If you are a sports fan – and it’s safe to assume that if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be reading this – I’m guessing that at some point in conversation with a friend or associate you’ve started a sentence with these words, “If I were the Commissioner …”
The individual sport? Doesn’t matter. All of them could use improvement, at the very least fresh ideas geared to the fan rather than to whatever entity is willing to shell out the most dough for broadcast or marketing rights or whatever.
So today I ask the question: What if you could be the boss? How many ways would you change MLB, the NFL or NBA or NHL or MLS or NCAA, or whatever other sports entity could stand at least some subtle tweaking? It could involve the way sports are marketed and the way fans are treated, both those on-site and those watching from home, as well as the way the games themselves need to evolve.
I’m not going to lie. The beauty of columns like these is that they’re good for another column – or two – once the readers add their own ideas to the mix. (I’ve already received a couple such ideas – and no, I didn’t tell anyone I was writing on this subject, which means they came up with these on their own. They’ll just have to wait for the follow-up column to see their ideas published.)
And I’m fairly certain the public isn’t going to let me down. Some may howl at my ideas, and that’s fine, too.
But since I’ve just crowned myself sports’ first Commissioner of Everything – at least for the purposes of this column – where to go from here?
Baseball: Recent changes have indeed improved the game, with examples including the pitch clock, banning the shift and challenges for out/safe and fair/foul calls and for ball/strike calls. (And limiting ball/strike challenges to two a game, which I was sure wouldn’t be enough, turned out to be genius because it injects some suspense and drama. Do you use it now or wait?)
But maybe the game’s most pressing issue at this point is the epidemic frequency of arm injuries among pitchers. As of Friday morning, ESPN’s injury list tracker revealed that 102 pitchers were on 60-day injured lists, 59 on 15-day injured lists and 45 listed “day to day.” Of those on 60-day lists, 62 – more than half – had elbow injuries, and five pitchers have undergone Tommy John surgery or related UCL operations in recent weeks.
My solution (and yes, I know it’s radical) is designed to somehow create an environment where pitchers aren’t pitching to the radar gun, and I realize that might have to start in youth baseball. Maybe this rule change would encourage that by forcing scouts to look at something besides velocity: If you throw over 95 mph, it’s an automatic ball no matter where it lands in the strike zone. Encourage pitchers to throttle back and actually pitch, and you reduce wear-and-tear and maybe save or prolong careers.
NFL: I’d mandate natural grass fields and trend toward fewer – not more – international games. American football will never supplant soccer in Europe, so why – be$ide$ more $hort-term profit$ – is the league moving in the direction of scheduling an international game every week?
Meanwhile, as I noted in a recent column, Players Association members see natural sod being rolled out at NFL stadiums for the World Cup and have a perfectly logical reaction: Why go back to artificial turf? Why, indeed?
NBA: This is an officiating quirk that is not limited to the pros but to me seems particularly blatant among NBA officials: An offensive player initiates contact on a drive to the basket, and the defensive player almost always gets called for the foul. Why are we penalizing players for attempting to defend?
(I believe the term used by the game official involving a challenge of an egregious call on a baseline drive in Game 5 of the Lakers-Houston series was that Austin Reaves was “not in legal guarding position.” Please explain.)
Aside from that, here’s a simple fix that will improve the product. I realize cutting games from the schedule is a no-go for economic reasons. But getting rid of back-to-back games will do wonders to protect players’ health.
NHL: This is the league that gave us “lower body injury” as a catch-all description of why a player isn’t playing, and while I’d prefer that teams are more specific, I understand the logic: If you know where a guy is specifically hurting, you target it. These secrets tend to come out only after elimination from the playoffs, when we realize just how tough these guys are.
And while this league – and commissioner Gary Bettman – does get in its own way quite a bit, it also has an innovation many other sports and particularly basketball could use: The embellishment penalty. If that existed in the NBA, certain players – I’ll name no names, but a few are playing in the conference finals – might not be able to function.
College football and basketball: With the NCAA basketball tournament expanding to 76, the better to include more mediocre power conference teams, and the Big Ten and SEC commissioners – or, more accurately, Fox and ESPN – disagreeing over the proposed super-sizing of the football tournament to 24, maybe it’s time at last to break up the big conferences. Use the Super League format with promotion and relegation for football, as we’ve discussed here in the past, and re-realign the conferences on a regional basis in every other sport.
Meanwhile, if players are going to be paid directly by the schools, they should be considered employees no matter what the administrators might say, with collective bargaining rights but also with specific player movement rules.
MLS: I give credit where it’s due here. I was dubious when the owners voted to align their league’s schedule with the rest of the soccer world (August to May, roughly). They’re going to put a two-month winter break in the middle of that to avoid inclement weather, and maybe the month-and-a-half the league is idle during the upcoming World Cup is a test of how well that would work.
Our suggestion: During the proposed mid-December to early February winter break, arrange to borrow every domed stadium available, as well as outdoor facilities in warmer climes, to play friendlies or a midseason neutral site tournament. Maybe this is the proper place for the otherwise unnecessary Leagues Cup. And make sure those games are shown in home markets, preferably on over-the-air outlets.
That’s all I’ve got right now, and I didn’t even touch on the hot button issue of how many streaming subscriptions you need to watch everything you want to watch. I’m sure there will be solutions, or at least lots of venting, on that subject.
Readers, what else have I missed?
jalexander@scng.com