And then it was over, with a bang. The fall sports season ended with the last blasts of confetti canons after the Super Bowl. Fall, the most exciting sports season, features pro and college football and the World Series. When the NBA and NHL launch in the fall, every team has a chance to be champion.
But now it’s February and the excitement is over. The Wolves and Wild slog through the last halves of their seasons, unlikely to make playoffs that are still more than two months away. It’s not yet time to fill out March Madness brackets.
I’m looking forward to baseball and soccer. The Twins report for spring training in a week. Minnesota United’s home season kicks off on March 15 and features five home games in March and April.
But mostly I’m thinking about baseball and the sport’s recent struggles with technology.
Major League Baseball’s investigations of sign-stealing tainted Houston’s 2017 World Series win. The team’s owner fired manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow. The fallout continued to fall on other former players and coaches who had moved on to other teams. Red Sox manager Alex Cora and Mets manager Carlos Beltrán lost their jobs.
The sign-stealing scheme involved watching video from a center field camera and relaying the catcher’s sign to the batter via a player in the dugout banging on a trash can. One or two bangs signaled off-speed pitches while no bang equaled a fastball. The scheme was a perfect match of high technology, low technology and a long tradition of sign-stealing.
The most famous instance of sign-stealing happened on Bobby Thomson’s legendary Shot Heard ‘Round the World that clinched the National League pennant for the Giants on Oct. 3, 1951.
The incident is reported in “Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World.” Giants position coach Herman Franks used a telescope from the Giants clubhouse during a number of late-season games, including that one to relay the catcher’s signs. A buzzer was set up to alert someone in the Giants bullpen of the pitch call, and he would in turn relay it to the batter.
MLB’s most recent advance in technology, the video review, opened the door to the Astros’ skullduggery. With the review rule, TV monitors appeared in dugouts and clubhouses, making sign-stealing, thanks to telephoto lenses on center field cameras, easy.
Generally, technology has not improved sports, for either the players or the fans. There are only two technological advances that have helped sports: lights so games could be played at night, allowing working people to enjoy games without skipping work, and jet travel replacing trains, bringing baseball to cities more distant than one-day train rides on the East Coast.
When the Metrodome replaced Met Stadium, Minnesota sports fans suffered their biggest technological failure. I photographed Bud Grant’s Vikings outside – in the mud, snow, rain, cold and heat. Photos from those games captured the essence of football and the Vikings’ home-field advantage. Then the games moved indoors to the sterile Metrodome where it was always 68 degrees, partly cloudy and the plastic grass was always green. The only worse place to watch sports is Tampa Bay Rays’ Tropicana Field, a gloomy indoor dungeon in the Sunshine State.
After the sign-stealing scandal, MLB is again turning to technology to improve the game and speed up the action. This season, some minor league teams will experiment with an automated strike zone to replace calls by human umpires. Instead of a three-dimensional pentagon, the strike zone would be a two-dimensional space at the front of the plate. Umpires with earpieces will call balls and strikes based on ball-tracking technology. The ump’s only real job will be to call “safe” or “out” in the rare play at the plate.
Modern society aims to eliminate all risk, errors and unfairness through regulations and government policy. What’s desirable for civil rights and justice is out of place in baseball.
I’ve got a better idea. Get rid of all the technology – except the lights and the jet planes – and just play the game. No more delays for video review, no more TVs in the dugout, no more ball-tracking tech. Just play ball. It’s a kids’ game, play it that way.
