As the world turns
Baseball in the time of COVID
(Writing time: 30 minutes)
On the PosCast this week, I am joined by dear friends Alexa Datt and Dani Wexelman of the podcast “Datt’s What She Said with Dani,” and it was a blast, and at some point there we started talking about the rules changes in baseball — the zombie runner in extra innings, the DH in the National League, the seven-inning doubleheaders, the three batter minimum.
And something occurred to me: I have not talked AT ALL about the rule changes in baseball. I don’t mean I haven’t written about it — I have not. But I haven’t even TALKED about it. It hasn’t come up in a conversation or text thread I’ve had with friends, and I have had a lot of those. Maybe someone texted me about the extra-inning thing the first time it happened, I can’t really remember. Life in the pandemic is a blur, as you know.
But the point is: I just don’t spend any time at all thinking about the rule changes.
And I think there’s a lesson baseball can take from that.
A few years ago, when baseball first started talking about adding a pitcher’s clock, I wrote a pretty highfalutin column about how bad that was, how the whole point of baseball is that it is the game without a clock, how a clock without spoil the rhythms that have made the game magical for so many of us for so many years.
Then I went to see a minor-league game in Toledo where they were using the clock and … by the end of the first inning, I already realized how wrong I had been. The clock was totally fine. It was better than fine. It made the pace feel crisper. Nobody really paid much attention to it. The pitchers had come to accept it — much in the same way that in tennis, the server accepts that clock — and it was no big deal.
And that was a good lesson: My first reaction to change as a baseball fan is always negative. Always. That is just hard-wired into my baseball fanhood. I have written many times that I believe everybody’s perfect version of baseball is the version of the game that was being played when they were 10 years old. For me, that’s 1977, when Rod Carew hit .388, and George Foster blew our minds by hitting 52 home runs, and starters would complete 20 games a season, and Nolan Ryan struck out 341 batters, and there were two divisions in each league and four teams made the playoffs and nine-inning games averaged two hours and 32 minutes.
There’s a part of me I can’t shut off that wants baseball to be like that again.
And that part of me seems to believe that every change the game makes takes us a little bit further away from 1977. So, right, a rule change suggestion triggers an instant and involuntary barricade. I can’t help it.
And I have to remind myself of four things.
We’re not going back to 1977.
We shouldn’t want to go back to 1977.
The only way we can get back any of the things I loved about 1977 baseball is to MAKE RULE CHANGES. This is so important. By not making rule changes, the people who run the game are letting it evolve in countless unpredictable ways. It’s a rudderless ship. Games are 35 minutes longer now not because of rule changes but because of a lack of rule changes. Fewer balls than ever are put in play not because of rule changes but because of a lack of rule changes. The triple is dead not because of rule changes but because of a lack of rule changes.
People like me might complain about rule changes before they happen … but once they do, we adjust. For all the complaining about the designated hitter, the single biggest and most controversial rule change of the last 100 years, nobody stopped watching baseball because of it. As fans, we adapt pretty quickly.
Which brings us to this year. Do I like the extra-inning zombie runner? Yeah, I think I do. My rule change defenses went up when I first heard about it, but now that it’s happening, yeah, it’s kind of cool, it makes me root for extra innings in a way that I certainly didn’t before. I know that we’re all supposed to miss those 18-inning games where the teams had to send out utility infielders to pitch and all that and those were fun, but I mean, they were also kind of dumb.
The DH in the National League? I was against that too, of course, because I liked each league having its own character. And while I’m a DH guy myself I always got a kick out of listening to traditionalists scream about the beauty of the double switch. But now that the DH is in the NL, yeah, it’s kind of cool, it’s a lot more fun watching A.J. Pollock hit than Ross Stripling.*
*One thing I would recommend, though, is that teams at least be allowed to use pitchers as designated hitters, if they want. As you know, the rule now is that if a pitcher is put in the lineup, the team loses the DH for the rest of the game — this was done because wise guys like Billy Martin tried to game the system. But I think that for the really good hitting pitchers like Madison Bumgarner or Zack Greinke, they should be allowed to be the DH and when they get pulled, the manager should be allowed to simply replace them with another DH. I don’t know how often this would come up, but it would be a nice feature.
The three-batter minimum? Seems fine to me. I have no particular love for the lefty specialist.
The point for baseball is: Be bolder. Make changes. Yes, the traditionalists will recoil, at least at first, and maybe even threaten to turn off baseball forever. But you know what? They won’t. We won’t. This has been a difficult year for baseball, just like it has been a difficult year for everything, but I think it has been a nice reminder that the character of the game isn’t locked in all the musty traditions.
Why would anyone (other than perhaps with Ohtani) put a pitcher in the DH spot to begin with? You mentioned Greinke and Bumgarner as possibilities. Their career OPS+ are 61 and 46 respectively. Including those two, there are 16 active players with 500 career plate appearances with OPS+ of 61 or below. 8 are pitchers (Including the hapless Johnny Cueto with a -36. .103/.128/.105 in 618 PAs. He has 1 double.)
Four of the 8 position players are career backup catchers, three are utility infielders, and then there is Lewis Brinson. These eight have combined for 62 MLB seasons, averaging 138 PAs a year. They have a combined 35 AL seasons, and a combined 3 starts at DH with one of those being in the player's rookie season. (Thanks, Ned Yost and John Farrell for the other two!)
As far as the 7 inning doubleheaders and zombie runners, it is OK in this Covid shortened season to get it in and expose players less, but I wouldn't want to see them in a real season.
How many innings in a season would the zombie runner save anyway? Even if every extra inning game ended in the tenth with it (and it wouldn't), there were only 117 games last year (4.8%) that made it past the tenth. (44% of extra inning games end in the tenth anyway) The average team played 18 innings last year past the 10th, (about 3 per month) and only 6.4 innings beyond 12. (About 1 per month.)
I really don't like the runner. I would even rather have ties (gasp!) after 12 than do this, and I hate ties. (There were 37 games beyond 12 innings last year, which would have meant 74 ties distributed among 30 teams, or about two and a half per team)
In a regular year, 7 inning double headers would favor the team with the superior starting pitching much more than a regular game. I understand doing it with Covid, but not in a normal season. There were 33 total double headers last season. The average team had 2.2, so this would save 4.4 innings per year, per team. That is negligible.
This is a good summary of my feelings towards the rule changes too. I have been a diehard NL fan and haven't liked the DH*. For most of baseball's history, a person could be away from the game for a decade and come back to the same sport, integration (embarrassingly late for that) and the DH not withstanding. I am an infrequent watcher of football and hockey, and I've been sometimes been caught by surprise over the last 20 years at things that have changed (e.g., where kickoffs are placed, overtime shootouts, overtime wins, among others). That being said, these new baseball rule changes (in baseball or the others sports) haven't destroyed the games and often have fixed problems that have evolved with time. This is the perfect season to try them out for baseball, and I suspect they might grow on me too.
(* I had always felt the DH was a logical inconsistency. If it makes sense to have a DH for a pitcher, why not do it for a light hitting shortstop? When the DH started, there were a lot of banjo-hitting shortstops in like Belanger, Brinkman, Harrelson, Bowa, etc. Why not have DHs for them? Where would it end--at full platooning? I guess after 40 years that hasn't happened so I'll concede this is a one-shot deal just for pitchers.)