D-Backs Potpourri: You Have No Good Column Ideas

Let’s start with someone else’s prompt:

This will be a good opportunity to expand on answers, so here are mine:

No more TV blackouts

This one is self-explanatory. Baseball’s territorial rights and blackouts mean that if you live in Las Vegas or Iowa and have seen an MLB game on Television, you are a warlock and need to be killed immediately. Make streaming games more accessible, and maybe you’ll get new fans, and in turn they’ll buy things and you’ll make money then.

Of course, that wouldn’t placate the rich pricks who own cable networks and whatnot, but since when did I care about making them happy?

Every MLB team must adhere to a player salary floor

Not a cap, a floor. It seems like a good half of the league is trying to tank for draft picks, and as such is putting some absolutely crap teams out. If your teams aren’t competitive, fans don’t really feel like showing up, and since attendance has always been a lagging indicator, it’s gonna take awhile for the fans to come back.

If every team has to spend a minimum adjusted on a year-to-year basis (This year I would say something like $85 MM, which is well below what the league average is, but so many teams decide not to reach that), we’ll get a lot more competitive teams, you might actually see Free Agents being signed earlier and for more money, which makes the players happy, and owners wouldn’t have any excuse to pocket money for no reason.

Teams cannot use position players to pitch if the score is within 10 runs

What was once a fun oddity has become an annoying and lazy crutch for managers trying to save relievers. Sorry bucko, but a 6-1 deficit can realistically be come back from, so you throw a reliever out there to be meat if you gotta.

Harsher punishments for pitchers who intentionally throw at batters.

As it stands now, pitchers get the standard 5 game suspension for that. With some roster trickery, they can just move their start back a day. Hardly a punishment for what can be an extremely dangerous act because you got your fee-fees hurt by the way a guy discarded a bat the last at-bat. 10-15 games minimum.

Universal DH or No DH, just f***ing pick one

The line between the leagues is blurring, there’s interleague play every day of the season, just do it.

What would your answers to this prompt be?

The Diamondbacks finished a series against the Rays, in case you’ve been in a coma for precisely six days. There’s a section of online Rays fandom that is, let’s say, interesting. They’re very defensive about accusations that the team is cheap (they are), and they’re eager to rub their 2018 season in your face.

You know, the one where they finished in third place and out of the playoffs.

Wonder if there’s another team like that? They should try doing that ironically, just to prove a point.

In any case, they’re doing well this year, and bully to them. We can probably warn them about the folly of taking a victory lap in April when your more accomplished division rivals are scuffling a little bit.

While playing Road to the Show in MLB 19, my speedy, high-average Shortstop on the Diamondbacks was traded mid-season for no apparent reason to the Cardinals.

What I’m saying is: that game is incredibly realistic.

I have nothing else to add here, but this is important, and quite shameful on the part of Rob Manfred/MLB: