Selling off Babe Ruth to your rival. The White Sox wearing shorts. Making the All-Star Game count for home-field advantage in the World Series.
Those were three pretty dumb baseball ideas. But they pale in comparison to the dumbest of dumb ideas in the 150-year history of the sport: Commissioner Rob Manfred’s desire to implement a pitch clock in order to further help trim ballgames into nice, neat three-hour broadcasting windows.
The potential future rule change has made its debut this spring in Arizona and Florida, where the mere presence of the 20-second clocks — umpires haven’t yet started issuing ball/strike penalties for violations — is an abomination to the game of baseball.