The Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken Jr. was my hero when I was a kid. So you can understand how it’s tough for me to write an article criticizing anything with which he’s involved. However as a writer sometimes I find myself in that position – today is one of those moments.
Ripken of course is now a Senior Advisor to Commissioner Rob Manfred (on youth programs and you outreach), and I was very interested to see this article come down the pike yesterday in USA Today. In effect, the school of thought is to tweak the rules just a bit so as to get kids playing baseball again so that they’ll remain baseball fans as adults.