Now I’ve been a sports fan for as long as I could remember, but I have to admit it’s getting more and more difficult to watch some of them. I’m not sure what I would do if I didn’t have sports to watch, but with the way things are going I might have to find out.
If you’ve listened to the Sports Time Radio podcast you know that I am completely down on the NBA and I watch very little of it. I loss interest when the league started to make the rule changes to eliminate defense so scoring would increase and they got it. Now every night it’s a 3-point shooting contest and I don’t understand how that’s fun to watch. It wasn’t for me; so I’ve pretty much stopped watching.
The NFL is starting to make some changes that are making me watch less and less of it. In the first 4 weeks of this NFL season I’ve watched less football than I ever have. To be fair the NFL started try to eliminate defense a long, long time ago, but now it’s the rule changes that are just killing me.
The biggest plus is they seem to have simplified the catch rule even though I’m pretty sure most to the referees don’t know what a catch is. Of course that little plus doesn’t make up for the gigantic negative that roughing the passer has become. It as bad enough when they started throwing flags when the quarterback got touched anywhere around the head area; now it’s just ridiculous. I’m sure there are some out their, but I haven’t seen one legitimate roughing the passer call this season and some of these terrible calls have cost teams games. That’s when it becomes a big deal. Just imagine your favorite team missing the playoffs by one game and you can look back at that one bad roughing that passer call that a referee shouldn’t of thrown a flag on.
With the road that the NFL is on right now I don’t know how much longer I’ll be watching games.
Now if you’ve listened to the podcast or even followed the blog for a while you know that baseball is my favorite sport out of all of them, but I am very frightened that my enjoyment of the game is going to be taken away from me.
Now I’m not a fan of sabermetric or any of the analytics that have been brought into the game recently, but I heard something yesterday that scared me to death when it comes to baseball.
During one of the many pre-game shows I watched yesterday they where having a discussion about the Oakland A’s using Liam Hendricks as their “opener” for wild card game against the New York Yankees tonight. Now using an “opener” is the new fade in baseball and the A’s going that route didn’t bother me; it was the way the conversation went after that.
The panel started discussing how soon there would be no more starting pitchers in baseball and ever game would be a bullpen game. This would be the end of it for me. I just don’t understand why teams would feel the need to do this, but the panel I was listening to was pretty sure that this was going to happen and happen sooner than people think it will.
I’ve always understood that from time to time you’re going to need a bullpen game or a game is going to turn into a bullpen game if your starting pitcher exits the game early, but to use it on a daily basis tells me a lot about your organization. The biggest thing it tells me it that your organization doesn’t know how to draft a starting pitcher or develop them once you get them into your minor league system. It also tells me that your coaching staff at the major league level has so little confidence in that pitchers ability that they’re not comfortable running the guy out their for the 1st inning. What’s the difference if the pitcher who was going to start the game and comes in after the “opener” faces the top of the opponents order to start the game or in the 3rd inning.
The “opener” seems like a gimmick to me, but the Tampa Bay Rays won 90 games this season and they used an “opener” more than any other team and they had success with it; so that means other teams will follow suit.
Now when I gave up on the NBA it wasn’t that big of a deal or even that difficult for me to do. I didn’t play basketball at a very high level; so I wasn’t invested in the game that much.
Football fading away for me is a little tougher. I played quite a bit of football in my life and I was actually a decent player and while I haven’t completely let go of the game if I get to that point it’s going to be tough for me.
Now I pray that baseball doesn’t put me through this. I am attached to baseball. I started playing baseball as soon as I was old enough to join and I played it as long as I could. It was easily my best sport and I have to admit that I don’t want to give it up, but I need them to stop ruining the game for me. Sadly for me I’m not sure if they’ll be able to stop destroying the game because it allows the people who couldn’t play it because they weren’t good enough to be involved and have some control and you know they enjoy that. Man am I going to miss baseball.
I guess I still got hockey and their regular season starts tonight.
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