Mark Twain once famously said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Similarly, baseball fans everywhere love to gripe and complain and talk about all the things they don’t like about the sport.
So here’s your chance to do something (on paper, anyway). You are now the absolute, unchallenged dictator of MLB, and you can do three things to fix it.
Someone recently asked me what I’d do as the MLB autocrat, and I didn’t even have to think twice:
1. Get rid of the DH and interleague play.
2. Change the replay system: Hire a new crew of people from outside the sport, give them comprehensive training, and make them the N.Y. review team. When there is a challenge, they are not told what the initial call was nor who is challenging. Set a time limit; if the current slowness is even partly due to not enough review crews then have more than one team working every day/night. And pop-up slides are no longer reviewable.
3. More umpire accountability, especially with regard to balls and strikes. Set an accuracy threshold that has to be maintained; if someone is consistently below that level he gets demoted. And choose the postseason crews based on those numbers.
What would *you* do?
