So this morning a baseball writer whom I respect, Rob Neyer of SB Nation, comes to the defense of the Dallas Observer‘s Richie Whitt’s hating on Colby Lewis for taking paternity leave.
Rob makes a similar analogy to football as Whitt did: would you want your quarterback skipping a game? Now, I don’t give a damn about football, but it seems to me that it’s a false analogy. There are 162 games in a baseball season, compared to merely 16 in the NFL. That fact alone makes each single baseball game less important than each football game – in other words, baseball managers can afford to be human when it comes to granting this sort of leave. (We’ll leave aside the speculation about whether Lewis could have been expected to pitch effectively if he was preoccupied by what his wife was going through many miles away.)
And if Lewis misses a start now, who’s to say that extra rest won’t allow the team to use him on short rest in September, and thus he might still end up making the 30 or so starts he might otherwise have been expected to make?
Regardless. None of that is the reason I felt compelled to respond to Neyer’s post. Oh no. I had to address this point: He tried to use Mr. Spock’s logic in his argument, and that’s just not playing fair.
