I have loved baseball ever since I was a small child, everything about it. Playing, watching on tv, and attending the games in person have all been highlights of my life. I love the sport, the strategy, the subtle nuances and the big moments. I grew up on the raw excitement of the late ‘80s and 90’s, and have spent my adulthood enthralled with analytics and the statcast revolution.
However, for the past 10 years or so, all I ever seem to hear is that the game is ruined and/or broken. How it needs to be fixed so that it may continue to enjoy the success it has sustained for more than a century. Drastic rule changes have been implemented already with more drastic changes imminently on the horizon. I’m not one to resist change, but I also disagree in general about the degree to which baseball needs “fixing” in the first place.
When the “baseball is broken” crowd is pressed for specifics on exactly what is wrong, the answers are all over the map but they come back to a few main points. They say they want more offense, faster games, more balls in play, and starting pitchers to have a more prominent role so we can have less of this bullpenning nonsense. There is a rational argument for each of these issues on their own, but when put together, it quickly becomes obvious that solving them all is impossible and contradictory. If you do stuff like moving the mound back, limiting pickoff throws, or juicing up the ball again, offense will certainly increase. Just as certainly, should any of those things take place, games will be slower paced than ever and the role of the starting pitcher in the game will be further diminished. Push the mound back a foot and you’ll see starting pitchers done after 3 or 4 innings rather than 5 or 6. Then there are the walks. The walk is the most boring play in all of baseball, and making it more difficult for pitchers to throw strikes is inevitably going to lead to lots more of them. Juice the ball up to increase the home run rate, and all those extra bombs are going to send starters to the showers quicker than ever before. All those extra runs take time to score (especially because walks take a long time and we’ll have so many more of them), so when you combine that with all the additional pitching changes as poorly performing pitchers leave the mound, you now have a longer and slower game.
I don’t think that the people advocating for those things really want them. They might say that is what they want, but what I think the really want is a return to the style of play we saw in the ’80s. There wasn’t necessarily more offense, but it was different offense. More exciting offense in my opinion, where situational hitting, line drives, and taking advantage of your opponents weaknesses were more prominent than waiting around for a 3-run homer. I can understand this desire a lot more, it was a really great era baseball. Unfortunately, while all the new rules being tested and proposed might address the things people are complaining about, in terms of actually fixing the game, they aren’t really going to work because those rules weren’t around in the 80s! People are reacting to what they think they don’t like about the game, but what I think they really want is the old game and you can’t make the game old again by coming up with crazy new rules.
Slow pace of play, the increased “three true outcomes” frequency, and overall fewer balls in play tend to be the main targets for rule changes. The general consensus is that people want “more offense”, but they don’t really mean more runs being scored, just a different way to go about the scoring that involves more doubles and stolen bases and fewer home runs and walks. I believe that I have one very simple solution that will solve all of those problems – and it’s not a new rule!
Since the increasing strikeout rates are being blamed for many of the issues with the game, not much time is spent considering any change that would give a perceived advantage to the pitcher. Most of the stuff in fact is the opposite, designed to make pitching even more difficult. Some of those new rules ideas would surely result in more runs – and in the case of the “2 pick-off attempts per batter” rule, significantly more stolen bases. However, they are not going to solve the problem of the increasingly slow pace of play or the three true outcomes issues. Making pitching more difficult just means we’ll have more guys walking, more home runs, and what basically amounts to free stolen bases once the pitcher is out of pick-off throws. To try to get to a real solution, I thought back to those old games from the 80s that were high action, fast paced, and could even have an 8-5 ballgame finishing up in under 3 hours.
One thing that popped into my head was Eric Gregg and his boisterous strike calls. When Gregg was behind the dish, every batter in the league knew he’d better come to the plate ready to swing. Gregg was not one to trifle with whether or not a pitch technically brushed the corner or not, if it was near the plate, it was a strike. Batters couldn’t get up there and take pitches on the black, hoping the ump would miss the call or give them a break. If you walked to the plate with the intention of working the count and making the pitcher earn his strikes, you were going to do little but earn yourself a stroll back to the dugout dragging your bat behind you. I say, if we really want fast-paced action baseball like we had in the 80s, we need to call strikes like Eric Gregg did in the 80s.
People who want more offense are going to immediately disagree with me and say that calling more strikes is just going to increase Ks and eliminate offense. That may be true in the short run while the batters adjust. However, as we all know, batters struck out way less in the 80s than they do now, bigger strike zone or not. It probably won’t drastically increase the output of runs on the scoreboard, but what it will do is get guys swinging the bat more. There will be fewer walks, and in time, fewer Ks as the batters stop being quite so selective about what they swing at and just put something close in play.
I watched the Sunday Night Baseball game between the Angels and White Sox the other night. It was a historic game, with Shohei Ohtani pitching and batting in the second slot in the order. It had all the markings of an outstanding baseball game, however, I got very bored by the slow pace of play. The game ultimately lasted over 3.5 hours, and regardless of the amount of time it took, the pace was just very slow and dragged heavily. In addition it was disappointing that Ohtani couldn’t even make it through 5 innings despite coming out for the 5th with a very manageable pitch count. I was in full agreement with the old-timers here, bemoaning the decreasing role of the starting pitcher.
