We’re not going to get a real MLB season in 2020. That’s not to say that we won’t see a baseball season in some form this year, but we won’t see the long ass 162-game season that is part of MLB’s charm or part of the reason you hate it, depending on your perspective.
The marathon of a season is essential to what the product is, and with the way players are hitting the owners with passive-aggressive subtweets every time one of those wack ass proposals comes through
Whatever the proposal was, it made Andrew McCutchen tweet “LOL” like a woman who just found out they man was cheating. That’s not a good sign for the progress of this labor dispute.
This player tweet is also far from ideal for a league that wanted to get going in July.
Yeah, negotiations aren’t exactly going well.
Despite the owners basically trying to run out the clock as if they don’t actually want play to resume this season there is a provision in the CBA that would allow the owners to force a 48-game season. At that point you’ve reduced the marathon season to a 5k fun run and invited the fans to put an unofficial asterisk next to the name of whoever wins the title. (Not that asterisks mean much in the long run. They put an asterisk on that Barry Bonds home run record ball and all I remember is seeing his chemically-enhanced ass launching balls into the Pacific Ocean and sinking several small boats every time he did it.)
If baseball wants to give us a version of the sport that looks nothing like what we’re used to, that’s fine. But if you’re gonna do that dumb shit, you gotta commit. You gotta be bout it bout it like Master P in ’96. If we have to watch baseball that doesn’t feel like baseball we need to incorporate the best mini game from the best baseball sim of all time.
I know this bat-control mini game from MVP Baseball 2005 raises more questions than answers, but let’s start with the obvious. This will not replace traditional baseball games. In my modest proposal (that doesn’t suggest eating babies) this would completely replace the truncated baseball season. Social distancing could still be enforced since we only need one pitcher and one batter on the field at a time.
Teams would go through the batting order and have each hitter face the opposing pitcher for one round of the MVP Baseball Bat-Control Challenge sponsored by EA Sports. If the batter reaches a certain point threshold he wins the round for his team; if the pitcher keeps the batter from reaching his point total then his team gets the win. Each team would have nine chances to bat just like tradition baseball so anybody watching can at least be reminded of what the sport should look like under normal circumstances.
As you can see in the above video points are accumulated by hitting the ball to the correct field and by hitting those bonus items when the ball travels a certain distance. Ramps will help get the ball farther and over the fence to hit those parked cars beyond the fence, but if MLB wants to do justice to MVP Baseball 2005, they’ll be sure to include the tractors.
Obviously the moving targets are worth more points than the stationary targets and they will be driven by underpaid minor leaguers. People may think the notion of having minor league players drive around the outfield so they can get hit by line drives is cruel, but is it any more cruel than when MLB planned to cut a bunch of MiLB teams altogether? At least my plan involves them getting paid more than minimum wage, so I’m definitely not the bad guy here. I hope your favorite team’s #29 ranked prospect doesn’t get rattled when that ball bashes off the window of that piece of farming equipment he may or may not know how to drive. We all gotta make adjustments in this post-Corona world and for some that means providing a moving target for a bastardized version of baseball since the owners don’t want real baseball this season. The addition of the tractor will be key to the authenticity and integrity of the MVP Baseball Bat-Control Challenge sponsored by EA Sports and John Deere.
Another thing you probably noticed from the above video were the mysterious force fields that propel balls back toward the infield. Obviously, this is unrealistic. No one is asking MLB to produce artificial gravity that would keep balls from finding the gap. I don’t trust MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred to oversee a group of scientists for that project.
If we’re being realistic we’ll need to create a series of small but stable black holes instead. Tell Manfred to get Niel deGrasse Tyson and nem on the phone.
If we can get him to stop solving the mysteries of the universe and smugly tweeting I know he could help save baseball.
We already created some black holes in the lab and since the billionaire owners don’t want to pay for a player’s salary, that leaves room in a budget for the proton accelerator that collides quarks at high speeds and open up a nice little void of doom and indescribable destruction in the outfield. Let’s hope your favorite team’s #29 ranked prospect is just as good at avoiding line drives as he is at avoiding those small rips in the fabric of space and time that have been artificially created on earth as a direct affront to the heavens just for the sake of the not-at-all-silly and very serious MVP Baseball Bat-Control Challenge sponsored by EA Sports, John Deere and The Horrors of Space.
Like most baseball fans I would prefer not to see this version of the game. A season where at least half the normally scheduled games was played could have been a possibility despite the Rona. Even if the loose plans to play all games with players sequestered in Arizona and Florida was deeply flawed, the basic plan of paying players a prorated salary should have basically been agreeable to all. This didn’t start going off the rails until the owners decided to save some bread by suggesting further salary cuts to make up for the fact that the stadiums would be empty.
The only way for baseball to be less of a joke than it already is is to completely lean into the joke. This can only be accomplished with the MVP Baseball Bat-Control Challenge sponsored by EA Sports, John Deere, The Horrors of Space and The Same Greedy Billionaires That Always Fuck Everything Up While Blaming the Labor Force for the Lack of progress in Negotiations.
Suits and 40s 