Opening Day is here…. so is your 2021 MLB preview.
This is not like the other previews, the other predictions on who will finish where in the AL East, NL East, NL West and the other divisions, yada, yada yada.
This preview is based on teams, players and outcomes that I am rooting for in 2021. Root, root, root for baseball. I want the Comeback Player of the Year in 2021 to be baseball.
I want the game to have a resurgence. I want baseball to be baseball again even without a last-second designated hitter added to the National League.
All this has nothing to do with the shortened 2020 Covid Season. That season is gone and forgotten. Like a bad dream, let’s move on from 2020 and the 60-game experiment.
First, there should be a baseball bonfire.
You know all those cutouts of fans that popped up in the stands in every ballpark as the teams tried to make it a cool thing? It wasn’t cool. It wasn’t real fans. It was more theater in a year filled with way too much theater.
Take ‘em all, throw them in a pile in the parking lot and build a bonfire, a modern day version of Disco Demolition Night that happened on July 12, 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
C-ya, cutouts.
Having fans back in the ballpark is the first step to success in 2021. Enjoy a hot dog. Enjoy the game again. Talk to other fans. Enjoy life, every wonderful inning of it.
The Lords of Baseball are determined to ruin the game, we know that. Look what they have done to the minor leagues, even getting rid of all those great names of the different leagues, but we can’t let them destroy everything in the game. The game needs to bounce back from all the years of no action and the explosion in strikeouts because those in charge of baseball, MLB officials, GMs, and their toadies went all-in on the “home run or nothing’’ approach.
That did not work. It’s the game of baseball that is essential, not the big swing.
Baseball devalued itself by devaluing the base hit. Baseball devalued itself by devaluing the win. Once the win and the base hit were not deemed important, once they were no longer the bedrock of the game, baseball itself began to crumble.
Don’t tell me wins are not important for starting pitchers. Don’t tell me base hits are not important and that it is all about the home run, and that a strikeout is really the same as any other out. That’s how we got to this mess. That’s how we got to 58,718 plate appearances where absolutely nothing happened. The ball was not put in play. In the last full season: 2019, there were 42,823 strikeouts and 15,895 walks
As a result, new rules and regulations are under consideration, including moving back the pitching mound. The irony of all this is the people in charge of saving the game are some of the same ones who put the game in this vise grip of nothing happening because of their love for the home run. They are the ones who pushed to take speed out of the game, the stolen base became a memory. Athletes were replaced by launch-angle bots. Perhaps they now realize the damage they created and want to fix the game.
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