Can We Prevent Sports Blowouts?
Earlier in this the cruelest month, a high school baseball team in Texas won a game 57-0. You read right – that’s baseball. The game was halted by a “mercy rule” after five innings or the score would have been worse. In fact, they might still be playing. As it happens, this wasn’t a case of a clueless or sadistic coach running up the score. To the contrary, he emptied his bench early and had his players go station to station – no extra base hits, no stolen bases.
The fiasco raises the age-old issue of how to handle the ridiculously lopsided game. Typically the problem arises not in high school but with younger kids, where talent levels are more disparate and egos more fragile. No one wants to see a U-12 soccer team lose 10-0: It embarrasses kids and squashes their confidence while doing little for the players on the winning team. But what’s the alternative? Coaches try everything. They tell players to shoot only with their opposite foot, or to make a certain number of passes before shooting, or they have the kids play keep-away instead of shooting at all. But these and other tactics to keep the score down may only make matters worse. The kids on the losing team see what’s happening and may find these gimmicks even more humiliating than if the other team just kept scoring goals.
At least in baseball, the effort has been made to legislate the problem away. The mercy rule that finally curtailed the Texas high school massacre typically puts an end to a game where a team has a 10 run lead after five innings. But it’s a flawed solution. For one thing, it often comes too late to provide much mercy. For another, any solution that simply sends the kids home early seems to defeat the purpose of playing the game in the first place.
The Associated Press article about the 57-0 baseball game pointed out a relevant rule that everyone overlooked: “The National Federation of Baseball Rule Book – used in Texas and most states – says a game can be ended early with the agreement of both coaches and the umpire.” Nice to know, but this “solution,” like other mercy rules, tackles the problem at the wrong end. So, it turns out, with his team trailing 29-0 after two innings, the losing coach could have approached his counterpart and said, “No mas.” Assuming the other coach and the umpire agreed (a safe assumption if we’re dealing with remotely rational folks), everyone could have left . . . having wasted only an hour of their lives instead of three.
The solution to sports massacres lies less in figuring out how to deal with them once they are underway than in avoiding them in the first place. What’s needed is prudent scheduling. There’s an amusing line in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four (actually a million of them), where a player on the hapless Seattle Pilots, watching his team get creamed by the juggernaut Orioles, observes that “we have no business scheduling these guys.” Of course, in the major leagues, mismatches can’t be avoided but don’t really matter. The worst professional team has a fighting chance against the best and professional athletes can handle a thumping anyway. But when it comes to a 57-0 high school baseball game, the joke becomes reality: Those two teams really had no business scheduling one another.
Practical problems present themselves. Because of geography, among other things, the powers-that-be can’t simply arrange for all teams in all leagues to be relatively competitive with one another. But certainly more steps in that direction should be taken. It’s worth some cost and inconvenience to make athletic competition meaningful. The 10-0 soccer game or 57-0 baseball game doesn’t develop skills and isn’t fun. Better no game at all than one in which people flip through the rulebook trying to figure out how to end things sooner.
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