Being a catcher on a professional baseball team is hard on the body, it's bad for the ankles, bad for the knees, bad for the hips, bad for the back, and with one too many backswings to the noggin--bad for the brain. Prime example: Joe Torre, who is apparently losing his marbles.
In rookie ball this year, Torre is instituting a policy for extra innings where teams start the inning with a runner second. Disregarding the oddities of how one would score any play involving said runner and the seeming advantage it gives to the home team, this is beyond a terrible idea.
One of the great things about baseball is that there are no namby-pamby, gold-star-for-everyone ties or super-duper special overtime rules. There is a winner and a loser and you play on, deep into the night, as necessary to determine the outcome. The tension and frustration, the sense of do or die, the hero or the goat, extra innings are the human condition played out before you.
And Joe Torre wants to scrap it all because "It's not fun to watch when you go through your whole pitching staff and wind up bringing in a utility infielder to pitch."
Maybe players don't like it but man is Torre wrong. Extra innings are glorious innings. I turn on games that I have absolutely no interest in otherwise because they've gone to extras. Maybe you pick a team to start but in the end, you end up rooting for whichever team is batting.
But because stupid ideas seem to prevail, we can all look forward to games that end more quickly in the future. Yay!
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