Wednesday, June 9, 1999 | 9:33 a.m.
Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.
Round and round they go, circling the bases and adding up astronomical scores.
Baseball has gone ballistic, with runs, runs, everywhere runs.
The Grand Old Game has changed, dramatically. Low-scoring games are now as infrequent as royal flushes.
A 1-0 pitchers' duel is just about extinct.
According to one local professional gambler, every day in the month of May at least one Major League Baseball team scored in double figures. That had to be a first.
History is being made but is everyone happy?
The answer, obviously, is no.
There are teams that have scored 10 or more runs in a game and lost, and there have been 17-1 scores. That type of offensive explosion is counterproductive, as the open seats in the late innings of these games underscores.
The over/under betting lines have gone up, up, up in recent weeks as the weather across the country warms and the baseballs fly a little easier to the deeper regions of increasingly shallow ballparks.
Every new stadium constructed in recent years or on the drawing board today has been built or is being built with two things in mind: comfort and offense.
The comfort part is nice. The accent on offense can be offensive at times.
Statistics are skewered and have an estranged relationship with those of the past. Whereas 20 home runs was once a banner season for a mid-level slugger, today you have to be capable of hitting 20 just to play shortstop.
Home-run records are toppled by multiple players and run-scoring records snap on something of a daily basis. The parks are cozy to an extreme and the balls are wound for action.
As if the hitters need even more help, pitching is diluted due to never-ending expansion and youngsters who once received the appropriate seasoning in the minor leagues are now slingshotted to the majors before they're eligible to vote.
This will be a passing fad only if MLB reacts by loosening the seams on the ball -- which is unlikely, given it denies the balls are wound tighter than ever -- or raises the height of the pitching mound. Another solution: Call strikes based on the rule-book definition of a strike, which probably hasn't happened in 50 years.
Here's something else for the baseball bigwigs to ponder: If the typical American sports fan was so enamored with offense and exotic scores, the Arena Football League would have been a smashing success.
Think about it. The AFL plays its games on a 50-yard field and it leads to scoring play after scoring play, a virtual plethora of touchdowns, as well as finals like 54-47. Yet the game bores the tar out of most people and the league, although it has been in existence since 1987, is constantly shuffling teams and changing locales in an effort to find some untapped resource.
If people really wanted nothing but offense in a sporting event, the Arena league and its ersatz style of football would be hugely successful.
But it's not. And that can be the result of many things but for the sake of this argument let's say it's because fans have their limits when it comes to nonstop scoring plays.
It gets monotonous, far more monotonous than a 1-0 game.
The Good Old Days may be gone yet baseball should give some thought to retaining a few of its once-cherished values.
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