Reforming baseball (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Friday, 17 October 2003

Reforming baseball

James Joyner thinks baseball needs some serious reform, including a shorter regular season or changes in the postseason format to make the difference in regular season record more meaningful.

Of course, my friend Scott would argue that because of the designated hitter rule, the American League isn’t actually playing baseball—a game that, by rule, is played by nine people.* Hence this would be reform of a game with a strong resemblance to baseball…

* This logic is pretty sound. Under the rules of golf, you aren’t actually playing “golf” unless you follow all of its rules; instead, you’re just hitting a ball with a club. AL baseball is, from this perspective, no more legitimate a form of baseball than oft-forbidden “pepper games” (hitting a baseball that is tossed in the air by the batter, rather than pitched to him; hence the sign in some ballparks saying “NO PEPPER GAMES“).

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Welcome to Signifying Nothing, a weblog featuring serious (and frivolous) commentary from Chris Lawrence, an associate professor of political science at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia.
Chris was also formerly a contributor to Outside The Beltway.
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Signifying Nothing formerly featured the stylings of Brock Sides, a left-leaning philosopher turned network administrator currently residing in Memphis, Tennessee who now blogs at Battlepanda, and Robert Prather, a libertarian-leaning conservative economist and occasional contributor at OTB.

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