My Unpopular Baseball Opinions

We all have opinions.  Some of us have more or stronger opinions than others and some express their opinions more strongly than others.  I have strong opinions that I express strongly.  I also have strong opinions that tend to be unpopular with others, especially my opinions about baseball.  I don’t know why I tend to hold more unpopular baseball opinions than most people, except that I have always been a non-conformist.  I have been expressing some unpopular opinions of late, and so I decided to compilate what I consider to be my top 10 unpopular baseball opinions and share them with my readers.  I would be willing to bet that after reading this post, there will be at least one of these opinions that you find objectionable.  These are in no particular order of importance, I just wrote them down as I thought of them.

1.   The DH is an abomination to baseball.  If I were commissioner I would abolish it altogether.  It’s nothing more than paying a player a lot of money to be terrible at one half of baseball.  If you can’t play defense—retire.

2.  The best way to fix bad umpiring calls is to have better and more accountable umpires.  Instant replay is like fixing a bad employee by getting a robot to do his job and then keeping the bad employee to sit and play solitaire all day.  The robot is expensive and it won’t suck up to you, so just get a better employee and forget the robot.

3.  Getting angry about baseball awards is stupid.  The system is subjective, and accusing a voter of bias when all humans are biased is like getting mad at water for being wet. It is what it is.

4.  The idea that corner position players must be power hitters is asinine. Somebody prove scientifically that there is causation between defensive position played and being able to hit for power.  Come on, I dare you.

5.  The modern baseball fan is home run obsessed.  There is something to be said for too much of a good thing being ruinous (my apologies to Shakespeare).  Station to station baseball is boring.  That is why I hate the American League.  Give me one less power hitter who can play good defense and steal a few bases but who can also hit for average and you have a darn good ballplayer that I would want on my team any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

6.  Baseball uniforms.  Imagine a flake of dust on the head of a pin and that is about how much I care about baseball uniforms..  Except if the uniform is orange or lime green, in which case my eyes and my equilibrium care quite a bit.  Like those colors make me nauseous.  Which is why I will never set foot inside of Marlins Park, unless you knock me unconscious and drag me in there against my will.  Don’t get any ideas.

7.  Baseball contracts.  Why do people feel compelled to insist that a baseball owner spend his money the way they see fit?  It seems to me if the owner tries to put a competitive team on the field and doesn’t spell his name Jeffrey Loria, he ought to be able to spend his own money without your input.  I get annoyed at people who want to trade away perfectly good players because the owner might spend a couple of million dollars a year more than they want him to on a contract.  Mind your own business.  And another thing, if you judge a player’s performance according to how much money he makes, you should cease being a baseball fan and go into a monastery (or a convent if you are a woman).

8.  The All Star Game.  Okay, here’s the deal.  If you want fans to vote, it should be strictly an exhibition game, it should not count for anything.  If you want it to count for something, then fans shouldn’t vote, because fans as a whole aren’t knowledgeable enough to pick the best players.  Brandon Belt almost beat out Joey Votto in 2012.  Enough said.  Except if you are a Giants fan, and well, I won’t go there, because my mother taught me better than that.

9.  I am an old school baseball fan and I don’t apologize for that.  That being said, not everything that is new and different is bad.  Better ways to evaluate talent are always a good thing.  People who refuse to accept modern statistical analysis annoy the heck out of me.  Sabermetrics are not perfect, but they are not tools of Satan sent to ruin baseball as we know it either.  Get with the program or get left behind.

10.  The Baseball Draft.  Modern techniques for player evaluation have come a long way and have made the selection of players in the draft better and more accurate.  But the draft is still a crap shoot.  Not all players with talent do well in professional baseball.  Some players who were not superstars in college or high school thrive in professional baseball.  So, when people tell me that a player who was drafted in the first 10 rounds has to be better than one drafted in later rounds, I want to slap them silly.  No. 1 draft picks sometimes flame out. It  happens and no one knows why.  13^th round players sometimes become superstars.  So please, never ever argue draft pick number with me when talking about a player’s abilities or lack thereof.

Now, I have plenty of other opinions, some of which are not appropriate for a blog.  Some are not about baseball, such as the most boring sport on the planet is golf, followed closely behind by soccer, and yes, football.  I wasn’t kidding when I said my opinions were unpopular.  Of course the fact that I am kind of snarky when I express them probably doesn’t help a lot, but I’m old and crotchety.

So feel free to let me have it about my snarky, unpopular opinions in the comments.  I may be old and crotchety but I have a thick skin.