Something that has been bothering me for the last year, maybe more, is why major league ballplayers seem to not know how to play baseball. Maybe it’s something that has been around forever, but for some reason I am just painfully aware of it the last few years. More and more I’m seeing players make fundamental mistakes. Even stranger is that I don’t notice it in the NFL, NBA or NHL. That could be because the NFL and NBA are nothing more than a distraction to get from the World Series to Spring Training and the NHL is, well, for Canadians.
Further compounding the mystery are the announcers who will mention it and (if it’s a rookie) say “he’s new up here, he’ll have to learn to hit the cutoff man”. I get it if he mechanically threw the ball and missed the cutoff man, we all make physical mistakes. But how do you not know to hit the cutoff man, or move back to your base on a line-drive or take the extra base if the cutoff man is missed?
These are basic laws that were taught to all of us in little league. In my mind, if you can’t learn these basics (and execute them) then you don’t advance to the next level. And if you don’t advance to the next level you sure as hell don’t get to the Major Leagues.
I can understand if a ballplayer is just SO GOOD that they completely outclass their peers in Little League, high school, maybe even college. So possibly they skate by, missing some of the fundamentals (no need to hit the cutoff man if you can throw a laser to home to nail the slow moving runner). But by the time you get to the minor leagues, Rookie through AAA, you are moving closer to the skinny part of the funnel.
The announcers or coaches will talk about a player’s mistake like the player is new to baseball. He’s new to the majors, sure, but he’s been playing baseball for the better part of fifteen years. The rules haven’t changed (aside from T-Ball, where now EVERYONE has to bat, score isn’t kept and EVERYONE gets a trophy). But it’s still four bases, six outs per inning and home team bats last.
When I got married nineteen years ago, I was new to the marriage thing. But I wasn’t new to life. Just because I was married didn’t mean I didn’t know to get up and go to work in the morning, use a fork and knife to eat, and take a shower each day. It wasn’t like I all of sudden turned soup, salad and steak into finger food and Kim said “well, he’s new to marriage, he’ll figure out where the utensils are.”
If you could hit curveballs in the minors and then can’t hit Roy Halladay’s, that’s simply the Selection Process weeding out the weak. But when you run to second as the batter bunts the ball in the air to the pitcher, . . . that’s what my five year old does because he doesn’t know the game. How can you be promoted to the highest level of baseball in the world with execution like that?
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1 comment:
Sad I hadn't gotten around to visiting the Doctrine in so long. Excellent post--it's something that I've been bothered by too.
On the other hand, the NHL is definitely *not* just for Canadians, although any team worth rooting for is from Canada. And, yeah, dumb mistakes are made at the NHL level but I think that comes from sprinting for 90 seconds straight while getting whacked in the head and body continuously. I challenge anyone to remember much beyond their name under those conditions.
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