Column: It's time to get rid of the rules of baseball

Baseball has never really been my thing. As a whole, I've found it too slow, with far too many pauses in the action. 

Part of that comes from never really getting into it as a kid. I went to Nationals games when they were bad, and you could skip school and buy tickets for like $7 and go watch them lose. But my mother never successfully passed on her love of the Red Sox to me, and I never really picked up a bat or tried my hand at pitching. 

Baseball just isn't that important to me or frankly to most members of my generation. So here is my proposal: get rid of the rules. 

Here's some background for how I came to this idea. Major League Baseball is still reeling with the fallout of the Houston Astros cheating scandal that tainted the team's 2017 World Series victory and revealed an organizational culture totally lacking in any form of accountability. 

They broke the rules because they thought they could, and because they were the best, and they didn't care if you were offended because 'look at us, we're so smart.' 

The Astros suck. But what they did was … kind of funny? At least, they way they did it. Using cameras to steal signs is run-of-the-mill cheating but buzzing bandages? Straight smacking trash cans to signal what pitch is coming? That's hilarious. 

Professional baseball has had its fair share of scandals, from throwing a World Series all the way back in 1919 to the widespread use of steroids in the 1990s and 2000s. 

Clearly, cheating isn't going to stop. If it's not stealing signs, it'll be something more ludicrous. So I say get rid of the rules, make it all legal. From now on, any way you wanna cheat in baseball, it's all good. Go for it. It's the only way I, for one, am ever going to want to pay attention. 

I want someone to juice themselves so much they send a home run 700 feet into the air. For the record, the longest accepted home run ever hit was by Babe Ruth, going for 575 feet back in 1921. 

1921? 1921! You're going to tell me the best we as a society can do at hitting a ball topped out in 1921? No wonder people think the game is boring. I need someone made artificially twice as big as Mark McGwire to smack that thing into another county.

At this point, I don't care what it takes. If you can't hold my interest for at least 30 seconds, I'm going to go browse Twitter until my eyes bleed. I'm not alone — only 9 percent of people surveyed in the latest gallup poll listed baseball as their favorite sport, the lowest since 1937. 

If it takes splicing raptor DNA to make a designated hitter who could be a part of the DinoSquad, then do it, because I'm literally soooooooo bored. 

What about something like the buzzing Band-Aid Astros players allegedly wore to tell them what pitches were coming? Surely, we can do better than this. From now on, all mechanical enhancements are Gucci in professional baseball. 

You wanna go get an Inspector Gadget extendo-arm to snatch a would-be home run out of the air? I'm for it. You want pitchers to be able to replace their eyes with technologically-enhanced ones that can pinpoint to the millimeter where they place a fastball? Absolutely. 

I want cheating to be so accepted in baseball it plunges the world into another technological revolution, this one solely centered around how to enhance humans to more effectively score more runs than their opponent or to stop them from doing so. 

I want a world like the video game Deus Ex series, a masterpiece that looks at the societal implications of enhancing human bodies with technology. Except screw the philosophy and moral questioning part of all that. Just give me the part where an outfielder has rockets on their feet to run down fly balls, or give a pitcher a LITERAL CANNON for an arm. 

Sportswriters of old often referred to athletes as gods, which seems extreme. But a dude with a cannon arm firing pitches at 600 mph to someone with rhino DNA? This is a sport I would watch. 

@bg_keyes

@DTHSports | sports@dailytarheel.com