The Ultimate Mercy Rule

In case you're wondering just how bad and unbwatchable professional baseball has become, look no further than this column:

Two games into spring training, and we have a solution for the 2021 Red Sox: The Little League Mercy Rule.

It’s a new preseason thing. If you are getting crushed by your opponent, you can stop an inning once your pitcher has thrown more than 20 pitches in a frame. Alex Cora ran up the white flag three times in seven innings of Monday’s 5-3 loss to the Braves and has invoked the slaughter clause four times in the first two games, both losses.

The Sox should petition MLB to make this an option during the regular season. No more jail-break innings. Everybody goes home feeling good about themselves, even on a day when you commit five errors and three times walk off the field before getting a third out.

But wait - it gets worse:

I watched on Fubo because the bosses at NESN have made watching the Sox harder than ever. NESN was dropped by YouTube TV last fall after negotiations between the two parties broke down. This meant that a large chunk of Boston baseball watchers had to scramble, and many steered toward Fubo, which just happens to be the top overall streaming service for futbol, offering 32 soccer channels.

Loyal baseball fans (remember them?) who dumped YouTube TV for a NESN carrier were doubly disappointed Sunday when the Sox exhibition opener against the Twins was not televised on the flagship. Imagine that. You have a sagging last-place team with little star power, aggressively cutting costs on player payroll … and you make it hard for your remaining loyalists to watch the team and perhaps learn the names of some of your faceless new players. Genius.

After paying my new streaming bill, and learning the bells and whistles of Fubo, I navigated around the menu’s soccer smorgasbord and found the Sox NESN broadcast at 1 p.m. I couldn’t wait to get a look at Garrett Richards’s vaunted spin rate.The view of JetBlue Park and the dulcet tones of Dave O’Brien made me warm all over. It was good to hear OB alongside Jerry Remy, who told us it was 84 degrees at the sunny ballpark. For a moment, I longed to be back in Fort Myers, but then O’Brien said he and the RemDawg were broadcasting from their Watertown studios, no more than a mile from where I was sitting on the Brighton/Newton border.

The view of JetBlue Park and the dulcet tones of Dave O’Brien made me warm all over. It was good to hear OB alongside Jerry Remy, who told us it was 84 degrees at the sunny ballpark. For a moment, I longed to be back in Fort Myers, but then O’Brien said he and the RemDawg were broadcasting from their Watertown studios, no more than a mile from where I was sitting on the Brighton/Newton border.

So there you have it - the Red Sox are again expected to be a poor team this year and when you can find the game on a local channel, the booth guys won't actually be at the park, which will be next to empty like they were last year.

Exactly what reason is there to watch baseball anymore?