American League vs. National League

     As I have written before, I'm not the type of guy to go out of my way to watch sporting events that don't affect my favorite teams in one way or another.  Since my favorite baseball team is in the American League, Interleague play gives me the chance to watch National League baseball rules that I don't normally get to.  The biggest difference in the American League and National League is that in the National League the pitchers have to bat for themselves, and in the American League an extra hitter is put in the lineup in place of the pitcher, called the Designated Hitter.  For years now, the American League has used the DH, and the National League has not.  Until fairly recently, the American League and National League never played against each other except for the World Series.  Now that there are set series between AL and NL teams, the rules apply to whichever team is playing at home.  So for an example, if the Yankees and Dodgers were playing in New York, they would play with the DH, but if they played in Los Angeles, they would not.

     I have watched interleague games in the past, but for whatever reason I have decided to take particular notice in the difference in games using the AL and NL rules.  My conclusion is that anyone who likes the National League better needs to be put in a straight jacket.  It's not nearly as fun to watch, and if you try to argue that it is, you're lying to yourself.  Now before you start, I already know the first argument for you NL loyalists.  The NL rules have more tradition.  My answer to that is, who cares?  Tradition in sports stinks.  If we worried about tradition all of the time instead of evolution of sports, there would still be no 3 point line in basketball, there would be no 2 point conversions in football, and there would still be 8 teams in the NCAA basketball tournament. 

     Having the pitchers hit ruins the flow of a baseball game.  When I am watching an AL game, and the 7th batter hits a line drive in the gap to put runners on 2nd and 3rd with two outs, then the next at-bat is very exciting.  If the batter gets a hit, then you are probably looking at a 2-run swing.  In this same scenario in the NL, they pitching team would just intentionally walk the 8th batter to get to the pitcher.  No pitchers can hit.  Even the pitchers tho can hit, can't hit.  The best hitting pitchers in the baseball have a batting average somewhere around the low 200s, which is not good, and a pitcher coming up to bat just ruins the momentum that a team created on offense.  The bottom line is it just makes the game less fun to watch.  In the AL, intentional walks are usually reserved for great hitters.  I watched a game last night where the Marlins intentionally walked Hank Conger, the rookie catcher and 8th batter for the Angels twice to get to the pitcher.  That's just not good for baseball.

     My next point is that there are plenty of DHs in baseball who are some of the most exciting players in the game.  Guys like Vladimir Guerrero, Jim Thome, Travis Hafner, and David Ortiz might not be in baseball anymore if not for the DH rule.  Those guys are fun to watch.  The bottom line is, if you are looking to watch an exciting baseball game to watch, who would you rather see hit, David Ortiz or Tim Wakefield?

     I have heard the argument a lot that you don't really use a lot of strategy in the AL.  In the NL there are a lot of pinch hitters, defensive substitutions, and double switches.  I agreed with this argument for a long time, until I heard someone else refute that argument, and off the top of my head I can't remember who it was, but it opened my eyes.  They said that it really doesn't take much strategy at all to manage in the NL, because most of the decisions are obvious.  It is not a difficult decision to pinch hit for the pitcher in the 7th inning in a close game.  Furthermore, it is not a difficult decision to turn that into a double switch so that the pitcher spot is further away in the lineup.  It is more difficult to make a decision to pinch hit, or bring in a new pitcher in the AL, where you don't have an obvious opportunity to do it.  After all, if all of these managers in the NL are making decisions based on avoiding the pitchers spot in the lineup, why not just make the rule for the DH in the first place like the AL.

     We are in the age of needing sports to be exciting, or people will change the channel, and the NL rules are old-fashioned and boring.  It's time for the NL to get with the times and go with the DH.

     A while back, I wrote a post about changing the baseball divisions.  Suddenly this is a hot topic in baseball, and many experts are putting in their input.  Of all the ones I have seen, the one I like the most is from Jim Bowden, former MLB general manager, and current ESPN baseball expert.  Here is his article and although I would keep the DH instead of take away the DH, I would agree with everything else he wrote here.

http://espn.go.com/blog/the-gms-office/post/_/id/363/mlb-needs-geographic-realignment

The Dumbest Punishment Ever

     2004 seemed to be a great year for the University of Southern California football program.  After their great 2003 season, in which they were co-national champions, they returned their most important role players for the next season including quarterback Matt Leinart, and running backs Reggie Bush and Lendale White.  With their stellar returning roster, they were ranked #1 in the preseason polls, and did not disappoint, as they went on to go undefeated during the regular season to earn a spot in the BCS National Championship game against Oklahoma.  They beat the daylights out of Oklahoma in that game 55-19 to easily win their second consecutive national championship.     Now 7 years later, the BCS is telling us that game didn't count. 

