And entrepreneur looks at sports

Never ask an entrepreneur to truly love sports.  They always see ways to greatly improve the game or change the game.  And why in heck do the people in charge not do this? 

            Baseball has constant battles between umpires who call balls and strikes and the batters and pitchers.  We could easily eliminate this by using electronics to call balls and strikes the way the broadcasters show the strike zone and the ball when it came across the plate.  Wouldn’t this make calls much more indisputable?

            But the sports I really don’t understand are hockey and pro basketball concerning fouls.  Why, in hockey can you come up behind someone and grab both arms and hold him back.  This is called a “check” even though the guy might be say a Pole or a Swede. And it’s legal.  Yes, but totally debilitating for the guy being held. If he were an agile skater, he could  develop a really accurate jackass kick  to the checker’s groin region. “Whoops, sorry.  My foot slipped.” Doing this with a steel skate would really teach the defender never to try this hold-down stuff again.  And maybe he couldn’t have kids ever, just in remembrance.

            Worse yet is the National Butcherball Association’s rules on fouls.  It differs so radically from college, high school, AAU or any other cager venue that it’s almost unrecognizable.  I was watching Rondo get clobbered by the Celtics.  He was just dribbling. A guy jumped on his back, never touched the ball, No foul called but Rondo missed his shot by 4 feet.  The similar strange foul ruling occurred when Westbrook went up for a layup.  The Rocket’s defender tried to block the shot from behind, mostly missed the ball and nearly took Westbrook’s head off.  They showed it again and again on replay, the blithely unconcerned announcers saying it was just a common foul, not a flagrant.  Well, if that’s not a flagrant, what would keep some team from having a couple martial arts experts on the bench for purposes of ruining someone’s career and making it look accidental.  I predict that the dumb-jock NBA will persist in their butcherball, this street ball, until someone really famous gets a career ended.

 This happened in 1920 in major league baseball when Chapman got killed.  Pitchers used to juice balls and rub them with dirt to make the ball hard to see.  In a game at dusk, Chapman couldn’t see the ball in the sun coming at him, got beaned and died the next day of a skull fracture.  Thereafter, baseball suddenly recanted from their love of the rubbed ball used for an entire game.  After that, any slightly dirty ball was discarded, and that is why they use 60 balls per game.  The old balls with fraying seams, called dead balls, suddenly gave way to new, fresh, tightly-wound balls called lively balls. I don’t know what kind of ball you call the skate-kicked hockey guy.