Repairing our Pastimes

The letter I had been waiting for from the White House finally arrived yesterday. It read,
Dear Mr. Gervase,
I have decided to appoint you secretary of my new Homeland Sports Repair cabinet post. Please send me your recommendations for fixing sports as soon as possible. I’m positive I can get the country, Congress, and EPSN to buy into your changes. Hell, I got Health Care Reform passed, I can do anything. Besides, I’m not doing much these days anyway.
Sincerely,
President Obama

Naturally, I jumped right into my new task. Here’s what I sent back:

Dear Mr. President,
These are my recommendations for the following sports:
Baseball:
• Widen the use of instant replay to include everything except balls and strikes or check swings. The Mets and Giants recently had a game decided by a bad call at the plate. Imagine if either team makes or misses the playoffs by a game. And what about poor Armando Galarraga? Not only did he miss out on a perfect game because of an ump’s boneheaded call, he also got sent down to the minors. Thus, the manager of each team gets one replay challenge per game. Get Apple to create a video replay application for the iPad. On challenges, the ball boys will bring it and four camp chairs out to home plate and the umpires can sit and watch the replays. Until the iPad is ready, the crew chief will have to walk up the stairs to the field level concourse, stand in line for a hotdog, and watch the replay on the TVs before making his call.
• Enshrine Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame. But he may not work in baseball. His accomplishments as a player merit his enshrinement. His crimes came after his retirement. If we can forgive President Clinton for what he did in your office, Pete can get his atonement too.
• Fix the All-star game. It no longer should decide home-field advantage for the World Series. Instead the teams from the losing league will have Tim McCarver’s audio feed from every game he’s ever announced piped into their clubhouses. If that’s not incentive enough to win, I don’t know what is. Cap the All-star rosters at 25 players. Every team doesn’t have to be represented, except for the host team.
• Tell the networks that they no longer get to dictate the start times for postseason games. No game will start later than 6:00 p.m. on the east coast. Wouldn’t it be nice if kids actually got to see their teams play in October? Don’t worry about us in the West. We can set our DVRs (Shhh. Don’t tell the networks that we don’t watch commercials).

NBA
• Dictate the league to go to back to having two refs. Maybe it’ll cut the number of fouls in a third.
• Mandate that the director of televised games is only allowed to use one camera during live action – the one at center court. I like that my couch is actually the best seat in the house. He needs to stop hindering my view. No half-court floor camera that shows nothing but the ref’s backside. No behind-the-basket shots that flattens out the court. No more switching from the standard view to an under the basket view in the middle of a fast break.
• High Schoolers can go straight to the NBA if they’re able, but if they go to college they must stay for three years. Baseball players do it, so can basketball players.


College Basketball
• Order the NCAA to not expand the tourney. It’s completely fine as it is.
• Send Dick Vitale to Afghanistan. There he could announce or coach in the TBL (Taliban Basketball League). After a week they’ll give us Osama Bin Laden just to get Dickie V (With his height, he’d make my all-Windex team, baby!) out of their beards.

College Football
• Playoff. Nuff said.

NFL
• Not much to tinker with here. Although the players’ off-the-field actions need to be cleaned up. Command all the teams to hire a family from the show, “World’s Strictest Parents.” Each rookie must then live with that family for a week. Then the parents get to administer all discipline to any player caught doing something off the field the parents wouldn’t approve of.
• Mandate that all preseason-game ticket prices are set at $5.00 each. Did you know that only two percent of NFL TV fans have actually attended a game? Going to an NFL game is a Bucket List item right up there with climbing Kilimanjaro or seeing the Great Wall of China. Wouldn’t it be nice if a few more fans saw the inside of a stadium before they died?

NHL
• It’s hard to even know where to start here. The sport recently returned from the ICU, but is one work stoppage away from a frozen cemetery. I’d start by enlarging the net, decreasing the size of the goalie’s pads, and using two pucks at once. More scoring can’t hurt.
• Eliminate the three periods, two intermission system. Like football and basketball, hockey needs four quarters and one halftime. Take a five minute break to clean the ice between periods. A normal intermission can then be had after the second period.

Soccer
• I think you can easily get Congress to generate some revenue from this global sport. Add a page to the Obama Care Bill requiring the FDA to bottle the World Cup and sell it as an over-the-counter sleep aid.