Make the Pros Bowl With Plastic

I love the PBA plastic ball championships. And, if the truth be told, I wish there were more of them. I hate how having the right ball in one's hands seems to have become more important than throwing the ball with the right speed along the right line with the right kind of roll, and how the touring, ball staff member pros with their armies of ball reps and unlimited access to equipment seem to have such an unfair advantage over their less privileged brethren.

In fact, I'd be delighted if all elite tournaments limited the players to the same cheap plastic balls and, better still, permitted no modifications to the simple pancake layouts and ball surfaces so that the player himself decided his own fate instead of the ball in his hands. The oil patterns could vary from tournament to tournament, but the balls would remain the same.

Yes, I suppose the ball manufacturers could continue to sell balls to the general public in order for them and their pro shop retailers to remain in business, and the public could continue to exhaust their bank accounts to shoot their ridiculous scores on "bumper lane" house conditions with the newest high tech balls that hook like crazy right out of the box and blast the pins to smithereens until they absorb so much oil after a few games that they lose their punch and it's time to buy another ball. But the pros would soar above this insanity.

Of course, the cat is too far and long out of the bag for this to ever happen. Forevermore, elite bowlers will have to focus more and more on ball physics (or have the right people in their "stable" to do the focusing for them) and less and less on technique, and I think PBA bowling will likely suffer from it until it, perhaps, eventually dies. And guys like me who can't afford the newest, freshest equipment and who aren't ball physicists might as well forget about competing in scratch tournaments at any level.

I think I'll watch a video of a time when men were men who bowled 100-game tournaments and bowlers didn't have to carry a truckload of balls and ball reps around with them to excel.

Too Little Oil to Make a Plastic Ball Tournament Interesting?

I've heard some people say they aren't excited about seeing this week's plastic ball tournament bowled on lanes with lower oil volumes. As one guy on Facebook comments:

"i was hoping they would leave a regular pba shot out there and we could watch guys goin straight and accurate...not throwin plastic 5th arrow...i dont like it...nothin differant about it with the shot they put out..."

It seems to me that there are some differences. The guys appear to be throwing the ball considerably slower and leaving significantly more 10 pins on weaker pocket hits, and the strikes aren't as "energetic" as usual. But some are still hooking the ball quite a lot, and many are shooting pretty big scores.

Although I wouldn't want to see so much oil put out there that the scores were so low that it only took a 190 average to make the TV finals, I admit that I'd like to see the lanes made more challenging than they appear to be now so that the differences between the reactive resin or even urethane game on the one hand and the "plastic" ball game could be highlighted more effectively.

How do you feel about this?