The basketball season is now fully underway. Nothing on Monday besides my normal trip to Gift Horse. On Tuesday I made a trip up to State College to see Maryland take on the Nittany Lions. I’ve never seen Maryland win there but I’m not really going to get a good opportunity to see them down in College Park this year. I was a bit bummed when the Charm City Classic didn’t happen. It is so much easier to go to Baltimore for that. Pregame stop at Happy Valley in State College for dinner and a happy hour brew.

I don’t get why Maryland struggles so much here but they do. They seem to lose every year up here. This year I do. PSU has the beef and Maryland does not. PSU controlled the paint and didn’t give Maryland anything easy. I don’t think the Terps got an easy look down low at the basket and they got most of their offensive rebounds on two possessions when they played volleyball with the rim. There is a huge physical difference between Jalen Smith and Mike Watkins. PSU led this one from the start with an alley-oop slam to Mike Watkins to start and it didn’t get much better from there. The big boot to the berries came when Myreon Jones hit a 3 from the corner with .6 seconds left in the half. He later hit another one as the shot clock expired that hurt just as much. Maryland got down by I think 12 in the second half and whittled that back to 2 on 2 different occasions but they could not get over the hump. PSU’s defense forced Anthony Cowan to take low percentage shots as the shot clock was expiring. Good game plan from PSU to say the least but if Maryland truly was the #4 team in the land this is a game that they should have won. Penn State wins 76-69 in front of a good crowd, for PSU. Made it home in less than 2 hours and it was starting to snow as I rolled back into York. Woke up the next morning with a winter wonderland on everything but the sidewalks and roads, so I didn’t have to shovel.

That means I didn’t see the butt whooping that York High put on Spring Grove. This might be the only one of these that they have, Spring Grove is bad and does not appear to have much hope in the future. So my penance for that is watching them take on Dallastown. High school games are all that are going on as the local colleges are not playing due to final exams. The good news for me is that I work right down the street so getting to this one (and to Red Lion) is not difficult. Dallastown has also been a place that York has struggled in and last year Dallastown looked like world beaters when they played us. If they would have played like that all year they would have actually made the post season but they didn’t. Dallastown does have most of their team back and they always get up to play York, and I did enter this one with low expectations. This was a hard game to watch. York led for pretty much the entire game and showed spurts of goodness but there is a lot of inconsistency. Their free throw shooting was atrocious (until it mattered most fortunately) and they can’t hit 3’s, which allows the defense to pack it in. This was an ugly affair and will not be ever shown as an example of good basketball. York High wins, much to the chagrin of the Dallastown student section, 41-39.

Another hot topic in the sports world (at least for me anyway) was the MLB’s implementation of the 3 batter rule for relief pitchers and several managers not knowing about it. I don’t necessarily think that this will speed the game up much as most relievers already are facing that imposed minimum but I have some other ideas that could help. Probably spitting into the wind with this but here goes Rob Manfred: 1) With the 30 second clock between batters the pitcher should be delivering the pitch when the clock hits 0, not with the batter just getting in and doing their practice swings. It shouldn’t take 30 seconds to walk from the on deck circle to the box. 2) A 15 or 18 second pitch clock with the pitcher coming set before it turns 0 (this works in the minors…). 3) The batter may step out only once during an at bat. 4) Pitchers can only attempt picking off a runner twice during an at bat. 5) Maintain the limited number of mound visits or reduce it by 1. In my opinion the biggest problem with baseball as far as watchability goes is that there is too much downtime between pitches. Pitchers can’t get into a rhythm and they think too much. I did informally time it took for a pitcher to get ready to deliver a pitch in the bigs and I found it would take 18-25 seconds for the pitcher to be ready. Remove those 5 seconds or so and multiply it out (4-5 pitches per at bat, 3-5 batters per half inning…) and it not only adds more rhythm to the game but it speeds it up. That could be 10-15 minutes per game right there while creating a much more watchable product. On a weeknight people have to get up to go to work the next day and many can’t be getting home at 11:00 at night or later following a game.

At the same time I am not in favor of contraction in the minors. There are some ideas there, like maybe creating an additional AAA league to reduce travel (That could be a problem fielding the AAA World Series but there is no guarantee that will survive) and I could see Advanced Rookie ball going away. Conceivably in that situation some of the Pioneer League teams could be folded into the Northwest League since not every team has an entry at that level. There are 8 teams in that league so 8 more could be added, creating a mountain division. Considering there are 8 teams in the Pioneer League that could work. I don’t think it’s a good idea to eliminate baseball in a large section of the country and it would be something that would be regretted. There’s not a lot of parks in the Appalachian League that are up to snuff, I think it’s like Greeneville and Johnson City and that’s about it (only been to Bristol in that league so I am not entirely sure about that), and for them see if they could be folded into another league like the South Atlantic League or Southern League. Contraction wouldn’t be the end of the world for me but I would lose Frederick, possibly Hagerstown, Williamsport and State College which I would miss. Frederick would be the biggest there as I usually hit about 6-8 games there per year and they do draw well. They’ve led the league in attendance quite a bit in the last decade. I am hoping that this is just a negotiating ploy and it seems to be one of the few bipartisan issues in Congress. I also would figure that some of these cities will have a lawsuit files the moment this happens.

Not much going on on Saturday so I spent my morning looking for my Christmas Eve refreshment, Martians Kidnap Santa Eggnog Stout from Spring House Brewing in Lancaster. After visiting several York County distributors I found that no one had it. Since the beer was on Spring House’s website I got in my car and drove over. Turns out they just put it on tap but did not can it. I brought an empty growler with me and had it filled, so I have my Christmas Eve refreshment as I watch Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Stayed in for the evening on a rainy and foggy day. Also stayed in on Sunday outside of breakfast and a walk down to Gift Horse for the Gingerbread Stout.