I understand intellectually why Johnny Cueto was allowed to come back in the game on Tuesday. With COVID restrictions, they’re playing fewer games, so it’s harder for everyone to get their work in. Teams have to get creative with how they stretch out starters’ arms to get them ready for the regular season, so the league is allowing pitchers to re-enter the game in Spring Training. Cueto had had a rough third inning, so Gabe Kapler took him out, but his arm needed more work, so Gabe Kapler put him back in in the fourth. The team wanted to see him sit down and come back out for one more inning. I get it. I do.
I hate it.
When I saw Cueto re-enter the game, it was absolutely impossible for me to care even one whit about the game, even more than I don’t care about a normal Spring Training game. There were no rules. If there are no rules, then there is no game. There’s just a bunch of stuff that happens, disconnected from any meaning, adrift in an indifferent universe.
Imagine attending that game. It is practically a miracle that you were able to snag a ticket for a chilly-ish night game in Arizona, in the middle (or hopefully tail end!) of a dang pandemic. The stadium is at about 1/10th capacity, so this takes some doing. You are excited to go see some baseball. It’s baseball! In person! That you can watch! You’re nailing this.
And then it turns out that it’s not even a serious practice game. It’s a practice game that is loose by the well-established standards of practice games. Johnny Cueto pitches extremely badly in the 3rd inning, leaves the game, comes back in the 4th, and continues to pitch extremely badly. Your time doesn’t matter. Your money doesn’t matter. You were lucky to get to come to this game, but also, this game is awful, and awful in ways that shouldn’t even be allowed. They changed the rules to make this game worse for you.
That would suck. It did suck, even watching it on TV, which I stopped doing, because it wasn’t interesting. In person, it would have been even more annoying, and insulting. I would have wanted to leave early, then felt bad about myself for wanting to leave early when so few fans were even allowed to attend the game. There would have been no winning (especially for the Giants! Hey-o!).
And yet, it doesn’t matter at all.
The messaging from MLB has been consistent since they started playing games last July: This is what you get. Baseball tells us how things will be, and then we feel grateful for getting anything at all. This is how the deal works, they tell us. It’s how it has to be.
In a lot of ways, that’s true. There really are needed protocols right now, obviously, and baseball has had to make changes to accommodate them. There can’t be that many fans in the stadium, and players can’t really interact with those fans, and to treat the situation otherwise would put people in danger. So you can score several points for the “This is what you get” team.
Watching that particular game in person would have been bad, yes, but would it have been so bad to outweigh the good of getting to go to the baseball game in the first place? Could that initial high of just being at the park win out over seeing a competitive game? If we’re being honest, yeah, it could. There’s plenty of goodwill out there directed towards baseball, and if you combine that with an elitist it’s-great-that-I’ve-been-selected-to-be-here kind of thing, well, baseball’s flaws start to look awfully forgiveable.
Aesthetically, though, it’s awful. What is baseball if not a set of communally agreed-upon aesthetics? What is Cueto re-entering a game if not a knife in the eye of those aesthetics? But does Spring Training have to be pretty or watchable? It’s just practice, after all. It’s not their job to dress up in their Sunday best and impress the world. It’s their job to make sure their Sunday best will fit in 3 weeks’ time.
Still don’t like it. It’s not a hill I’m going to die on because I try to avoid dying whenever possible, but I don’t want to see that. It’s several million entries down the list of priorities in the world, but I’m putting it on my list. I earnestly hope this isn’t one of those changes that sneaks into baseball and stays forever, even if it’s limited to Spring Training.
If it is, though, what am I gonna do? It’s not exactly a dealbreaker for not watching Spring Training games. Just one more thing I don’t like in a sport that’s constantly accumulating more things I don’t like.