Changes to baseball won't bring fans back

The Major League Baseball season is upon us.

The game is looking less like the “National Pastime” each year.

I remember when every little town or city had its own baseball team. There was no talk then of major changes to the game’s rules.

The truth is that the sport has lost a lot of its fan base. Rule changes proposed and made won’t bring them back.

Sports fans have changed, and I fear they have left baseball behind.

Fans now like tougher sport action, the kind that leaves a targeted quarterback or receiver on the field and hauled off on a stretcher.

Length of the games and pitchers taking too much time on the mound between pitches are only a couple of things that some complain about. I remember when sports writers could write a full column on a relief pitcher just walking from the bullpen to the mound. That was the level of interest the game had.

At least for me, making all these rule changes is taking, and will continue to take, the subtlety and finesse from the game.

I covered professional baseball for a couple of years while with the Idaho Statesman in Boise. Milwaukee had placed a team in Boise in the Class C Pioneer League. The league was made up of the larger cities in Idaho and Montana.

I wouldn’t say that league play would draw huge crowds, but the fans were loyal and teams fed parent teams’ need for the better players moving to the top.

The Boise Braves had their spring training in Waycross, Georgia, and it was still the days that African American players were refused service as they headed to Boise from Waycross to start their season.

It was my experience that all the players had one goal in common: making it to the majors.

Boise was constantly bombarded by head-office officials and baseball scouts to look at the talent on the field. They were always good for a feature story or column if you could get them to tell you, really, why they were there.

The Boise Braves were managed at that time by player-manager Billy Smith, a pretty good baseball player himself. He was barely older than his players on the field.

There wasn’t fuss by the baseball fans back then. They understood that the game was all about things that suddenly happened to make you feel glad you came to the park.

In each of the two years I covered them, I took some time to take a trip with the team to other cities in the league. There were no plane flights to Pocatello or Idaho Falls, Billings or Great Falls. It was by bus, which gave a writer an opportunity to get close and personal with the manager and players. They would talk about making it to the majors, and how they saw how it could happen.

Several did make it. I remember one player who did and whom I got to know a little bit. His name was Tony Cloninger. You could tell just by watching him that he was going to move up.

Others who moved up through Boise were Bob Uecker, Sandy Alomar, Bill Lucas and Clay Carroll, to name a few.

Covering the games was fun. I would go out to the park well ahead of game time and sit around and talk with fans. It was after the game that was tough, when I had to dash to the office to write my story. Those who haven’t worked the magic of writing on deadline don’t know what they are missing.

Player-manager Billy Smith was a mild-mannered person. When pressed, he became something else. I saw him tossed out of several games. One time after being tossed, he made his way to the press box and used our phone to continue calling the shots until the umpire figured what was going on and put a stop to it.

I recall on one occasion when the official scorer didn’t show that I was asked to do the job. The official scorer calls errors, and I suddenly learned why. It always went bad when you had to call errors, and the players got a shot at you the next day.

Baseball is OK the way it was; the fans have changed, and I fear for good. It’s the finesse of the game that made it the “National Pastime,” and the more you try to change it, the more difficult it will be to get the fan base back.