Throughout the game, and especially during that ill-fated 5th inning, I became incredibly frustrated watching the umpire calling balls on pitches that were clearly inside ESPN’s handy on-screen strike zone box. I went back after the game and counted them up, there were 13 pitches that hit the strike zone and yet the umpire called for balls. It doesn’t sound like a lot in the face of the 300-ish total pitches thrown in the game, but when you filter it down based on how many pitches are actually borderline and are “close calls”, this is a pretty terrible rate of success for an umpire. For comparison’s sake, every single pitch that did not hit the strike zone was called correctly as a ball. While 13 pitches doesn’t sound like many, that is 13 at bats, more than one full time through the order, that were prolonged and dragged out by the umpire’s unwillingness to accurately call strikes on pitches on the edges of the zone.
The fun started in the first inning, when Ohtani painted the corner on a 3-2 pitch to Jose Abreu. It was fully on the black, on the edge for sure, but a terrific pitch. It absolutely should have been strike 3 to end the inning, and Ohtani should have been strutting back to the dugout. He had actually already started the strut and had to stop in the middle when he got the inexplicable news from the ump that his outstanding pitch had been called a ball. Abreu strolled down to first instead, and Ohtani had to then face the tough Yoan Moncada with a man on base. The White Sox did not get any runs in this situation, and many fans would say “well, the bad call didn’t affect the outcome, so why does it matter?”
It matters for the overall game integrity, and the in-game effects are real. Ohtani threw extra pitches in that first inning that he shouldn’t have needed to throw. Had the umpire simply accurately enforced the strike zone, Ohtani might not have been as fatigued in the 5th. While Moncada didn’t produce in that particular at bat, if you replay that exact scenario 100 times, some of those times Moncada does come through with an RBI double or a home run. Those cases clearly have an immediate and negative impact on the game, and in addition in aggregate they have long-term effects for pitchers due to the statistical swings like making less money or being demoted to the minor leagues.
Forgetting the long-term detriment to the pitcher for a minute, let’s get back to this game. This walk slowed down the pace of the action. It was a clear strike, but instead of keeping the game moving, we had to watch Ohtani pace around, collect himself, and work to a tough batter from the stretch. It was a totally unnecessary delay, and to me, this type of thing is the most detrimental to the overall pace of play issues.
I mentioned that Ohtani didn’t make it through the 5th inning. The home plate umpire turned his attention to missing pitches on Dylan Cease for innings 2, 3, and 4, but Ohtani felt the brunt in inning five the worst, with three clear strikes all being called balls in the frame. The first was to Billy Hamilton. With the count 1-1, Ohtani painted the corner with a slider. Billy Hamilton is bad at hitting in any count, but when you get him down 1-2 he becomes a nearly automatic out. Ohtani did manage to get him on the next pitch regardless, but the risk was there. It didn’t turn out so well for him next time. A more competent hitter in Adam Eaton was at the plate, with a runner on third courtesy of a single and Ohtani’s bad pick-off throw. Ohtani missed outside for ball one, but the next pitch was right down the middle at the knees. It should have evened the count, but instead the count became 2-0, which quickly became 3-0, and eventually turned into a walk. Now obviously Ohtani doesn’t get Eaton every single time that call is made correctly, but while I’m not going to take the time to look it up, I’m sure Eaton’s OPS from a 2-0 count is massively higher than his OPS from 1-1 counts. It is most assured that regardless of what happened, it wouldn’t have happened exactly the way it did after that botched call
Jose Abreu was up next, and you could see Ohtani tiring (likely as a result of all the extra pitches he had to throw after Abreu’s ill-gotten walk in the first). He was losing a little bit of his control, and fell behind 2-1 to Abreu. He came back with another nasty slider right on the corner, but the umpire just spit on it and called it a ball to go 3-1. This was a real turning point, as the correct call would have put Ohtani one pitch away from being in the dugout. Instead Ohtani had to continue to battle Abreu, eventually succumbing and walking him. Moncada was up next, and while Ohtani managed to strike him out, if you watched the game you’ll remember that the catcher missed the third strike, went back to pick it up, and chucked it down the right field line trying to get the out at first allowing 2 runs to come home and tie the game. Now for starters, both of the runs were scored by batters who walked after getting a free ball on what should have been a strike. Secondly, had all of Ohtani’s strikes been called correctly, he would have been much less likely to end up in that situation in the first place. Lastly, in spite of all the runs that scored, we had what was easily the most boring and slow-paced inning of the ballgame, with most of the time spent watching Eaton and Abreu working the count and not swinging at pitches that were in the strike zone with no consequence.
If we want to pick up the pace, we don’t need a pitch clock, we need umpires to go back to raising their right arm when the pitch is in the strike zone. Overnight, we might have just had fewer runs and a better performance from Ohtani. Over the long haul, what we’ll have is good hitters like Abreu and Eaton swinging at those pitches rather than taking them. I don’t think the benefit there is all for the pitcher. Maybe Abreu would have smacked one of those two pitches out of the yard instead of taking them had he simply been incentivized to swing. I’d say it is likely that he would have put at least one of them in play, and as we all know, anything can happen when you put the ball in play. Start by calling all the pitches in the strike zone as strikes, and from there we can consider expanding the strike zone to be the size of Eric Gregg’s rather than the current slimmed-down model. This will get us right back to the pace of the 80s. We don’t need any new rules, we just need to use the current rules as they were intended – to make it so the batter can’t stand there all day waiting for a fat one right down the middle. If we can light a fire under the batters, make them stop being so picky, and give them a reason to take the stick off their shoulder, I think it could solve every fundamental issue with the current game.
