Just get Back to the Basics

Photo cred outfieldflyrule.com

For non-baseball fans, the length of a baseball game takes too long. For baseball fans, the length of a baseball game still takes too long. It doesn’t matter who you are, baseball is a slow-paced game that can take upwards of four hours to complete. So the answer is simple, increase the pace of play, right?

The Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner's office is experimenting with some rule changes in the Gulf Coast League, the Arizona Leagues, and the World Baseball Classic. These rule changes include: placing a runner on second base at the start of each inning during extra innings, skipping the four pitches of an intentional walk and having a signal from the dugout instead, and increasing the size of the strike zone.

Rule Change 1 - Who’s on Second? Extra Innings

BREAKING NEWS!! The National Football League’s Commissioner, Roger Goodell, has announced new overtime rules. The kicker of each team will line up at the 50 yard line and the first one to miss loses the football game. Ridiculous, right? It seems as though it would be too easy to score. How can the NFL let the outcome of a game be determined by that method? According to research conducted by unconventionalstats.com, the NFL field goal percentage at 50 yards was 50.52% during the 2013 season. Compare that to the odds of a runner scoring when on second base with no outs. According to a study by Scott Lindholm (beyondthescorecard.blogspot.com), a runner on second base with no outs scored 59.8% of the time during the first 30 games of 2013. Thus, the proposed rule changes in baseball would make it even easier to score a run during extra innings than a NFL place kicker making a 50 yard field goal in overtime.

MLB’s Chief Baseball Officer, Joe Torre, was quoted by Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports saying “It’s not fun to watch when you go through your whole pitching staff and wind up bringing a utility infielder in to pitch. As much as it’s nice to talk about being at an 18-inning game, it takes time”.2

Royals win 2015 World Series

I agree with Torre on the idea of how miserable it must be for a manager to go through his pitching staff during a long game. But isn’t that why they are paid a hefty sum of money? At that point in the game, it’s a battle of who can be the most effective while still maintaining efficiency for games still left on the schedule. It comes down to who wants it more. Who is going to blink first. And to me, that’s the most intense part of baseball. Would you have rather seen the Royals start with a man on second base against the Mets in Game 5 of the 2015 World Series? The Royals just scored two in the ninth to tie the game and have all the momentum and now we want to go ahead and put a man on second base for them? Not a chance! Make them continue to hit and produce runs. Consider the scenario - the best hitting team in baseball (Royals) vs the best pitching team in baseball (Mets), and we’re going to take the power of pitching out of the game?!? It probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but the 10th and 11th innings were some of the most intense moments in baseball history. What a shame it would have been if fans had to miss out on THAT experience during Game 5 of the 2015 World Series.

Rule Change 2 - Take Your Base

The whole point of implementing the new intentional walk rule is to save time. Good, so now we’ve cut down 45 seconds of every other game. Now, I can make it home for dinner! There simply aren’t enough intentional walks during a game to make significant impact on the overall length of a game.

Rule Change 3 - Strike Zone

Baseball has become a pitchers game in the past few years. Batting averages have decreased while pitching statistics have improved. Society has grown bored with baseball due to pitching dominance. I’m not saying that dominate pitching is a bad thing but fans want to see home-runs, hitting parades, and web gems. Raising the strike zone decreases all three of those characteristics. In my personal experience, a 95 mph fastball is a lot easier (but still incredibly difficult) to hit at the knees rather than at the top of the zone. Strikeouts will increase more than they already have, which increases fan boredom, which makes baseball, once again, feel as if a game is too long. Give hitters a chance. They only succeed two to three times out of ten chances already, don’t make it more difficult.

Play Ball!

Play under review

Back to decreasing the duration of the game. My issue with trying to increase the pace of play is that baseball was always a game ruled by human ability and the occasional human error until the introduction of instant replay in 2014. Coincidently, that was the first year that the average 9-inning Major League Baseball game lasted over three hours. Interesting! “The average time of a nine-inning game lasted three hours last season (2016), an increase of four minutes from 2015, despite the implementation of rules to speed up the game”.1

So yes, baseball is taking too long for fans to remain attentive, but it’s because of the rule changes that have slowed the pace of  the game. We don’t even get to see managers run out of the dugout and get face-to-face with and umpires anymore. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like the fact that old-fashioned baseball is changing as rapidly as it is now. Maybe we need to slow things down a bit. Pun intended.

References:

1 Nightengale, B. (2017, February 03). MLB commissioner looks to speed up pace of game. Retrieved February 20, 2017, from http://thesportdigest.com/2017/02/mlb-commissioner-looks-to-speed-up-pace-of-game/

2 Passan, J. (2017, February 08). MLB plans to test new extra-innings rules in rookie ball, with Joe Torre's approval. Retrieved February 21, 2017, from http://sports.yahoo.com/news/mlb-plans-to-test-new-extra-innings-rules-in-rookie-ball-with-joe-torres-approval-224914115.html