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Opinion: Sports Random Musings

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More and more I think you will see each helmet equipped with microphone to pass the information along for each play and the players will have to think even less.

One of the more popular school activities in the past few years is robotics. Students have to program a robot into carrying out a specific task and the ones that accomplish the task the best are declared winners.

That has been going on for many decades in sports, if you think about it. The athletes are the robots as the coaches try to program them so they will carry out their duties without having to do much thinking on their own. In a way it seems to defeat the purpose of education in trying to get the students to make decisions and use their own minds to do so, since doing so prepares them for their future endeavors.

Football is one of those sports that lends itself to robotics. The first player that I can remember that balked at being a robot was Don Meredith, QB for the Dallas Cowboys. He battled with Coach Landry about wanting to call his own plays, instead of having Landry call all of them. Don't think he won that battle and probably why he retired in his prime.

There was a time when the plays being sent in was by a messenger player, which meant a couple of players could letter by switching positions during the game. Then came sideline signals. Coaches were giving hand signals much like a baseball manager and mostly still do for the defense. 

Then you found a sideline that looked much like some type of rally as placards would be raised up and down and somewhere in there was a message as to what to call. Players had to spend much of their time and attention looking at the sidelines. 

Now with the digital world around us, you have another look. The offense will rush up to the line as if they are going to run a play and as you prepare yourself to watch a play, they all raise up and have eyes right to their sideline. 

Then after someone checks with Siri or Alexa for the correct play, it is relayed to the team. Each player now checks a gadget on their wrists and now we can get ready to watch a play evolve. More and more I think you will see each helmet equipped with microphone to pass the information along for each play and the players will have to think even less. I have seen much the same thing in softball where all the players have to check their wrists before a pitch is made whether they are batting or in the field. Even the Astros took away decision-making for the batter and made them robots as well.

The problem I have always had with robots is the same as the improvement in equipment. How do you get to brag about your ability when there is always a doubt being cast as to whether your performance is due to your ability or the ability of your equipment? For example, slow-pitch has regulated some of that by controlling the distance a ball can be hit by limiting standards of official balls and bats.

Until recently, I have always assumed all of these baseball players being drafted by the major leagues, and playing in the minor leagues, were guaranteed a pretty good living while they are playing the game-- and they mostly dropped out when they realized they would not ever make it to the majors. 

The reality is far from that. In recent articles about changes being proposed by the MLB, one was the raising of salaries of the minor leaguers. It said today's salaries ranged from $290 to $502 per week depending on the class you were playing in. To boot, you only get paid for when you were playing which at most would last five months. This means you would be making between $6000-$10,000 a full season and then you had better be looking for a good off-season job. 

Furthermore, if you were invited to spring training you get paid $100-$200 a week. 

The proposed plan for increases as always seems to have a downside. This one would eliminate all class teams below AA which eliminates many dreams before they get started. 

The situation of the minor leaguers reminds me of the athletes that sign letters of intent to play at colleges. We assume financial but do not realize many of the colleges are not allowed to give athletic scholarships while most sports scholarships are chopped into pieces and never full.

Well, the UIL has extended the moratorium on school sports until May 4, leaving the carrot still dangling in front of UIL sports. In all probability it is a cruelty joke. That means seven non-playing weeks will have elapsed and less than a month of school left, not to mention the governor's edict until May 14 and the NCAA's shutdown. 

At some point, people have to understand that organized sports cannot take precedence over common sense. We keep saying it is only a game, so we must prove it. We may discover family time together without it being organized sports is a fun time too. There was a time when that was so and while sports day cares are closed down it can be so again.

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