Finally, Major League Baseball has dispensed with its usual frippery and struck a blow against what is truly plaguing this great game.
The sudden drop in scoring? Nope. Games running longer than three hours, often for no good reason? Hardly. Players continuing to use performance-enhancing drugs? That is so 20th century. No, MLB has clamped down on the true scourge of the game – bubbles.
Until recently, whenever a Los Angeles Dodgers player hit a home run, the team celebrated in their dugout with a bubble machine. That is, until MLB executive vice president and former Dodgers manager Joe Torre reportedly told the team to stop.
While the bubble machine made a swift return after just one day’s absence, more worrying is MLB behaving like their cousins in the NFL – also known as the “No Fun League” for their strict regimentation of every aspect of the game, on and off the field.
MLB will not explain their move, saying only that they “respectfully decline comment right now”. What could be behind this sudden onset of curmudgeonry? An outbreak of ebulliophobia (irrational fear of bubbles) at the league office? A fanatical devotion to Austrian economic theory?
MLB needs to lighten up. No one is being shown up or mocked. Baseball is a game, and games are supposed to be fun. In an era rife with fireworks, ear-splitting music and dance routines when other teams hit home runs, a bubble machine is tame.
Let the bubbles flow.
pfreelend@thenational.ae
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