     Over the past 7 years, we have learned some new things about that national champion USC team.  For one, Reggie Bush, the most talented player on that team was said to have received improper benefits as a student-athlete, making him an ineligible player during his last two years at USC.  Since then, USC has had all of their 2005 wins, and some of their 2004 wins vacated, and now today the BCS has announced that they are vacating their 2004 National Championship.  Recently, the USC football program has been banned from bowl games for two seasons, and has lost a significant amount of football scholarships. 

     I guess I understand the post-season ban, and the loss of scholarships, other than the fact that the ban is for the 2011 and 2012 seasons, which is punishing players that had nothing to do with these violations.  Even the coach Pete Carroll is now gone, and is the head football coach for the Seattle Seahawks.  But all that being said, that punishment makes a lot more sense to me than vacating wins and championships.  I watched USC pretty frequently those seasons, and now 6 and 7 years later someone is telling me those games really didn't happen?  I don't see the purpose of this, the games happened, I remember them so well.  So the National Championship in 2004, as well as Reggie Bush's Heisman Trophy Award are all vacated.  The only thing this seems to do is make it so when someone looks back through the list of National Champions and Heisman Trophy winners, in those two cases there will be a line that says vacant, and probably an asterisk and a sentence explaining this whole mess.

     The problem with this punishment is that it doesn't really punish the people that made the violations.  There is a black mark in the record books and everything, but that's it.  It's almost getting to the point where that is the case with every record.  Look at baseball, in what other sports would the all-time career leaders in some of the most important stats not be in the hall of fame, or really look like they are anywhere close to ever getting in, like Pete Rose, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens.

     In my actual job of school teacher, my principal often says to us teachers that it is okay to have a problem, as long as you also come with a solution.  This is the thing I struggle with most on punishing players who formerly violated eligibility rules.  While I don't care for the current punishments, I don't really have a good solution on what you can do.  You can't punish people who aren't there anymore, and it stinks to have to punish people who had nothing to do with the violations.  So until I hear something I haven't thought of yet, I'm just going to have to go on having a problem with no solution.

Richard Childress Gets a Slap on the Wrist

     In case you are not a huge NASCAR fan, let me walk you through this crazy incident, which I have never heard anything like in sports before now.  Kyle Busch is a NASCAR driver, who is not exactly known for being the most polite race car driver in the world.  He will do anything he has to do to win a race, and that includes knocking another driver out of the way if necessary.  This is not an uncommon trait among NASCAR drivers, although Busch may be one of the guys who gets himself in these situations more often than others.  In this situation, in a race in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, Busch and another driver, Joey Coulter, happened to be racing each other pretty aggressively.  Again, this is not uncommon.  What happened after this however is very uncommon. 

     Coulter drives in the Truck Series for Richard Childress Racing, a top NASCAR team which once was the team Dale Earnhardt Sr., drove for.  Lately, Busch has gotten himself in these aggressive driving situations with RCR cars frequently, and the RCR drivers have been very public about their dislike for him and his driving style.  Apparently this time, Richard Childress had enough with Kyle Busch.  After the race, Childress went down to the garage area, and found Kyle Busch, took his watch off, and put Busch in a headlock and repeatedly punched him in the head.  If you need to have this image in your head, please revisit the Nolan Ryan/Robin Ventura fight below:

     While this is very amusing, and I would have loved to see video of this altercation, this incident breaks the barrier between players and owners that is inexcusable.  Richard Childress was fined $150,000 and placed on probation for the incident, and I don't think that's good enough.  When you let players in a sport patrol their own behavior like is done in one way or another in every sport, that is one thing, but when you have owners getting in physical confrontations with athletes, that is a line that can not be crossed.  First of all, if this had happened in any other sport, players would be suspended for a significant amount of time, so why was Richard Childress not suspended at all?  In fact not only was he not suspended, he was allowed at the track for the weekend's Sprint Cup race.  Can you imagine if George Steinbrenner or Jerry Jones were seen getting in a fight with athletes?  They would be kicked out of the sport.  I'm not sure what makes this any different for Richard Childress.  One of the reason this bothers me the most, is that Earnhardt Sr, RCR's most popular and most successful driver ever, was most famous for driving extremely aggressive, much more so than Kyle Busch. 

