MLB's 'Lasers in the Outfield' controversy a sign of the times

— -- Lasers in the Outfield. Sounds like a major motion picture coming to a Cineplex near you. Turns out it's just another high-tech baseball innovation that won't be coming to an outfield near you, me or Yasiel Puig.

Of all the unlikely controversies we've seen in baseball in the 21st century, this one might be the hardest to fathom. Not to mention the hardest to follow.

This situation erupted a week and a half ago, when those free-thinking Los Angeles Dodgers showed up in New York and asked the groundskeeper of their good buddies, the New York Mets, if they could paint a few marks in the Citi Field outfield before the game. Just to help position the outfielders, with the help of a device that you and I would call a golf laser range finder -- but which baseball refers to as an "electronic positioning device."

Doesn't sound too threatening to me. But here's how nuts things got from there:

The groundskeeper initially said yes ... until someone alerted the Mets' front office ... which then asked the commissioner's office to investigate ... which resulted, a few days later, in the Dodgers being told their little laser show has been ruled to be officially illegal.

But why exactly? Please. Help us understand what's so dangerous about what the Dodgers were doing out there.

If the Dodgers were zapping the opposing outfielders with laser beams to blind them every time an L.A. batter hit a fly ball, OK, then feel free to ban that. If the Dodgers were using lasers to redirect balls they hit away from the nearest gloves, then holy guacamole, ban that, too.

But the more I've delved into this, the more obvious it becomes that they weren't attempting to do anything surreptitious. In fact, they'd been using their range finder and painting their marks in the outfield for over a month, without incident, without controversy, without jeopardizing national security, until the Mets cried foul. So what were the Dodgers up to? Here's what:

For, like, 100 years, you know how outfielders were positioned? With coaches standing on the top step of the dugout, waving towels. Kinda like bus boys after they accidentally set your napkin on fire.

Then along came this newfangled invention. You probably call it "computers." They've got a whole new level of information stored inside them. So not surprisingly, they also provide a whole new level of exactitude in helping teams decide where fielders might want to think about standing.

It's all based on the novel concept that it works out well if you position guys where hitters actually hit the ball. As opposed to where Connie Mack's fielders once stood in 1911.

So it's now an accepted practice that infielders shift all over the infield on practically every hitter. But moving outfielders around is trickier.

For one thing, there's way more ground to cover out there. For another, those outfielders are standing a lot farther from the dugout. And some of those dugouts are dug beneath the playing surface, so the coaches in charge of positioning get a lousy view of the outfield.

But the Dodgers wanted to position their outfielders with the same precision that all teams now position their infielders. So their idea was to pinpoint four spots in the outfield at the depth where outfielders would commonly play an average hitter. Then they had outfield coach George Lombard walk around before the game, reviewing with the outfielders how they should adjust to opposing hitters based on data that all teams gather.

And those mysterious lasers? They just provide a more exact and more efficient way to establish the depth at which the outfielders ought to stand for the average hitter. Is it really that complicated? Is it really that dangerous?

Even a rival executive doesn't see what the big deal is.