Geometry, revisited

 This one goes out to Mr. Hanefeld, my high school geometry teacher, who schooled us in the proper orientation of parallelograms and isosceles triangles and the like, and also let us listen to World Series games because this was when they played them in God's own sunshine, as God himself intended.

(The year this happened was 1970. Mr. Hanefeld was a huge Reds fan. Unfortunately for him, God liked the Baltimore Orioles better that year.)

Anyway ... we're gonna talk geometry here, and why all the gooey baseball poets were wrong about the Splendidness and Perfection of the game's Pastoral Parameters.

Apparently they're not so Splendid and Perfect. 

All these decades upon decades, and now we find out second base is not where it should be. It's misplaced by a foot or so, which messes up the coordinates. The first and third baselines line up with the outside of first and third base; the imaginary line connecting first to second and second to third goes right through the middle of second base.

Who knew? Not me. Although maybe this explains why Ty Cobb was such a prickly asshat; perhaps he somehow sensed something wasn't kosher.

In any event, baseball has decided, after a mere 150 years or so, to do something about it. The minor leagues being MLB's laboratory for experimental work, this year in the minors they'll move second a foot closer to home to bring it into proper alignment, and see if a foot adds up to more steals and more plays that don't involve either home runs or strikeouts.

For the same reason, they're also making the bases slightly larger. They won't be the size of Delaware or anything -- this is baseball, so they won't be radical about it -- but they will be bigger than, say, the wadded-up jackets we used to employ as bases when we were kids.

In any event, geometry is satisfied at last, and hooray for that. I'm sure Mr. Hanefeld will be pleased, if he's not still wondering why the hell Boog Powell keeps hitting home runs and Brooks Robinson keeps vacuuming up grounders.