As a coach and sports enthusiast, I can say for certain that the world is seeing bigger, faster, and stronger athletes every year. However, the sports we love are often not changing at the same rate as the athletes; most sports are receiving only slight tweaks each year with the focus being primarily on safety. With the development of the ADHD generation (and the up-and-coming ADH-what’s-that-over-there-D generation), it’s time to make these sports more exciting for the casual and easily distracted viewer. To that end I present you my realistic (and way more awesome) proposals for how to fix six popular sports.
1. Baseball
The Problem: I have to start with baseball since I am a big time baseball hater. Watching baseball on TV is awesome when I want to take a nap. I will allow that a baseball game is much more entertaining in person, but still slightly less entertaining than watching paint dry with a hot dog and an $8 beer.
The Realistic Fix: While work is already being done to make the games shorter, something needs to be done about the length of the season. The regular season is 162 games. How in the world can games in the first half of the year feel meaningful if there is still 100 more coming? A lot of these games are broadcast while the masses are at work because they are borderline pointless. Between the insanely excessive regular season, the playoffs, and spring training (February is not spring, by the way), baseball is played almost year round. No sport should fill Sportscenter with highlights more than eight months. I won’t be greedy here; cut the season down to about half of the current length and games mean more, players rest longer during the offseason, and a larger percentage of the games will be seen live by the target audience.
The Way More Awesome Fix: Although Futurama took many of the best ideas with blernsball, major improvements could still be made to make baseball crazy awesome. Imagine baseball taking place with a ball that is more rubbery like a lacrosse ball and the field encased in a dome; there would be no more out of the park homeruns since the ball would be trapped in the field of play and the outfielders could catch the ball off the sides of the dome. Additionally, I say give all the basemen and the catcher an American Gladiators style blocking pad to knock the baserunner away from the base. No one makes fun of a player for packing on a little weight in the offseason when he trucks them on the way to first.
No one gets to first base safely. No one.
Scrumming with Shakespeare 