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	Wednesday, November 1
	Suggestions for a better year ahead By Keith Law Special to ESPN.com
	Editor's note: The team of writers from the Baseball Prospectus (tm) normally writes for ESPN.com Insider. This is a special free version of their work. You can check out their web site at baseballprospectus.com. For fans of the sport, baseball is a faithful companion, more so than the pretenders to the honorific of The National Pastime. Day in, day out, from the earliest days of spring to the bleak, leafless days of late October, baseball is there with box scores in the paper, games to watch, unlikely heroes to make fans cheer and nuances to spark lengthy discussions in bars and at water coolers. At its best, baseball gives us games filled with tension, close plays, great performances and decisions to second-guess. The World Series that just ended showed the sport at its best, with four tight games that could easily have gone the other way, and a fifth that featured a stunning performance by one of the greatest pitchers in the game's history. Football may draw more fans, but it's only around once a week, and you can only dissect a three-hour game for a day or two before you're desperate for another game. Hockey brings the tension, but its frenetic pace doesn't lend itself well to the discussion and analysis that baseball allows. Basketball doesn't bring any of these facets in the rare bursts of action between referees' whistles. Yet despite these advantages, baseball has lost ground to other sports in the important metrics of fan interest, TV ratings and revenues. As much as we love the game, we know that it is not perfect. World Series games this year consistently ran past midnight, unacceptable for working people as well as the kids whose interests baseball must capture if it wishes to grow as both a business and a cultural institution. With that in mind, here are five things that baseball's owners could do this offseason to make the game a little better for everyone next year. 1. Stop batters from doing the hokey-pokey. Pitchers, too Although many people like to blame smaller stadiums, the tiny strike zone and diluted pitching for the increasing length of the average baseball game, those are all difficult things to fix -- assuming that they're really culprits. But one thing baseball can do easily and without too much fuss from the Players' Association is keep the game moving by preventing batters from leaving the box. Why Nomar Garciaparra has to readjust his batting gloves six times between every pitch, or why most hitters have to wander halfway to the stands to contemplate what just happened (you swung and missed, genius, now get back in there) is lost on me. Similarly, too many pitchers take long enough between pitches for the Galapagos finches to evolve into new species. Reducing this nonsense would shave at least 10 minutes off of the average game. 2. Ban full-body armor A favorite cause of ESPN.com's Rob Neyer, the football-style padding that many hitters have begun using on their elbows and forearms has shifted the balance of the game significantly. Pitchers who try to establish the inside part of the plate find themselves putting opposing hitters on, and the hitters no longer have the fear of a broken ulna or metacarpal to deter them. Banning this protection, with some sensible exceptions for players with previous injuries to the area (e.g., Jeff Bagwell could protect his exposed hand), is simple, consistent with the rules and will help a number of pitchers who need the inside part of the plate to survive. (Peter Gammons did write recently that the owners are planning such a move.) 3. Keep the players in our faces Basketball and football players are around all year in commercials, making cameos on television, in magazines and newspapers. But baseball has failed to market its stars the way that other sports have. Nationally televised games don't pull in the audiences they once did, and the easy explanation is that baseball isn't as popular as it once was. While that's probably part of the problem, it ignores the fact that once upon a time, everyone knew who Willie and Mickey and Joe and Ted were. Aside from Mark and Sammy, baseball really doesn't have any stars like that today. Players whose fame transcends the sport are good for baseball. Pedro and Alex and Derek and Randy and Mike deserve as much. 4. Stop pretending that the Internet is the answer When presented with arguments regarding the divide between high-revenue and low-revenue teams, Major League Baseball has taken a decidedly bureaucratic tack: appoint a committee, wring its hands about the problem and do nothing. But now, MLB has latched on to a new panacea for its ills: The Internet. MLB.com now operates as a separate subsidiary, with its own (expensive) executives, a big marketing push and a concise domain name. It also has little in the way of revenue-generation and it barely has any advertising. Baseball seems to think that there's money somewhere on the Internet, even though no one else is making money from consumers on the Internet. Some executives have pointed to streaming media, suggesting that baseball could use the Internet to bring games to viewers worldwide. But the quality of most streaming media on the Internet today is terrible, and it's prohibitively expensive to deliver anything more than a video screen smaller than even the strike zone. Besides, baseball already has the opportunity to show all games to all viewers via cable, but territorial rights prevent a Yankee fan in Boston (there are a ton of them, trust me) from watching their team of choice. The Internet is no deus ex machina, swooping down to save baseball from its economic problems. Baseball could do its fans a big favor by acknowledging that the Internet is a long-term investment, and by making a more serious effort to evaluate the economic state of the game and, if necessary, prescribe solutions that the players might actually accept. 5. Take a public stand against steroids and similar substances How easy would this be? Ban any substances like "andro," the near-steroid that happens to be legal in the United States. Reiterate the ban on steroids and other performanceenhancers. And that's all. Why does taking a public stand matter if you're not testing the players? One, it's important for baseball to avoid the impression that it doesn't care whether players use steroids or not. The image of the game is at stake. Two, if a player is caught red-handed -- with steroids in his car, or his locker -- baseball will have a much easier time imposing a punishment if it has repeatedly stated a prohibition of those substances and the planned penalty for those who are caught. Crafting a joint statement with the Players' Association would be even better. It is too easy to just allow baseball to join the NFL and NBA as suspected havens for drug users, but it's easy enough to prevent it. It's All Saints' Eve today, closer to Thanksgiving than to Labor Day, and you, the reader, came to the baseball page of ESPN.com and found this article. You love the game, its players and its stories, flaws and all. You'll devour every trade and every transaction this offseason, just looking for a slight draft of warmth to remind you of the lazy days of August pennant races. Next season will bring new heroes, new stars, new moments to take their place in the annals of baseball's long history. Maybe we'll even get a new champion for a change. Mark your calendars: pitchers and catchers report in 117 days. Keith Law may be reached at klaw@baseballprospectus.com.		ALSO SEE Baseball Prospectus archive