to go long (under baseball rules, once a player leaves the lineup for any reason, he cannot return during the same game). And as a staunch traditionalist when it comes to baseball, I'm not at all a fan of the increasingly-prevalent use of generic American and National League uniforms. I happen to like seeing all the different unis playing together on the same side (the difference being all the players on the visting league's team are wearing their road greys), as it makes it easier to tell at a glance who's who and thus keep tabs on your favorites. Of course, it's not something that'd work on a regular basis, but on a special one-night-only basis it's a cool sight to see. None of the other major all-star games (football, basketball, hockey) do this anymore, so it helps make baseball's version even more distinctive.
(Yes, I know the actual game still has the players dress in their normal uniforms; the generic jerseys are mostly used for photo ops and other events associated with the ASG. But the day will come. You know it, I know it, and the MLB execs know it. It's only a matter of time.)
But the thing that irks me the most is the one thing that's actually gotten fan interest in the ASG up in recent years... the Home Run Derby.
I hate the Derby. I loathe the Derby. I despise it with a passion rivaled only by my abject hatred for anything related to Ohio State football. Here's why.
The Home Run Derby, as it's currently formatted, is an attempt by the MLB braintrust (and I use that term very loosely) to emulate the success the NBA has had with its All-Star Weekend festivities; you know, the 3-point shootout, the dunk contest, the skills drills, that stuff. And for the record, I do enjoy the shootout (I actually make a point to watch it every year), so I'm not objecting to the existence of such contests. But basketball can get away with a variety of different mini-games like this because of the fluid nature of the sport itself. With baseball on the other hand, it's a much more regimented game, with nowhere near the same potential for set pieces or other special situations that can be easily re-created artificially.
I also have a big problem with the Derby in that it overglorifies power hitting and swinging for the fences every time. Yes, the home run is and has always been the big draw for baseball going back to the Babe Ruth days. That's perfectly fine and I'm not going to dispute it. However... as a lifelong baseball junkie myself, I certainly appreciate pitching just as much as, if not more than, I do batting. It's often been said that the most important player on the field at any given moment is in fact the pitcher, because if not for him everybody else would just be standing out there with their thumbs up their wazoos, wondering what to do next. The pitcher is the one who gets the whole thing going by introducing the ball into play. You'd think that there could be a skills contest for the pitchers as well, but if there is one I certainly have never seen or heard any mention of it; it's all about the friggin' Derby. You could easily set up, let's say, a fastest-fastball contest, or maybe a strike-zone accuracy challenge, for the pitchers to have something to do. But they don't do that.
(There's also a basic flaw in giving the glory to guys who hit as many home runs as possible in the current baseball climate, what with the whole BALCO fallout and a disturbingly large number of baseball's top power hitters turning up positive on drug tests on what seems to be a biweekly basis... c'mon, it doesn't take Stephen Hawking to figure this one out.)
Even the way the contest itself is structured drives me batty. (No pun intended. For once.) Remember last year's Derby? Josh Hamilton's marathon performance, 28 dingers in the first round of play? Okay, it sounds impressive to say it, but it suddenly becomes less of a big deal when you consider that he, along with everyone else in this contest, hit those HRs off of a batting practice pitcher who is actually paid a bonus for gift-wrapping these four-baggers. Not to denigrate anyone's batting ability, but let's face it... when the pitcher is actively trying to give the batter a gift, even I could probably hit one over the fence! This is not a contest, or a showcase of hitting skills; it's almost as fraudulent a spectacle as a WWE show, the only difference being there's no script involved. Plus, performances like Hamilton's serve mainly to numb the audience to the longball, making it less special when it happens in the actual game the next night.
This is not to say the Derby cannot be good. It can be, but in its current format I cannot tolerate it. What is needed here is, perhaps, a structure similar to that used by the NBA for the 3-point shootout: Rather than playing to ten outs, set a fixed number of pitches -- say, 20 or so -- for each player, maybe mixing up the types of pitches (fastball, change-up, curveball, etc.) during each player's turn. If the batter fails to get wood on horsehide or fouls it, it should count as a strike, and just like a real game, three strikes = one out. (Currently, whiffed balls don't count as anything, which is another reason the event tends to drag interminably.) And then, for the final round, I don't understand why they don't adopt the format similar to the old, and I mean old, TV show Home Run Derby, where the finalists would face off in a nine-inning HR contest scored similarly to an actual game (with the exception that everything is either a home run or an out); this would make it a lot more interesting, I tihnk, and since the current Derby is supposedly inspired by the old show it'd be only fitting as a tribute. Lest you think a nine-inning contest would take too long, most episodes of the Derby series easily fit inside of a half-hour of TV time, with only minimal editing required to fit it into that space. Besides, with every pitch counted as a HR or an out, and no teams to change over between innings (just a batter and pitcher), ESPN could easily go 2-3 complete innings at a shot before breaking for commercial.
A lot of people just don't understand why I, a confessed baseball fan, can't get excited about the Derby, which far too many people mistakenly believe is the best thing to happen to baseball since the advent of interleague play. I find it a complete waste of time, one that not only perverts the true meaning of the home run in baseball but also potentially sends the wrong message in the post-BALCO world. I also find the contest itself, in its current form, to be a slow and interminably plodding affair... which is, oddly enough, also how most critics of baseball itself describe America's only major team sport not played to a fixed time limit.
But as long as the event remains popular with the fans, I guess I'll have to live with it. Just don't ask me to get psyched up for the thing...