The Kansas City Star from Kansas City, Missouri • 196

Can Baseball Save Itself? Such a schedule would also allow time for interleague games during the season which one American League executive told us would be single biggest box-office hypo we could apply Bringing National League stars occasionally to our town would bring the Cans out in But few of the club owners are ready to play ball on weekends only They say that such a radical move would be financially impossible Frank Cashen Executive Vice-President of the Baltimore Orioles paints out: play on weekends only and continue to pay players the same high salaries our own payroll runs about $700000 for instance have to at least double the price of tickets to stay in business And the word is not necessarily box-office magic A Wednesday or Thursday night game you know often draws a bigger crowd than a sweltering Saturday or Sunday day and warming-up of pitchers and arguments with umpires intentional walks and slow changing of teams on the field after the third out baseball lacks the continuous action of football and basketball where the speed-up is strictly enforced by time-clocks This pitchers will be limited to 20 seconds between pitches when there are no runners on the bases just as football and basketball players have time limits within which they must snap the ball or take a shot or be penalized And a move to keep managers off the field during games is gaining strength But these could prove mere beginnings The more progressive club managements have been discussing and studying a report of a speed cd-up experimental baseball game between two Southern college teams a while ago in which pitchers wanned on the sidelines while their teams were still at bat Pith runners were used for pitchers and intentionally-walked batters were waved to first base without waiting out four balls Players were required to run to and from field positions between innings The game which lasted ten innings was completed in only one hour and forty minutes But many sports writers and devoted Cans fed that the need for faster action is only a part of wrong with baseball There is also the complaint that the sport suffers from overexposure in too many games Twelve years ago when the late Bert Bell was playing a leading role as commissioner of the National Football League in developing pro football into a popular spectator sport he was asked if he could bring a similar stimulation to major league baseball Bell shook his head draw big crowds at every he said you play games every he success of any professional sport today depends heavily on its exposure on nation-wide TV and the unpredictable length of its games is a serious handicap for baseball in this respect use my name because not supposed to admit that anything wrong with says the director of one major league local telecasts face it the popularity of any sport today is no longer measured by the turnstile more people now watch one pro football game than all the people who saw all the games at Notre Dame during all the years Knute Rockne coached there baseball been pushed as a network TV attraction because how can you schedule a baseball game for a network time slot when you know how long the game is going to last? A while ago NBC was all set to put major league baseball on its network The day before the deal was to be closed the Mels and die Giants played a Sunday double-header game that lasted until 1 1 130 at night Imagine what that would have done to scheduled TV programs across the country! The next morning NBC dropped the whole idea look at die fuss when NBC cut off a Jets-Raiders game to get Heidi started on time or when CBS broke into a Vikings-Colts game to show us the astronauts on their way to the moon! you want my opinion about wrong with baseball it Baseball teaches kids a great moral lesson the game is never over until the last man is out Unfortunately those same words give cold chills to the television Mlajor league baseball finally being up to its failing popularity is moving into the spring training camps in an experimental mood which may bring drastic changes to the old tradition-bound national pastime even before the coming season opens Alarmed by the dullness of last weak-hitting pennant races the hierarchy of baseball has instituted a playoff system modeled after pro football and basketball It has also taken a few small steps toward giving the game more offensive punch shrinking the strike zone and lowering the mound But more revolutionary basic changes are sorely needed to make the action chi the diamond Caster more exciting and more continuous The spring training games will be testing laboratories for such innovations and some of them could be radical enough to enrage the ghosts of Connie Mack John McGraw and the other founding fathers of the modern big leagues Sure to be tried will be die unlimited use of finch hitters instead of pitchers in the batting order and the free substitution of pinch-runners for any player who is slow on the base paths The introduction of speedy runners (who would not be obliged to bat or to cover a field position) could open baseball to sprinting stars from college track teams as pro football has already welcomed speedsters like Bob Hayes and Jim Hines And if baseball opens the door to such specialization could the next move be complete defensive and offensive platoons? In its efforts to make the game more attractive management is taking steps to cut down delays on the field always a bugaboo in every baseball park With its dragging time-outs for changing Paseball dub owners recoiled in horror from a proposal submitted to Tins Week by three fans in the Midwest Wallace Henry Otto Toomey and Michael Kelly who contended that baseball would cure its ills if the major leagues played games on week-ends only one game on Friday night another on Saturday afternoon and a double-header on Sunday Fewer games these Cains argued would make each game more important and more eagerly awaited like football and thus more appealing A weekend schedule would also improve the quality of baseball they claimed because each best pitchers would bea vailahle foreach weekend series with four days of rest during the week.