Spinning Reality: Baseball’s Major Problems are Off the Field, Not On, and They’re Erasing Memories

Every Dodgers fan remembers the moment on a fall night in Los Angeles in 1988 when a wobbly Kirk Gibson took a step out of the dugout, while using his wooden bat as crutch, to step into the on-deck circle to bat for Dave Anderson.

What happened next was a magical moment we all tell our children and grandchildren about to this day.

As baseball fans we also remember when Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr., “the Iron Man,” ran that victory lap in the bottom of the fifth inning in September of 1995 after breaking Lou Gehrig’s mark of 2,130 consecutive starts.

There are many more baseball moments like this, such as Braves’ first baseman Sid Bream huffing and puffing as he rounded for home to score on an Orlando Cabrera single that got through the hole between short and third to make it to the 1992 World Series over Barry Bonds and the Pirates.

Then there’s the Marlins’ moment in 1997, with Edgar Renteria singling up the middle to win the World Series in an epic game 7 over the Indians.

Who could forget Luis Gonzalez hitting a flare over the head of legendary Yankees closer Mariano Rivera in Game 7 of the 2001 Fall Classic?

Do you know what all these amazing moments that helped build the sport of baseball and what helped make it magical as a kid growing up have in common?

A baseball fan from now to the end of time will never see it again.

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and his people are more worried about the speed of the game, spin rate, and other stuff that they feel will make the game more exciting.

Baseball doesn’t need those fixes to make it more exciting to fans. Those moments recalled at the top of this story would never, absolutely never, happen in today’s game with today’s front offices.

Let this sink in: Gibson would have never come up to the plate.

What front office would keep a man with no legs on its roster to face the most formidable team World Series history, the 1988 Athletics?

Instead, Danny Heep, Chris Gwynn or Jose Gonzalez would have been in the batter’s box against one of the greatest closers in history, Dennis Eckersley.

And you probably know the outcome, three straight strikes and the Athletics probably go on to win the series instead of the Dodgers.

Ripken Jr. would be in the same conversation as Corey Seager, a hitting shortstop that gets a rest day every four days. The Orioles shortstop would have never broken the record or had a legendary career with Dave Roberts as his manager or with this front office led by Andrew Friedman.

We will never know what a player could achieve playing a full season schedule ever again.

And finally, those singles to make it or win the World Series would have been outs in today’s game, thanks to the shift.

The Pirates’ Jose Lind would have been there for the easy ground-out to send it to extra-innings. The Indians’ Omar Vizquel and Yankees’ Derek Jeter would have been up the middle to cancel out Renteria’s single and Gonzalez’s flare and who knows how these games would have ended.

The problem with Manfred is he is trying to police the game and fix it. The game doesn’t need a cop or a foreman. It has never needed that.

If you think foreign substances on a ball are ruining the game, it’s not. Pitchers throughout history have always done this. Hitters are not making more outs because pitchers are adding more spin on the ball, it is because there is no place to hit the ball anymore. The shift takes away the offense.

Imagine how many more hits there would be if teams were forced to play up the middle and only allowed to move in their positional area.

Taking away technology from the game would be the way to go. If players want to study videos, allow them to do it before or after the game. Do not allow it in game. Don’t allow pitchers or fielders to carry cards in their hats that tells them where to play.

Have the coaches direct them from the dugout, but again only in their area.

In the old days no one was clamoring for changes to speed the game up, or what amount of spin was on the ball.

That is because there was no technology that kept track of that stuff. You just came to the park to watch two teams in a dogfight, trying to battle it out on the field.

The real change needed is not allowing technology to make choices on and off the field.

It’s allowing players that deserve to be in the lineup, to be penciled in every day. Let today’s young exciting players like Fernando Tatis, Jr. and Vladamir Guerrero Jr. play every day, instead of making it look like the current NBA landscape where you are lucky to buy a ticket and see a star.

Don’t look at the metrics that tell you a guy is tired and to take them off the field, let coaches use their gut to tell them if a player should be in the game or not. Today’s managers are front office puppets that are told who plays where, when and how.

The evidence was out there to see in last year’s World Series where technology in the game may have prevented us from seeing a Game 7. The Rays’ Blake Snell was clearly taken out of the game in the middle of a masterpiece because nerds upstairs with a big computer told them to do something that has worked all season.

Could you imagine if a computer told Tommy Lasorda to not bring up Gibson in that moment, a Dodgers fan’s life from 1981 to 2021 would be empty of a lifetime memory and key moment in baseball history.

Who knows if the team would even have made the World Series because which computer would have allowed Orel Hershiser to pitch that many times in the playoffs, or let Mike Scioscia hit off of the Mets’ Dwight Gooden in the ninth.

So my advice to Manfred is let’s not spin the story that you are trying to clean up the game from cheating, and shift the mentality and ideas to getting the game back to it’s roots when it was simple.

Let’s leave in on the field, not off of it.