Headline: “MLB considering starting extra innings with a runner on second base“.

According to one dismal story:

Major League Baseball plans on testing a rule change in the lowest levels of the minor leagues this season that automatically would place a runner on second base at the start of extra innings, a distinct break from the game’s orthodoxy that nonetheless has wide-ranging support at the highest levels of the league, sources familiar with the plan told Yahoo Sports.

One reason for the support is that other decadent countries have adopted the rule. If every other country walked off a cliff, or switched to aluminum bats, would we, too?

Joe Torre provided a more important, but far less manly, motivation.

“It’s not fun to watch when you go through your whole pitching staff and wind up bringing a utility infielder in to pitch. As much as it’s nice to talk about being at an 18-inning game, it takes time. “It’s baseball. I’m just trying to get back to that, where this is the game that people come to watch. It doesn’t mean you’re going to score. You’re just trying to play baseball.”

No ties in baseball. Just like it used to be in real life, before equality of outcome began to be mandated. The same puritanical effeminate degenerate spirit that brought in instant replay review is responsible for this horrid change.

Listen: Torre is wrong. It is fun to watch the chess match of shifting pitchers in an extra-innings game, knowing that tomorrow the team starts a three-game series with their traditional rivals, and the pennant is in view. Is today’s win as important as tomorrow’s? What would easing off do to the moral of the players—and fans?

And doesn’t anybody remember this is just a game? It is a pastime, an entertainment, a diversion. Great excitement is had watching teams pushed to their utmost. But in the end, it is just for fun. Torre, being too close, forgets that. He speaks like a general plotting the best strategy and not like a ballplayer. Mistakes, too, are part of the lore of the sport, and that is the reason why instant replay is an abomination. The imperfections are what we come for; they allow the true beauty, which is rare and should be, to shine.

Headline: “Read all about it! Books are back in fashion, shelves are wackier than ever and libraries are the new stars of Instagram.”

According to a survey by Aviva, one in ten of us doesn’t own a book but, conversely, sales of printed books are on the rise.

Why? Books do decorate a room, that’s why.

Good-looking or quirky book shelves are becoming so popular that they’ve earned their own hashtag on photo sharing site, Instagram. Type in #shelfie and hundreds of images pop up of hexagonally arranged books, colour co-ordinated spines and novels that appear to be floating up walls.

Book fetishism. Who saw that coming? Well, it was obvious. All those books which pour forth as a cataract from publishing houses and which fewer and fewer are reading had to go somewhere. Some line furniture stores, the rest are being snatched up by designers. “‘Try creating individual stacks in similar, but graduated hues,’ says Nadia McCowan Hill, resident style expert at online interiors company Wayfair.” Arranging by subject matter or author are out, stacking by hues is in.

I’m complaining not only because of the demise of reading, which that cataract paradoxically contributes to: it’s harder to separate wheat and chaff, and which anyway was inevitable with increasing formal education (let the reader understand), but I’m whining because of the pragmatic concern of what this does to the price of used books.

It’s getting tougher all the time to find a physical used bookstore (or even new bookstore). Buying on-line carries a minimum of about four bucks, after postage and “handling” fees, which is too high for an old paperback novel. Once designers start sucking up books for their non-reading clients, the price can only go up for those who want to read.

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