Baseball Think: otherwise intelligent and/or educated people simply say things that make little or no sense.

What's disturbing is that this probably happens all the time in other more serious areas but it's just so obvious in baseball.  I typically get Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) reactions to my radical ideas.  And when some true believer realizes that the idea is so good that he sounds dumb by continuing to oppose he resorts to: they'll never do it.  Yikes!  The baseball "community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates".  That would explain everything, even Bud Selig.

Screenshot from the trailer of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) by Givememoney17 from Wikimedia Commons

Baseball Think: contradictory and unimaginative. Radical Baseball: increase roster, designated fielder, re-entry.  Wednesday, February 4, 2015

It's not just whether you agree with me, although you should.  It's whether you're thinking at all or whether you've slipped so far into a baseball twilight zone that stuff that is obvious to non-baseball people totally escapes your attention.  For instance, women were way ahead of men in realizing that baseball is boring.  We just kept telling them that they were missing subtleties and intricacies.  Women weren't missing anything. Baseball is and was boring.  It's gotten more boring, especially during the mind numbing regime of Allan Huber "Bud" Selig, and that is continuing with Selig's hand picked and groomed successor Rob "Bud Light" Manfred, the A-Rod slayer.

The three suggestions contained in the post shown above are all reasonable.  You may not agree, you have better variations, you may even have totally different ideas that are more innovative.  It's like saying that Willie Mays was the greatest all around player of all time.  You may think it was someone else but you would likely think that Mays is a reasonable candidate.  Harmon Killebrew, on the other hand, would not be a reasonable candidate.

Does Rico Petrocelli make us stupid?  Monday, June 3, 2013

When Ricco suddenly jumped from 12 to 40 (home runs) we all attributed it to his playing his home games in Fenway Park with that silly left field wall.

If we had given it a second thought we could have reasoned as follows.

How many HR could he have reasonably hit at home?  Let's say a whopping 25.  That would still leave 15 on the road.  Prior to that Ricco's previous high for an entire season had been 18.  So obviously something more than the Green Monster in Fenway Park was involved.

Maybe it was steroids.  We now know that the 1963 San Diego Chargers were given steroids by the coaches.  But the real issue here is whether we baseball fans are stupid.

The type of issue involving Rico Petrocelli in 1969 is repeated every day in 2013.  It's impossible to listen to a conversation about baseball for more than five minutes without an otherwise intelligent educated human being saying something comparably stupid.

Does baseball make us stupid or are we interested in baseball because we are already stupid?  ...

Baseball and stupidity.  As American as apple pie and ice cream.
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Pitching duel or slugfest?  Sunday, July 28, 2013

In order to show their baseball knowledge many baseball fans will say: pitching duel, pretending that a game with little action is preferable to a game with lots of action.
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How often have you heard those thoughts or close variations of them?  How often have you had them yourself?

What kind of idiot actually wants to watch a pitcher bat?  The idiot may couch it in terms of a tactical battle battle between two managers but it still often boils down to watching a player who is completely over matched being inept.

How much do you really enjoy one of those 2-1 games?  Sure, you don't want to sit there simply watching a parade of batters hit a tee shot over a wall and then take an exaggerated victory lap but at least something happens in a slugfest.  It's more than two guys playing catch.  If you're at the game you can delude yourself into thinking that you can actually see the nuances between the pitcher and batter but unless you're sitting in one of those outrageously overpriced seats near a dugout you're so far away that you're lucky you can see the plate umpire's call.

Baseball field managers are limited by the ancient rules.  They make almost no big decisions in the first half of a game.  The only thing they can do is remove the starting pitcher, which they only do when it is painfully obvious that there is no choice.  There are probably 13 pitchers on the 25 man roster, four of whom will not be used because it's not their turn to start.  Of the 12 non-pitchers, one is the backup catcher who is unlikely to be used.  That leaves three subs in the National Conference and two in the American Conference.  So, go ahead, make some moves.  You're not allowed to put a player back into the game, although I see no good reason for that restriction.

Now you may say that this very limited situation makes every move precious.  That brings us back to the beginning of this post.  Look at how ridiculous such thinking is.  It's Baseball Think.