End the beanball wars

There is one argument that I hate more than any other, and that is justifying some policy just because of “tradition.”  The name of the football team in Washington is obviously racist, yet the owner and thousands (millions?) of fans refuse to change it because of tradition.  Homophobes hide behind religion to mask their bigotry, all the while saying they support “traditional” families.  The argument is basically that just because were done a certain way yesterday, they should be done the same way today despite all of the ways the world has changed since yesterday.

Baseball, the sport steeped in the greatest amount of tradition, is the one most susceptible to accepting tradition as an excuse for idiocy. For 150 years batters have been commanded to stoically trot around the bases after a home run, lest they be found guilty of “showing up” the pitcher.  It used to be even worse—I remember when a player would hit a home run, and then next batter would inevitably get plunked.  The pitcher had to punish the next batter because the previous batter had somehow insulted the pitcher by doing his job.  Hey, pitcher, you don’t want to be “shown up”?  make better pitches.

I also recall the furor when a Mets rookie named Lastings Milledge came up in 2006 at hit his first home run in his home ballpark, and he high fived fans in the stands as he went to his position in right field. “That young man will learn how to play the game right,” intoned the announcer, who couldn’t have been more disgusted by this spontaneous outpouring of exuberance if it had included photos of Roseanne Barr naked.

Things may be on the verge of changing.  Reining AL MVP Josh Donaldson hit a home run against the Minnesota Twins.  Obviously this was an insult to pitcher Phil Hughes, who greeted Donaldson with an extremely inside pitch in his next at bat.  Hughes next pitch was behind Donaldson, but plate umpire Ripperger didn’t even issue a warning to Hughes.  Donaldson’s manager John Gibbons came out f the dugout to complain and was ejected for his efforts.

Maybe, you say, Hughes wasn’t deliberately throwing at Donaldson. Maybe the two pitches just “got away” from Hughes.  Right.  Hughes is a professional pitcher, someone who makes his living throwing a baseball accurately, but after Donaldson hit a home run off of him he threw a pitch four feet off the plate behind Donaldson?  I’ve heard of nibbling at the corners, but missing a target by four feet is more than a little “off.”

Of course the Blue Jays aren’t innocent; later in the game they hit Minnesota catcher Kurt Suzuki in the bottom of the inning.  That’s always the way with these beanball wars; you always HAVE to retaliate.  The logic is this: if I throw at you, you will be intimidated, but if you throw at me, I’ll retaliate.  It never occurs to anyone that if they would retaliate if they were thrown at, then the other team will retaliate when THEY are thrown at.

A baseball is a weapon. Using a weapon against another person is wrong.  If you want some idea of what a baseball can do when thrown, look at what happened to pitcher Ryan Vogelsong when he was hit by a pitch (not intentionally).  Okay, pitchers want the inside part of the plate, but Hughes apparently wanted the batter’s box to count as a strike zone.

If pitchers insist on enforcing “the code” and throwing at players who run out a home run too slowly, or too quickly, or admire their homers for too long, or not long enough, then they deserve to have the inside part f the plate taken away from them by the umps.  Managers ordering retaliatory plunkings should be summarily ejected. 

I know there was one umpire who didn’t believe in enforcing the rule to eject pitchers who “intentionally” threw at batters because, he said, how could I possibly read the pitcher’s mind? The rule says “intentionally” so it must assume it is possible to infer intent.  Did the batter homer in the previous at bat?  Did the prior batter homer?  Was one of the pitcher’s teammates hit by a pitch after homering?  It isn’t rocket science.  And if occasionally a pitcher is ejected for a pitch that did get away from him, well, he should be a good enough pitcher not to let that happen.

It is time to end the beanball culture in baseball.  Maybe pitchers used to know how to throw at batters, hitting them with a change up near the rump, but today’s pitchers do seem to have less control; throwing behind a batter is extremely dangerous (batters tend to instinctively back up when they see a pitch coming inside).  Knock off the macho posturing and play ball.

TV Review--Houdini & Doyle

TV Review—Houdini and Doyle

When a TV show is an unexpected hit, there is a rush to replicate it.  Lost triggered a deluge of TV shows with confounding mysteries and vaguely sci-fi happenings, and they all had one thing in common; they failed rapidly.

The X-Files debuted 23 years ago, and its basic premise—two investigators, one a Believer, one a skeptic—still shows up in the DNA of series hoping to mine the same vein that Chris Carter has been milking for 23 years (and is still milking, if the moderate success of the six-episode X-Files arc is any indication).

The latest is a Fox series called Houdini and Doyle, and yes, that is Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle.  The latest manifestation of the “quirky companion to law enforcement” meme has well-known debunker Houdini teaming with spiritualist Doyle to investigate crimes dealing with the supernatural.  They are aided by a female constable who is so integral to the plot that I shan’t mention her again in this review.

Houdini and Doyle fails on a number of levels, but let’s start with casting.  Steven Mangan plays Doyle with all the seriousness of a music hall comic.  He completely lacks the gravitas necessary to play the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who was as quick witted as Holmes and pompous enough to think he could kill off Holmes to concentrate on “serious” writing.  The same problem plagues Michael Weston, a fine actor in small roles who can hardly fill Houdini’s larger than life persona.  Oscar winner Adrian Brody did a much better job playing Houdini in a TV movie last year; it is probably unfair to compare character actor Weston to an Academy Award winner, but that’s what happens when you take the role.

The script is confusing, hemmed in between having to appear to be a crime with supernatural elements to draw Doyle’s attention, while being ultimately mundane to satisfy Houdini’s belief.  A medium gives Doyle a clue that seems to be legitimate, but then later she is shown to be a fraud.  A ghostly apparition appears to Doyle, but it’s revealed to be Houdini’s assistant on a wire even though the ghost was clearly transparent.  It all makes very little sense. 

Better examples of mystery TV shows set in the same era abound, from the BBC’s Ripper Street (apparently resurrected from cancellation) and CBC’s Murdoch Mysteries, about to enter its tenth season.  These shows try to recreate the Victorian era; Houdini and Doyle are content to put modern characters in funny clothes and have them speak the occasional aphorism that sounds olde-timey.

I cut pilot episodes a lot of slack, but I don’t foresee Houdini and Doyle getting much better.  As someone once said (I can’t remember who), casting is the one mistake you can’t fix in post-production.  Mangan and Weston are both terribly wrong for their roles, and the fact that the roles are written as a modern buddy comedy with lots of quips and banter just makes it worse.  As we enter the doldrums of summer, I may give some more episodes a try just because, well, Lucifer is off until next season.  When you make Lucifer look good by comparison, your TV show is not long for this world.