Hitting is Part of Baseball!
Personally, I like this time of year. No, not just becuase the Celtics won a championship last night, but because of interleague play. You see, I consider myself a fan of baseball, not just a fan of the Red Sox. But the problem is, I rarely get to see any teams play aside from those appearing on the Red Sox schedule. Yes, there are some non-Sox games on Saturday afternoon and Sunday night, but lately most of those have been Sox games with crappy announcers (though I’m not getting in to how bad McCarver/Morgan are). Sometimes there will be a game on here or there on a random Monday or Wednesday night. But the Red Sox play pretty much every day so I don’t typically watch 2 games.
But I WANT to see other teams. Yes, the Rays of Sunshine are fun to watch this year, and the Orioles aren’t quite as bad as everyone thought. But 19 times is plenty. The other AL teams get kind of old as well - take a guess at how many American League teams the Sox have yet to play? Believe it or not, they’ve seen every team in the AL except the White Sox and we don’t get to see them until we go to Chicago in August.
So this brings us to Inter-League play. I think its exciting. I want to see the Sox playing a game in Cincinatti. I want to see how Shane Victorino and Ryan Howard can hit against Jon Lester (they can’t!). I mean, how cool would it be if we played the Dodgers during the regular season and we could all see Nomar playing short in Fenway again! Sure, this isn’t happening this year but it still could thanks to interleague.
And that brings us to the controversy that, mostly becuase of Hank Steinbrenner, is rising up this year. Chien Ming Wang hurt himself running the bases, which I’m sure you’ve heard about. If you haven’t, well, you must be deaf or not own a TV or something. Basically, his tirade revolved around the fact that pitchers don’t usually hit in the AL and therefore don’t practice running the bases and therefore it’s the MLBs fault that his only consistent pitcher is out for most of the season. Yeah, OK. Maybe if they weren’t hanging their entire season on one pitcher who can’t strike anyone out it wouldn’t be such an issue. It was easy for us Sox fans to laugh at poor Hank crying about his pitcher going down.
But then… Bartolo Colon had a similar incident. Fat Boy won’t be pitching for at least a couple weeks.
Yes, Bartolo, since he’s had all of 10 at-bats since 2004, wasn’t very good at swinging. But he tried hard - a little too hard - and now he’s on the DL with back issues. So now the Red Sox can start complaining about pitchers hitting, right?
NO! I say wrong. Some will argue that pitchers hitting is an old and outdated baseball legacy. Pitchers today are much more focused on pitching than in the past and it makes sense, much in the same way your quarterback would never play defense, to never have pitchers hit. Fine. That is probably true and if we were writing the rules of baseball today, that is probably one of them we would change. But the thing is, pitchers DO hit! They do it every game in the national league. We can’t just change the rules becuase pitchers for both the Red Sox and Yankees were injured. That is just plain stupid.
The other potential solution is to simply do away with Interleague play, which would be a horrible idea because I’m sure I’m not the only one who loves seeing the NL teams. Plus, you still have the World Series, where at least some AL pitchers are going to have to hit. What do you do then?
In the end, the only point I’m really trying to make is that Hank Steinbrenner and everyone else complaining needs to settle down. Maybe pitchers shouldn’t hit. Yes, maybe. But the thing is, they do. That is baseball, that is the rules of the game. Batters get hit with pitches more often in the AL than the NL because there is no retaliation against the pitchers, but you don’t see anyone complaining on that front. Only when the Yankees are a safe bet not to catch the Red Sox does this controversy begin.
I think the Colon injury may even help the Red Sox long term, so we really have no reason to complain. Masterson gets to stay and pitch more, where he would have otherwise gone to AAA for Matsuzaka to come back. And Colon gets to be saved for later in the year when the innings will be much more pressured.
And hey, if nothing else, don’t be too upset because these funny rules screwed the Yankees a lot worse than the Red Sox!
Stumble it!