Prospector

Set to pull a pitcher? Stop yelling at the TV, start voting online.

Set to pull a pitcher? Stop yelling at the TV, start voting online.
By Bennett Richardson | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Selected Quotes:

TOKYO – In Japan, baseball fans may soon get a way to tell a struggling pitcher to hit the shower that is far more effective than yelling at the TV.

Devotees of the Fukuoka Hawks could soon decide whether to dump a pitcher through an online voting system that would display results on a stadium's center screen.

And the Rakuten Golden Eagles - which debut this year as the first new team to join Japan's pro leagues since 1954 - may allow viewers to watch players off-field in the dugout, the bullpen, or the locker room, simply through a click of the mouse as part of plans to webcast games live.

Professor Yoshikazu Nagai, an expert on the sociology of baseball fans at Kansai University in Osaka, is also skeptical. "While new ideas are effective as an advertisement" for the game, he says, viewer voting to replace pitchers would be extremely difficult to regulate properly.

Purists say that an opportunity for fans to alter game play via the Internet not only flies in the face of tradition, but raises philosophical questions about the nature of sport in general.

One key element that would be lost, they say, is the idea that athletes must face their opponents alone, acting in the arena according to their own wits, without help from outsiders.

"This interesting facet of sports would be destroyed" if viewers were so directly involved, says Kazuaki Sawada, a professor of education at Shiga University in western Japan.



Set to pull a pitcher? Stop yelling at the TV, start voting online. | csmonitor.com

posted by Prospector @ 8:45 AM