WEEKLY WHINE

Even baseball isn't immune to partisan politics

Well it's interleague time in Major League Baseball, and that can only mean one thing: People get to argue over whether it's a good idea. The only reason it's not a good idea is that the two leagues are still playing under different rules. If they could just agree on whether to DH or not, the concept of interleague baseball would make a whole lotta sense. You know, all of a sudden Jimmy Key has to bat and you have to shuffle the lineup to find a place for Edgar Martinez to play. On the other side, you'd have to decide whether to let Kevin Brown throw another inning because you don't have to pinch-hit for him and you have to dust off one of your benchwarmers to fill the free spot.

The bottom line is, as long as fans think baseball is run by a bunch of morons, they're not gonna show up. Let's think. Nobody likes Marge Schott, but then, she doesn't like anybody. Bud Selig isn't getting anything done. The small market teams are whining that they don't have enough money, even though they put together a team that challenges for the division lead, or at least the wild card. Insert your favorite George Steinbrenner joke here. Interleague play is a smart concept, but when you put it in the context of a bureaucracy just trying to sell more tickets, it suddenly becomes less appealing.

Anyway, you still need a good commish to make stuff happen. Remember Pete Rozelle? Sure you do. He was in charge of the NFL from the 1960s to the 1980s. What happened during then? He organized the merger with the AFL, which had really different rules [did somebody say two-point conversion?]. But when he put them together, you got one league with one rulebook. Sure baseball has had two leagues for nearly a hundred years, but for much of that time, they could at least agree that pitchers would have to swing a bat. If you just tie the leagues together a little bit tighter, as in not give them their own leaders, we would be much happier.

That's extremely clear to us at this point: The AL and NL are gonna have to patch up their differences. Look at Microsoft and Netscape. Even they agreed to go by HTML standards instead of continually trying to one-up each other with their browsers. Of course, that was at least partly because ZDNet Anchordesk sponsored the Make-A-Difference petition that allowed ordinary people like you and me to send our complaints straight to the top. I would do that, but if Bud Selig reads this, he probably wouldn't be too thrilled to see me.