Richard Herr - Something's Wrong

Something’s Wrong

I’m writing this on Sunday morning, and in part, I’m drawing my conclusions from the events of the pat few days. The results of this afternoon’s game may somewhat color what I’m saying, but I don’t think by that much.

Something’s wrong. Something has knocked off the very fine balance of the great game of baseball and sent if spiraling wildly away from its carefully balanced center. Something has knocked it off its center of gravity and sent it wobbling around like a billiard pin that’s been grazed by a bowling ball.

Take the example of this Sunday morning’s perspective. The Mets recently concluded a four-game trip to Dodger Stadium where they got totally bitch-slapped. The games weren’t even close. The Dodgers were launching home runs all over the place. The Mets looked like the sorriest sad-sacks you’ve ever seen. They crawled out of town (didn’t even have the power left to limp) and headed north to San Francisco where you figured Buster Posey would chew them up like a plate of appetizers.

What happened? The first game in SFO the Mets sprayed twenty hits all over the ballpark and won handily. The second game, they won rather easily 5 to 2. (It was actually 5 to 1 plus a ninth-inning who-cares? run.)

The tables were entirely reversed. It appeared that the sad-sack Mets suddenly said the word “Shazam!” (google it) and turned into super heroes.

The trouble is: that sort of thing is happening throughout the game. Teams either get incredibly hot, or they go on dismal losing streaks. One team beats another by a lopsided score, then loses just as badly to the same team the following night. Many baseball scores are beginning to resemble football scores. I’m sure this year will show a record of many more teams are scoring double-digit runs in a game.

The major thing I find shocking is what’s happening with ERAs. Time was, (last year) if you looked at the ERA of the starters on a team, you’d see that their number one guy had an ERA somewhere around 3.0. The better ones were below. As you went down through numbers two, three, and four, you’d see the number go up to the high threes. If you had a particularly bad number five, he’d be up there in the fours.

This year the ERAs have skyrocketed. Starters are sporting ones that go into the 5’s, 6’s, and even 7’s! Pitchers who were previously well established number 2 and 3 starters re up there in the 5’s and 6’s. Runs are proliferating all around the league.

And it’s becoming harder and harder to put up good pitching numbers.  Jacob deGrom is coming off three terrific starts. However, just before that he put up a couple of stinking performances where he put up close to ten runs in each game. It used to be difficult to travel that narrow path to a good pitching performance. Now the path has become razor thin.

Something’s wrong. Somebody’s tinkered with something. Somebody decided it would be great to push things a tiny, little bit further to make the game more exciting, add a little more pizzaz to the game. I don’t know whether it’s juicing the ball, making the seams a little tighter, cutting down the strike zone, but the game is careening out of order. It’s turning into a parody of itself. It’s becoming a flash-and-trash, glitz-and-tits, super wound-up, neon-blinking video game.

It’s got to be fixed. We need to return the game to the national pastime.   

Whenever Richard Herr isn’t solving all the Mets’ problems, he spends his time writing humorous science fiction novels.

You can see his books at https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Herr/e/B00J5XBKX4.