How Baseball Can Take a Lesson from the LPGA

I completely loathe the game of golf. You spend 20 minutes in the sun hitting a little white ball around, and then you spend another three hours walking around looking for it.

It's the most frustrating game in the world, and the most ridiculous part is that the more frustrated you get, the worse you play, which thus creates a vicious circle. 

Even more so, I hate watching golf on TV. It's a sport where you can drink beer and play at the same time... why is everyone whispering? Until the last few months, there was one guy who won everything, and now that he forgot how to play, no one knows who to root for.

So excuse my lack of golf knowledge; this article is not about golf.

But I have to say, something that happened at an LPGA event impressed the crap out of me. Juli Inkster, who apparently is an LPGA legend of sorts, had some waiting time in between shots, so she affixed a weight to her club and started swinging it around so she wouldn't tighten up.

This is a rule violation because that weight is considered a training aid, and it's against the rules to use a training aid during play. No one noticed though, except some guy sitting on his couch watching the game. So being the upstanding, law-abiding citizen he is, he actually called the LPGA and complained.

The LPGA laughed him off and said it's in the past, so we're not changing it, right?

Wrong.

The LPGA went back, reviewed tape, and disqualified the golfer.

Amazing. You mean to tell me that ONE guy can call in and change history to its rightful place? This was just for some measly tournament too—and might I add that the LPGA currently does not have any instant replay system set in place.

I seem to recall a time earlier this year when video results conclusively showed that one Armando Galarraga was robbed of a perfect game by a bad call, and MILLIONS of people called in, wrote it, Morse coded, whatever to the MLB about this. And what happens? Jim Joyce doesn't even get a slap on the wrist. 

I also recall a St. Louis Cardinals vs. Pittsburgh Pirates game where AN ENTIRE TEAM of umpires simply failed to call a infield fly and then proceeded to call TWO men out after the Cards complained, but had no explanation as to why ANYONE was called out when the Pirates manager asked. You can bet the phones were ringing off the hook then too.

But that's the story with MLB. They don't care. They would rather back up their umpires than honor the rightful wishes of the fans that bring in billions for them every year. They have the Rafiki complex: "eet doughsn't mahter, eet's in de pahst."

This isn't recent either. Earlier this decade, they did random steroids screening just to see if anyone was doing them, and boy, were they doing them. So rather than punish those involved, they said, "OK, from now on you get two chances, and we're going to pretend that last test never happened."

So in the meantime, while Barry Bonds is destroying one of baseball's most sacred records and the Red Sox are juicing their entire team and winning the World Series, the league just lets it happen because "they haven't yet tested positive under the new policies," and even when it does come out after the fact, they refuse to go back and set things right.

So as much as I hate the game of golf, my hat goes off to LPGA. Here is a league that knows where its money comes from: the small, but obviously dedicated fanbase. When a fan questions whether or not something is amiss, they check it out, and they change it if it's correct, because they are protecting the integrity of their game, while MLB destroys the integrity of theirs.

I'm glad they have to remember that every time they walk by that asterisk branded into Barry Bond's record ball, courtesy Marc Ecko.

So where does this leave me as a baseball fan? I'm not sure; I'll think about it.

But right now I gotta go.

Golf is on.