Is anyone watching MLB playoffs?

[Big RR]

Unless you want to festoon the stadia with cameras, sensors, infra-red beams, and other electronic gadgetry with every other call being subject to review, much like it is now in American football?

"Every" aside (many calls are not subject to review in NFL or college football), is that necessarily bad. Do you really want human error to be determinative of the game result?

[BoSoxGal]

Do you really want human error to be determinative of the game result?

Why shouldn’t baseball be like life?

[Big RR]

Why can't it be better?

I'm not a baseball fan (watch it only occasionally), but I do not see making it less prone to error as being a bad thing (although I concede some purists might disagree). It's like the Olympics and swimming--taking away the guys with the stopwatches and adding in the electronics to measure when the finish pad is touched makes sure the race goes to the swiftest. Baseball could be the same. Shouldn't a game that specifies that the pitchers mound be 60 feet 6 inches (not just around 60 feet) from home plate (and at an elevation of 10 inches above it, not around a foot) aim for that same precision in making calls?

[ex-khobar Andy]

I see that the NYY 'fan' who ripped the ball from Betts' glove will be banned from Game 5.

I personally think he should be banned from all baseball grounds - kids, college and professional - for life. He'd probably plead that he'd made a mistake. N fucking O - that's not a mistake and probably - because sports betting is legal in many jurisdictions - an attempt to interfere with a game and thus criminal.

I know that there are times when a fan, trying to catch a homer or a foul ball, misses and ends up affecting the game. That could be called a mistake and it probably happens once or twice a season and we all see the replays. We can say 'he should have left it to the fielder' but we can all see that it was a close call. This one wasn't and besides he isn't an 11-year-old.

[MajGenl.Meade]

There go the judge

[BoSoxGal]

Brooklyn triumphs!! WOOT!!!!

[MajGenl.Meade]

Why, that must be the Mets fan reacting!

[Big RR]

Brooklyn BSG? Having grown up in Brooklyn a little after the Dodgers left, I can attest that there was a lot of animosity against the deserters (at least among my friends' fathers--my dad didn't watch much sports at all). However, this animosity evaporated when it came to anything involving the Yankees--they were hated much more than the LA Dodgers ever were (even though abandoning Brooklyn was a much bigger reason to hate the Dodgers--but that's baseball fans); I do recall a lot of rooting for the Dodgers against the Yankees in the 1963 world series (as I recall, the Didgers won it). I have no doubt many of my friends' fathers would have cheered the loss of the Yankees this year if they were still around. Indeed, I have still kept that Dodgers tradition to this date.

[Bicycle Bill]

... I do recall a lot of rooting for the Dodgers against the Yankees in the 1963 world series (as I recall, the Didgers won it).

Wasn't that 'The Year The Yankees Lost in Four"?   It's been a long, long time, but I remember back in (Catholic) grade school I used to get a comic-book type magazine called 'Treasure Chest', and there was one issue that had a three or four-page treatment of that series vs. the Dodgers under that title.

Incidentally, back in 1964 this same magazine ran a 10-part serial story entitled "Pettigrew for President".   Looking ahead to the future, it told a fictitious story about the 1976 election, the same year as America's Bicentennial.   The title character was Tim Pettigrew, who was supposedly the governor of New York — but the interesting thing was that the candidate's face was never shown, and it wasn't until the final installment that it was revealed that Pettigrew was a black man.

This was ground-breaking fare indeed, being delivered under the guise of moral and religious-themed entertainment to the youth of America!!   Wonder what MAGAts would say if they knew that THIS was also a part of the era they want to return to when they loudly proclaim "Make America Great Again"?

-"BB"-

[Big RR]

Bill--I'd have to check to make sure, but I do believe the Dodgers swept the Yankees in the Series that year.

Another thing I just recalled; most of the games were played weekday afternoons, and we all tried to smuggle transistor radios into the classroom to listen during class. To remedy this, my teacher, in something I have always seen as an unbelievable gesture, set up an inning score chart on the blackboard and permitted the score to be updated on an inning by inning basis, allowing one student to sit in the hall with a radio for one inning to keep track of the game. I don't think she even liked baseball, but she knew it mattered to many of us. She even used batting average calculations in arithmetic as an example, and I recall being assigned a book on Jackie Robinson for a book report. For an old lady (really, not as old as I am now), she was pretty progressive in her methods.