I used to LOVE going to the Astrodome as a kid (probably 30-40 games a year) ALWAYS hoping I'd get to see a 16 or 18 inning game. I still loved extra inning games as an adult for a lot of reasons. I loved the tactics and strategy when both teams were down to their final bullpen guy and it was a game of attrition at that point. My grandmother who had season tickets would NEVER leave before the final out even if it was midnight on a school night for me.
The ghost runner is not going away. For some reason both the league AND the players like it. That's why it was brought back even after it was initially cancelled after last season. Only the fans dislike it so there is no way it goes away. We know how important the league AND the players think the fans are.
I remember an extra-inning affair at the 'Dome against the hated Braves. We were sitting in the CF mezzanine, and Rafael Ramirez (when he played for us, not them) blasted one just a few rows in front of us. I think that bomb got us into the tie. I don't remember how we won it, only that we went home happy.
Yeah, of course they like it. They get paid the same for a 10 inning game as they would a 16 inning game. And food/alcohol sales are stopped, so there's no $ in it for the owners. Only the fans benefit from long extra inning games. More baseball for the price of admission. More bang for the buck.
Ramirez hit one HR in his career against the Braves. We lost 3-4. He did hit a go-ahead HR against the Pirates and then Dave Smith blew the save and Ramirez won it with a single in the 12th. Perhaps the games melded together. Or maybe you called that beer guy over 1 too many times that night. We did play the Braves in Extras 4 times in 1988.
Oh how far we have fallen. From, "The customer is always right" to "The customer is irrelevant. He will take whatever expensive crumbs we offer." It's almost like they went from competing in a free market to manipulating and gouging a captive market.
It must have been that Pirates game. I can imagine, all these decades later, the games melding together in what's left of my brain.
I've mentioned before my dad remembers missing Mike Scott pitch a perfect game due to 2 errors by Ramirez. It was actually 1 error by Ramirez and 1 by Reynolds. I'd swear I went to an Astros-Braves game where Biggio hit 2 HRs and Bagwell hit 1 and we killed them, but that is 2 separate games from 2004. And Shazam is a real movie that Sinbad starred in.
The errors, and he gave up a hit with 2 outs in the 9th. https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/HOU/HOU198806120.shtml
The theory is without the errors it would have been a perfect game. I think he missed another no-hitter in a similar fashion.
The customer has never been always right - in any industry. On this particular issue, while lots of people love 6 hour regular season games, lots of people don't. So they aren't going to make all their customers happy regardless.
It was an exaggeration, but it was a rule of thumb not THAT long ago. It generally functioned as promoting customer satisfaction up to the manager on duty who had the authority to say enough to the customer if the request or demand was unreasonable. Of course I lived a life that others may not have. When people usually only requested a reasonable response to a problem.
Sure - so the real philosophy was "sometimes the customer is right; sometimes not". The use of it here makes no sense - if customers asked employees to work several hours past their shift for no pay, they would always have rejected you. That's what extra innings basically are. Lots of sports try to end games earlier in the regular season - NFL has simpler overtime rules and ends after 1 OT in a tie. They have also just recently shortened OT from 15 to 10 minutes. Hockey does some kind of shootout or something (I don't watch hockey, so not sure the details). In baseball, with a 162 games and now even more playoff teams, an individual regular season game has minimal meaning, so ending it early to preserve players' health and make employees happy seems like a rock solid plan, especially when lots of fans end up leaving without seeing a conclusion otherwise.
