Opening Day: Let’s Keep the Game Nice and Slow, Thank You!

            It’s opening day for Major League Baseball, and hope springs eternal, even for Cubs fans.  With just 162 games left on the schedule, every team in Major League Baseball (with one wonderful exception) is currently undefeated and tied for first place in their division.  That exception is the evil New York Yankees, who are 0-1 thanks to an “opening night” loss to the Red Sox last night in Fenway Park.

            In our Nation’s Capitol, the Washington Nationals open the season today against the Philadelphia Phillies.  The Nationals’ starting pitcher will be a southpaw named Barack Obama.  Well, okay, President Obama will not be the Nationals’ starting pitcher.  But he will throw out the first pitch, continuing a tradition that began in Washington 99 years ago, when a big right-hander named William Howard Taft was the starting pitcher on opening day for the Washington Senators.  After one pitch, President Taft had reached his pitch count and was quickly relieved by Walter “Big Train” Johnson.

            President Obama will be the second President of the United States to throw the opening pitch for the Nationals.  President George W. Bush threw the first pitch for the Nationals on opening day in 2005, after being traded to the Nationals from the Texas Rangers.

While millions of Americans anxiously await the return today of our national pastime, some folks are worried about the game of baseball and want to change it.  These folks include MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and 14 members of a recently-formed committee of managers and owners who are exploring possible rules changes.

            Any time that an MLB Commissioner forms a committee to explore rules changes, I get upset.  Baseball is an absolutely wonderful game, and it should not be changed and amended like Congress passing a health care program.  In the past, similar committees formed to “improve” the game of baseball brought us such diamond abominations as the designated hitter rule, inter-league play (I’m sorry, but the Cardinals and the Yankees should play only in the World Series, thank you), and a recent All-Star game that ended in a tie.  Bear Bryant once famously said that a tie is like kissing your sister.  In baseball, a tie is like kissing a very ugly sister.

            Why the next thing you know, Commissioner Selig will form a committee to determine whether hot dogs and beer are hazardous to your health.

According to published news reports, the biggest concern this Committee has is that Major League Baseball games . . . hold on to your hot dog, my fellow baseball fans . . . last too long.  You read that right, Harry Carey breath!  Worse yet, Commissioner Selig and his committee are now reportedly studying plans to shorten major league games.

            This is not the first time the Commissioner of Major League Baseball has tried to cut short the absolute joy of a summer afternoon or evening at the ballpark.  In the early 1990s, then-Commissioner Faye Vincent formed a special committee to try to speed up the game, considering such ideas as limiting the number of times a batter could step out of the batter’s box to spit and scratch himself.  The committee also considered proposals to limit the number of times that catchers and managers could visit the pitcher’s mound.

            Fortunately, all those ideas sizzled out like the Cubs in September.  But now they are being considered again by Commissioner Selig’s new Let’s – Improve – The – Perfect – Game -

Committee.

            A cynical football fan once observed that baseball is a game in which 30 minutes of action are crammed into three and a half hours.  Well, from where I sit (a cheap seat in the bleachers), I say, “Hooray for that!  Somebody start a wave!”

            Most of us Americans now rush through life, hopped up on a combination of Red Bull and Starbucks.  In this era of e-mails, tweets, text messages, and fast food consumed in cars as we speed down expressways talking on our cell phones, we need one institution that takes its sweet time, thank you!

            We need a game without shot locks, endless videotape reviews, or sudden death overtimes!

            Does anybody really want to get in and out of the ballpark in two hours or less?  Not me.  I want a long Sunday afternoon that starts with batting practice.  And then I want to stand and sing the National Anthem like Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun.  And once the game starts, I want the batters to hit lots of foul balls that I can try to catch as if I were Steve Bartman before he was placed in the Federal Witness Relocation Program.

            During a pitching change, I want to walk to the concession stand and get myself an unhealthy hot dog and a cold refreshing beverage.

            And when the seventh inning stretch comes, I want to stand up and sing an off-key rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” with all the vim and vigor of Harry Carey, circa 1990.

            And then, I want extra innings!  I want my team to win, all right, because if they don’t win, it’s a shame.  But I want to win on a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 15th inning.

            Yes, I want a nice, slow baseball game.

            In fact, in the words of the great Ernie Banks, “Let’s play two!”