Love It or Leave It

 Oh, do Cub pitchers dislike the notion of speeding up the game.  (Sox pitchers probably do, too, but nobody thought to ask.)  Why can’t they leave things alone? starter Jason Hammel complained in today’s Tribune.  “It’s a great game.  How many times are you going to flip these things and change the rules and bend them here and there?  Football is going to become flag football very soon,” and readers are left to wonder if Hammel can tell one sport from another, or if he suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder.

Over at the Sun-Times, Jake Arrieta was quoted as saying efforts to speed up the game are “ridiculous.”  He thinks it’s all about getting “16-to-30 year olds more interested in baseball,” which will fail.  “I don’t think you completely change the way the game’s been played forever because we can’t get people to put their iPhones down.”  Good to know that Arrieta doesn’t suffer from that very same bad habit.            

No, he just worries about a spur-of-the-moment decision to attract “people that don’t necessarily even like baseball anyways.  If they don’t really like the game of baseball, the people that do love the game of baseball are going to suffer for it.”

People that do love the game—how ungrammatical and yet crystal clear.  Arrieta means only ballplayers can love the game, and fans who agree with those ballplayers.  Somehow, I’ve ended up with the iPhone crowd, and I don’t even own one.