Baseball purists have long opposed any efforts to modernize the game. America's favorite pastime is perfect as is, they say, and any changes that move it further away from the days of gloveless fielders and muttonchops are nothing but poppycock and horsefeathers.
For years, that's been the prevailing sentiment among league management, too. That may all be changing.
On Tuesday, MLB approved a new padded cap for pitchers, one specially designed to protect them from screaming line drives. The announcement comes after a spate of terrifying injuries in the past few years made head trauma a leading concern within the game. In the most violent case, Oakland A's pitcher Brandon McCarthy took a line drive to the head in 2012 that fractured his skull and caused an epidural hemorrhage, necessitating emergency surgery.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
Now, the safety hats are optional, and it's possible no one will wear them. McCarthy, an advocate of protective caps, said that some design flaws still needed to be worked out and that he "won't wear it in its current form."
Still, the mere fact that the league approved the caps for in-game use is a significant step toward a more safety-conscious sport. And in a broader sense, it's indicative of how the league, after years of foot-dragging, has finally accepted that "adaptation" isn't a dirty word.
Also this offseason, baseball announced an expanded form of instant replay, and outlawed home plate collisions, both significant changes that have been a long, long time coming.
Criticizing umpires is as much a part of the game as home runs and hot dogs. To illustrate that point, here's noted hothead Lou Piniella going nutso on some umps:
Yet the league, while acknowledging the fallibility of umpires, resisted instant replay, thinking it would sterilize the sport and lead to longer games. Even as other pro sports embraced official reviews, baseball held out, only grudgingly adding it in limited fashion in 2008 for home runs.
As for home plate collisions, that too became a polarizing subject in recent years after a number of grisly injuries, most notably the blow that snapped Giants catcher Buster Posey's ankle. So despite the gripes about nannying ballplayers and removing toughness from the game, the league stamped them out.
"The costs associated in terms of health and injury just no longer warrant the status quo," New York Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson, chairman of the rules committee, said of the change.
More than just broken bones though, the league is increasingly concerned with the dangers of head trauma. Concussions — or at least their diagnosis — are on the rise among catchers. And in December, the family of former player Ryan Freel announced he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) when he killed himself in 2012. It was the first confirmed case of CTE — a degenerative neurological disease that has been documented extensively in boxers and football players — in the game.
Taken with other safety-enhancing changes in recent years — a new concussion policy, mandatory helmets for base coaches — the latest changes have quite possibly made baseball the most proactive pro sport in addressing serious injuries.
The NFL, for all its talk, continues to downplay the link between football and brain trauma, and it's still embroiled in a legal suit over an alleged attempt to hide that connection. The NHL, too, is now facing a lawsuit over concussions in that sport.
Who would've guessed that baseball, with its devotion to tradition and ancient esoterica, would suddenly be racing ahead of its peers on that front? Yet here we are: Baseball is finally, at long last, modernizing.
And even with the changes, baseball isn't turning into blernsball. At least not yet.
