My apologies if this spoils your plans for the week. Despite what I said Thursday, there is a post today. I found this little error too amusing to not share, but didn’t want to sit on it until after my vacation.
Many newspapers’ sports sections, including the Chron’s, include a listing of player moves–trades, promotions, suspensions, and so on–tucked away in the back. These are not exactly a fount of stunning revelations. The only people who look at the Transactions report are obsessed geeks, and we usually know all the details before they make it into the paper.
Just imagine my surprise, then, when I found this blockbuster news hidden away in Transactions (Thursday, 5/26/2016 for anyone who wants to confirm that I haven’t doctored the image.)
Apparently the Seattle Seahawks have changed sports, moving from football to baseball.
I can’t decide which is more surprising: that this happened mid-season, or that the ‘Hawks will be playing in the American League, going head-to-head with the Mariners!
I presume there will be a follow-up item in Friday’s paper listing the roster moves necessary to get the 53-man active roster down to MLB’s 40-man limit.
It should be a very interesting experiment in roster construction. Football teams, by and large, don’t have more than a handful of players capable of throwing the ball accurately enough to pitch. That’s going to make for a very skimpy bullpen.
Receivers and kick returners ought to be able to make the transition to the outfield, but stocking the infield may be a challenge. On the other hand, finding players with the traditional catcher’s build shouldn’t be any trouble at all–and while there may be an elevated number of wild pitches (see note above regarding pitchers), I don’t think there will be a whole lot of passed balls. And those new catchers are going to love MLB’s anti-concussion rules.
And talk about offense! Nearly every player on the roster is going to make David Ortiz look undersized. When they make contact and get their bodies into it, well, let’s just say that I expect this team to hit record numbers of 450-foot home runs.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this move, though, is the question of how to lay out a diamond in CenturyLink Field. Looking at the current seating chart suggests that the longest dimension is 420 feet. That’s fine for dead center field, but the fences in left and right are going to be a hell of a lot closer to the plate–maybe 255 feet down the lines. Given the likely quality of the pitching, that’s never going to work. Heck, that wouldn’t work even if the rotation included Felix Hernandez, Madison Bumgarner, and Clayton Kershaw. Some seats are going to have to get ripped out, and that’s going to hurt revenue.
Still, as I said, an interesting experiment. Stay tuned for updates!
Koi Scribblings 
Well, we’ve certainly seen individual players dabble- or switch over completely- from one sport to another. This may just be a logical extension of that phenomenon. Actually, I suspect a bored (and possibly hung over) low-level Editor, somewhere, just amusing himself, and curious to see if anyone would notice. Did you, in fact, let the Chron’s sports page Editor know you’d caught it? There may be a bet riding on this, somewhere. Kudos on being the kind of obsessive who would actually catch such a thing. I suspect this may be a residual manifestation of the kind of skill that made you successful at your previous profession.
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(Yes, I am monitoring comments. So much for a complete get-away-from-it-all vacation.)
Anyway, no, I didn’t directly notify the Chron, but the announcement of the post did invoke the Chron’s Twitter account, so perhaps the word will trickle down to the Sports Editor.
And yes, individuals have tried crossing over before, with varying levels of success–Bo Jacksons are few and far between, after all. But this sort of en-masse endeavor has not been tried before. At least not at any level above that of a small-town high school.
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