There’s a cold wind blowing and a forecast of snow. But no, it’s not the end of football season or the middle of basketball season. It’s actually the beginning of the baseball, softball and track seasons.
I’ve experienced some of the worst weather of the year while watching baseball and softball games. Some of my most memorably frigid moments have occurred at the St, Michaels Invitational softball tournament, but this year Mother Nature outdid herself. Not only did it snow a bunch (5-7 inches), but the temperature plunged into the teens. I hesitate to call this latest storm on March 27 a spring storm. It was more like a winter storm in spring.
Looks like no apricots again this year.
The weather is just part of the reason I’m not too crazy about baseball, especially at the small high school level.
At small schools, the talent pool is limited. I sit through games where routine plays become adventures, but this doesn’t make the game more exciting. Fans cheer for errors these days, but I just groan because it’s not good baseball. I groan at errors no matter which team makes them, including the team I’m rooting against. Sometimes, both teams are playing bad baseball. The outcome is determined not by which team plays better, but by which one plays worse.
The opening-round games of this year’s Northern Rio Grande baseball tournament had scores of 32-2 and 19-1. This is not good baseball.
There are only four teams (McCurdy, Mora, Peñasco and Pecos) in the Northern Rio Grande tournament this year. A fifth school, Mesa Vista, had to cancel its games at the tournament because it lacked players.
It’s difficult for small schools to get enough good players to make a competitive baseball team, as Mesa Vista is finding out. It becomes even harder when a school has a track team too. In most cases, the track team suffers and the baseball team isn’t very good either. McCurdy used to be a track powerhouse until it started a baseball program.
Mesa Vista has a good track program and, in my opinion, its athletes would be better off concentrating on running.
There’s another factor working against high-school baseball — the incredibly shrinking strike zone. It began in the major leagues as a way to boost excitement. Pitchers in the pros can throw meatballs anytime they want, but they’ll get hammered if they do. They rely on nibbling at the outside edges of the strike zone and tricking hitters into a swing.
But as the practice filtered down to the lower levels, it resulted in more walks and longer games.
At a recent baseball game I attended, there were nine walks in the first inning.
Finally, metal bats have totally changed the game at the high school level. The ball jumps off these bats. Combine that with bad pitching, and home runs are much more common.
When you put all these things together — small strike zone, poor fielding and metal bats — you may get more runs, but you don’t get good baseball. You get long, drawn-out games, with spectators sitting for hours in that foul spring weather.
Don’t get me wrong. When I was a kid in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I enjoyed playing baseball. But I didn’t feel good about winning a game if it was because the other team played badly. If you’re a player you know the difference, or at least you should. Now when a team makes so many errors that the batter, despite hitting a routine groundball, rounds the bases to score, this has become a home run.
When I was a kid, no one on my team, myself included, would even think of calling this a home run, nor would the fans. It is now.