Game on … finally!
PITTSBURGH — It’s game on. Finally.
The NHL labor dispute has been settled and the Pittsburgh Penguins will start the season in the fast lane, playing at Philadelphia and at the New York Rangers on consecutive days next weekend.
That means there won’t be any trouble ramping up the emotional level after nine months without a game.
The regular season takes on more importance because there are only 48 games. There’s less time to recover from a prolonged slump.
The players who went overseas for the lockout (like Evgeni Malkin) should be in position to dominate. They’re in mid-season form while everyone else is in training camp mode. No matter how spirited those voluntary sessions at Southpointe may have been, they couldn’t come close to duplicating game conditions.
This will be an interesting challenge for the coaches as well. The Penguins’ Dan Bylsma noted the other day that it’s been a long time since he ran the bench during a game. He was hoping for at least one exhibition game, but the hurry-up nature of the NHL’s start won’t allow that.
The goaltenders will be the players to watch. Aside from those who found work elsewhere during the lockout, they’re going to attempt to get going with nothing more than a few practices behind them. Imagine going from summer vacation to facing 100 miles per hour slap shots. No wonder so many goalies are crazy.
What kind of game will we see? Last season there was grumbling league-wide that obstruction had worked its way back into the NHL. It wasn’t as blatant as it had been in the past, but there was clearly more tolerance of the little hooks and holds that can disrupt plays from being made.
When the NHL returned from losing an entire season, it was with a full commitment to eliminating obstruction and giving the game back to the players with skill. The NHL would be smart to adopt a similar policy this time, too.
Tell the referees to call it closely. The players will adjust, just as they did before. If the NHL issues that order, it will make special teams even more important in deciding games.
Look for some feisty, spirited games as soon as the first weekend. The players have been waiting for a long time to get back on the ice in a competitive environment, and there’s plenty at stake with the shortened season.
Game on, finally. The guess here is the players will make sure it was worth the long wait.
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Now that the Baseball Writers Association of America has thrown a shutout at this year’s Hall of Fame nominees, perhaps we can get to the real issue:
Get a better system for voting. The balloting is currently in the hands of anyone and everyone who has been a 10-year member of the BBWAA, a do-nothing organization of waning influence.
The BBWAA voting goes back to the days when New York had nine daily newspapers. Times are different.
For one thing, writers shouldn’t vote on awards or Halls of Fame. The Pittsburgh newspapers won’t allow their employees to serve as official scorers for MLB games, believing it’s a conflict of interest to have them decide between hits and errors.
The philosophy has been that reporters are there to report the news rather than make it. Fine.
But if something that trivial is a conflict of interest, why isn’t voting for the Hall of Fame?
In the fallout of the no-induction vote, there were more quotes from writers explaining their ballots than there were from the players who were kept out of the Hall.
Beyond the obvious conflict of interest, the BBWAA voting body includes people who haven’t been active in covering baseball in a long time. Some of them never covered games, but got membership because their papers signed up everyone on staff for membership.
People who never covered baseball have a say in who gets into the Hall of Fame. Vin Scully and Bob Costas don’t. That’s ridiculous.
As newspapers evolve, fewer people are covering baseball. Fewer reporters are staying on the beat for 10 years. The BBWAA is fading.
It’s time for baseball to get ahead of the problem and put together a new voting body. Baseball should use a system similar to the one employed by the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The Football Hall of Fame knows that everyone voting is lucid and knowledgeable about the game. Nobody is there because they were signed on for membership in a group 50 years ago.
If it leads to reform in the voting process, some indirect good will have come from baseball’s steroids era.