     If I were making this decision, I would suspend Richard Childress from all operations from his team and not allow him to be at any NASCAR races for the remainder of the season.  After all, crew chiefs are suspended for multiple races when something from a car doesn't meet the exact specifications set forth by NASCAR.  I think it's pretty clear that this is much worse of an offense than that.

New Sports For Me to Watch

     I already spend a ridiculous amount of time watching sports.  This is in addition to all the time I spend reading about sports, and the in-depth analysis of sports I watch as well.  So when I told Shannon I was now interested in another sport, she was not exactly pleased.  This is a down time for sports fans who don't really get into the NBA playoffs like me.  By down time, I mean really during the week it's just baseball (which is still about six nights a week), and on the weekend it's NASCAR and a few PGA major championships in the upcoming months.  So due to the reduction of major sports to watch, I found myself getting into sports that I never would have thought of before.

     The first sport I found myself getting into only more recently is soccer.  I don't mean like last week, I'm going back a year for this one during the 2010 World Cup.  Actually, let me go back a little further than that to the 2006 World Cup.  I remember this World Cup because at the time I happened to be at a small bachelor party weekend with about 4 other guys.  I claim to be a bigger sports fan than most people I know, but I was the only person at this gathering who was not getting into the World Cup.  I never really liked soccer all that much, but my friends gave me a pretty good argument about how I claim to be such a big sports fan, but refuse to watch the world's biggest sporting event.  That was all it took to convince me that at the very least I should give it a chance.  That World Cup was about over at the time, but I knew that the next time it came around, I was going to give it a good chance.  I decided to thoroughly follow the U.S. team for the 2010 World Cup and it was very exciting.  I don't think I could follow soccer year round, but watching the U.S. team try and play above their level, and advance through the tournament like they never have before as the underdog team was a lot of fun, and easy to get into.

     Another sport I have started to get into more recently is college lacrosse.  Now this one is more because of personal interest for me, but I still think it was worth getting into.  Being a Maryland fan for other sports, I noticed Maryland was on ESPNU one day.  I know all too well that it can be difficult for some teams to get some national coverage, so I thought it was particularly special for a lacrosse team to be on national television.  I soon found out that the reason they were on national television was because it was the first round of the NCAA men's lacrosse tournament against North Carolina.  This was the first time I actually sat down and watched a full lacrosse game, and I loved it.  First of all, there is constant action going on.  The game is played in 4 15-minute quarters, and there are rarely any timeouts, so the game doesn't drag on at all.  Later on I got to see what would be thought of as one of the greatest sports plays of the year so far, when Maryland pulled off a "hidden ball" play, that would be shown on SportsCenter about a thousand times that week.  I got to watch Maryland advance through the tournament all the way to the championship game which they lost to UVA, but it was a great game, and a fun tournament to watch.  Barring any significant explosion in the Maryland baseball program, I think I found my college sport to watch in the Spring season.

     My last, and probably least exciting of new sports to watch was tennis.  There have been periods of time where I have gotten into tennis, so this isn't exactly a story as to why I have gotten into it recently, but I just happened to sit down and watch the Maria Sharapova and Li Na matchup at the French Open, and I couldn't turn away from it.  Tennis is one of those things for me that's easy to get into if there's anything special about the match.  Yesterday for example, it was because Sharapova has been out of the national limelight for tennis recently, so she was making a big comeback by making it to the semi-final round of the French Open.  This was also the only major tennis championship she has yet to win.  She didn't win the match but it was still fun to watch her play a competitive match as she tried to continue her quest for the career grand slam. 

     These three are the only sports I have started to grow more interest in than normal lately.  If you have any more ideas of new sports for me to watch, please don't tell me about them so I can give Shannon at least a little break from sports.