The New York Yankees play by their own rules and Major League Baseball needs to put an end to it.
Before I start this column, I need to go to the mini-bar to get some cheese for this whine. From Friday to Sunday, I sat through some of the worst examples of the great game of baseball that I have seen in my 15 seasons sitting and working in the broadcast booth.
When the dust had settled after the Yankees defeated the Blue Jays on Sunday 7-5, Jamie Campbell, Pat Tabler and myself -- along with our Rogers Sportsnet crew -- had been forced to sit through 33 innings and 13 hours, 23 minutes of bad baseball. It got to the point where 3-2 counts were the norm, no one could throw a first pitch strike and pitchers were changed more often than Elton John’s wardrobe during a concert. Thank God that rookie starter Jesse Litsch brought his A-game and pitched into the eighth inning, leading to a thoroughly enjoyable, 4-1 win for the good guys in an economical 2 hours, 42 minutes.
But there were things that went on away from the camera lens that made this weekend almost unbearable to sit through. My major pet peeve is how Yankees manager Joe Torre is allowed to change a pitcher without even throwing a pitch in an inning. It happens a lot, and it's not against the rules, but that needs to be looked at to speed up games. If a pitcher takes the mound to start an inning, then he should have to face, at least one hitter. That doesn't seem too much to ask. Plus, only Al Widmar, the former Jays pitching coach, took longer to walk to the mound than Torre. Pick it up, skip!
But this seems to be part of the Yankees modus operandi: to lull the opposition to sleep by dragging games out to well over three hours in length. Try these numbers on for size:
Average National League game: 2:48
Average American League game: 2:54
Average NY Yankees game: 3:11
Not hard to see what's going on here, but it's allowed to go on. Just like the umpires allow Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez to stand ten yards away from the on-deck circle -- almost behind home plate on the warning track -- to get a better read on the opponents' pitcher while waiting for their turn to hit. And they allow their first and third base coaches to stand well outside of the coaches' boxes. And they most certainly give the Yankees a different strike zone (the size of a shoe box) than the visitors (the normal size) at Yankee Stadium. It's as if they are afraid to call the game right in front of the sold out, raucous crowd. Now, this may sound like whining, but it's just what I've observed after all these years.
Hey, I'll be the first to say it: The New York Yankees are bad for baseball. Their games take way too long, especially in this era of hockey and basketball games taking no more than two-and-a-half hours. And the fact that they intimidate the umpires into bending the rules in their favour sets a bad example.
Or how about this? There were, apparently, around 12,000 people in the seats when the first pitch was thrown while the Yankees PR department reported that 23,567 butts were in the seats and then the final attendance count on the bottom of the boxscore records that 53,281 tickets were sold for the game, giving the Yankees their 50th sellout of the season. With this being their final regular season game of the season, that means they set an attendance record of 4,271,356. Poppycock, I say. Apparently every record, even attendance, has to be applied to the New York Yankees.
The only good thing about this is that after watching the Yankees split with the Blue Jays, it is clearly apparent that their bullpen is not good enough to win the World Series. Oh, they can hit, but their relievers not named Joba Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera are afraid to throw/can't throw strikes and that will be their undoing in October.
When that happens, all my whining will seem perfectly justified. Remember, 29 other teams play this game.
Enough is enough
This is not about Milton Bradley blowing a gasket yet again and going after an umpire leading to him tearing an ACL and being sidelined well into next season, but about how the level of the major league continues to drop. And if it is proved that first base umpire Mike Winters provoked the emotionally-sensitive Bradley, then it's time for MLB to step in and discipline this and every umpire who does more than just call the game. I remember in my early years in this job, seeing the likes of Greg Kosc and Ken Kaiser clearly provoking players, and then glaring at them, almost waiting to run them from the game.
I've always been a believer that fans pay good money for tickets to see players play, not the umpires do their -- below average at times -- thing. If it is true that Winters crossed the line to enrage Bradley, then MLB needs to take a page out of the NBA book -- see Joey Crawford ejecting Tim Duncan from a game for no reason last season -- and give the umpire a lengthy suspension. And finally we'll have a level of accountability when it comes to the ornery umpires.
(Note: Before hitting hay on Monday, I watched umpire Phil Cuzzi eject not one, not two, but three Brewers in a game earlier in the day. This is the same Phil Cuzzi that ejected Roy Halladay, unwarranted, after Doc plunked Rocco Baldelli with a pitch in his second last start of his Cy Young award winning season of 2003. Cuzzi claimed that there was a "history" between the Jays and Devil Rays, although none of us could remember anything going on between the two teams. It's just another case of a bad umpire becoming confrontational when it clearly wasn't warranted. Time for baseball to reign in these rogue umps.
