Is it time to unify baseball's rules?
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share thisTonight, Chien-Ming Wang will start for the New York Yankees against the Washington Nationals.
Nobody will particularly care, except that Wang has a rather outrageous 21.60 ERA as a starter this season, and this could be the two-time 19-game winner's final chance to stick in the Yankees' starting rotation.
For the sake of this discussion, let's assume Wang pitches like a two-time 19-game winner. We'll call it seven innings strong, six hits, a run or two, a walk perhaps. Joe Girardi only reluctantly pulling him from the game, knowing he can probably get an out or two in the eighth. Nothing that will get ESPN to send Peter Gammons to Yankee Stadium for a live Wang remote, mind you. Just something indicative of the pitcher Wang has been in the past.
Let's just say he gives them that much. What next?
If he stays in the starting rotation, Wang's next start could come as soon as Tuesday. At Atlanta. Where Wang will have to bat.
The last time he batted, the mere act of running the bases caused the tendons in his right foot to explode, and he missed the rest of the 2008 season. Before that injury in Houston last June 15, Wang was 54-20 with a 3.79 ERA in his career. Since, he's 0-4 with a 14.34 ERA.
Interleague play's merits have been debated every year at this time since commissioner Bud Selig instituted it in 1997, and because it is too good a money-maker and too valuable a conversation piece to this day, it will be debated every year at this time because interleague play is going nowhere.
That's fine, as far as I'm concerned. The novelty of interleague play, for some reason, hasn't worn off after all these years. There's still something about seeing the Yankees play the Mets, and the Dodgers face the Angels. Seeing the two first-place teams in the West - the Dodgers and the surprising Texas Rangers - play last weekend was intriguing. I don't believe watching the Red Sox play the Phillies in June will spoil my October should the Red Sox and Phillies meet again in the World Series.
But that doesn't mean I don't look at Chien-Ming Wang and see everything that is patently unfair about the interleague system as it is currently set up. In a time when the competition is so close that four divisions - the AL East, AL Central, NL East and NL West - were decided by three games or less last season, it's tough to justify the fact that the teams competing for those titles aren't playing equal schedules. It's tough to justify asking National League teams to use designated hitters, when they don't employ them. It's also tough to justify asking American League teams that employ designated hitters to relegate them to the bench, sometimes for a week at a time.
Like interleague play or not, it's patently unfair - when one game can mean the difference between a wild-card berth and no postseason at all - to ask teams and players to do things they aren't normally asked to do as many as nine times per season.
Things like, say, American League pitchers running the bases.
Of course, we'd all prefer the game hadn't devolved to this state, where not every player on every roster can be asked to do fundamental things like bunt and run the bases effectively. Question is, do we blame someone like Wang for collapsing the first time he needed to run the bases as a big leaguer? Or, do we blame the system, which allows Hideki Matsui to do half of Wang's job for him?
Look, teams play 162 games. One hundred fifty-three of them, at most, will be played under the same rules. Chien-Ming Wang isn't going to train differently because he might have to run the bases once all season, and the Yankees aren't going to ask him to. Just like the Mets aren't going to sign a good slugger who is useless defensively because they play at Camden Yards in June.
History won't see Wang's injury as the motivation for eliminating interleague play. But maybe, things like this will be the motivation for unifying the rules - either eliminating the designated hitter in the American League, or adding it in the National League.
Might seem outrageous now, but all it will take is a few more NL teams who played the AL East that finish a game out in the Wild Card race to a team that played the AL Central.
Or, a few more AL teams crossing their fingers, hoping their ninth batter doesn't reach the bases - because who knows what will happen if he actually has to run around them.
Contact the writer: dcollins@timesshamrock.com
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