Rich Eisen of the NFL Network got people talking when he tweeted this somewhat insane notion:
There's an idea being floated in MLB of a manager being allowed to bat whoever he wants when trailing in the 9th.
— Rich Eisen (@richeisen) February 21, 2018
MLB exec: "No other sport has the best players sitting on the bench in the final minutes of a game. Imagine LeBron, Brady, Renaldo watching from the sidelines" https://t.co/JGts5naG4U
At the outset, let me note that, yes, if the other team has the ball and they’re taking a knee while beating the Patriots, you can bet your bippy Tom Brady will be watching from the sidelines, but I’m not here to discuss the merits of this proposal.
Eisen is a bigtime sports media personality, so if he tweets something out, I get it, people are going to run with it a bit longer than if it was tweeted out by Joe Schmo. But I am willing to bet the lives of my children that no one in Major League Baseball is seriously discussing this, even if it was mentioned once or twice in passing in some brainstorming session. The odds of it being actually presented as a plausible rule change by anyone are so long that C-3PO would start calculating it, steam would start coming out of his ears and his head would blow up.
This is being picked up by a lot of people online because (a) it’s fun and/or outrageous; and (b) people are kinda mad at Major League Baseball for pace-of-play ideas and other things they think run counter to the purity of the game or whatever, but I guarantee you, there is no there there.
At the very least, such a plan would not even be worth doing until we could perfect time travel or transform the entire game into holograms, thereby allowing Brian Snitker to pinch-hit the 1971 version of Hank Aaron in a close game. Go big or go home, I say.
