Baseball should have more Home Runs

The Game Room
1

The average for baseball is about one home run per inning, and this seems to have been fairly consistent throughout history. However, I get the feeling like baseball has largely ceased to be the American game because to most people it is too slow and nothing much ever happens. It’s significantly more fun to see people get caught between 3rd and home than before even getting to first. But that’s only going to happen a lot if it’s easier to get people around to the end of the run.

As it is, the odds are that the guy at bat isn’t going to make it to home. There’s not much thrill in that. Ideally, he would have about even odds of getting stricken out as making it home. It’s when things could go any way that a game is most interesting, and baseball fails at that basic level, and people aren’t patient enough these days to not have the game maxed out for viewer enjoyment.

I’m not sure what specific changes to the rules or layout of the field could make this happen. Any thoughts?

2

After playing nine innings, games should be decided by a home run derby. Awesome!

Also, give batters a free hit off a tee if they pretend to get hurt.

3

In what alternate universe does baseball average a home run every inning???

For the entire SEASON, this year the Yankees hit 244 home runs, which lead the league. They played 162 * 9 innings (roughly) = 1500 innings (about). Thus, they scored a home run roughly every six innings. Even if all their opponents hit home runs at the same rate, that would be one per three innings between them. As it is, the median home run tally was 160, so that means one home run per GAME, thus, the average baseball game this year saw two home runs, one by each team.

IF baseball has ceased to be the American pastime, it’s the result of two combined issues: televised baseball takes forever to watch, thanks to all sorts of stupid commercials, plus lots of time wasting antics by the players, and going to the ballpark to take in a game is not a cheap and easy proposition any more, at least for the major leagues.

Of course, in our increasingly attention-deficit society, where a new thing pops off the screen at us every 30 seconds, perhaps the real issue is that we don’t bother to pay attention to anything long enough any more.

4

Ahah, it appears to be 4.5 per game (i.e. 0.5 per inning) though I’m not sure if that’s per team or a combined total by both teams. I looked this up a long time ago but I guess misremembered the answer then.

5

That chart details Runs, not Home Runs. Are you referring to Home Runs, or to overall scoring?
The numbers put up by DS seem correct to me.

6

Overall score.

I was worried that might be a technical term that meant something different than I intended. Baseball was my favorite of the big games, but I never got into the lingo. I just played it in grade school where a run to home is termed a “home run”.

7

So, let me get this straight. You played baseball in grade school, yet you still don’t know what a home run is, and you say that whatever it is, baseball doesn’t have enough of them?

Watch another sport. Please.

8

Baseball is supporting 30 teams somehow. Attendance is of course higher than any other sport as they play the most games (by far). Attendance was a little off this year, but both NY teams opened smaller stadiums in a bad recessionary period. Overall Attendance is still near historic highs.

The overall TV ratings apparently saw a small increase this year. Sports in general did from what I heard. Football especially. This might also be recession related as more people are opting for the cheaper entertainment of TV Sports rather than heading out. Just a WAG on that last part.

Baseball is #1 by attendance and actually has more viewers than any other sport. The post season numbers will probably never return to what they once were, but only Football and sometimes Nascar beats them. They can’t beat Football as Football is EVENT TV. Every football postseason game is an elimination game. Baseball and the other major sports do not work this way. As to Nascar, this is regional. In the North baseball draws more viewers but there is a lack of southern teams honestly.

Increased scoring has helped the game it appears as during the scoring boom in the 90s the attendance figures kept rising. However it leveled out somewhere along the way and the decrease in scoring of the last few years does not seem to be hurting the game. It is doing well vs. the recession.

Baseball is not broke no matter how many claim it is. It is unlikely to pass football as the #1 ratings sport as again Football is an Event Sport. 1 game per week vs 6-7 games per week make a huge difference. In every other way baseball is doing great. Football passed baseball a long time ago now and it really isn’t that big of a deal.

9

Certainly there’s no rule that a sport has to bend to attract viewers. You could probably get even more viewers if baseball players had spikes on their chest and ran at the person on base and there were bikini babes in the outfield, but that doesn’t mean that they should do this.

It’s just something that’s been nagging at me for a while. It doesn’t seem like it would hurt the game any to make it more balanced for the batter, so it seems like a prospect that could be considered reasonably. Baseball is the most elaborate and interesting of all the major sports (imho), so it seems like a waste if the game isn’t optimized within its own underlying theory of play. That theory is that it’s forcing a group to work at a lot of different skills that are both offensive and defensive and see if they could do just as well at one as the other. But if it’s balanced against offense, it’s not effectively testing that.

10

Do you have any idea how much slower and longer games would be if you ramped up the offense? If people want to get more enjoyment out of baseball, they (the fans) need to start focusing more on watching the pitching than waiting for the next home run. With the technology available, the TV networks are already giving the viewers a better understanding of the pitching - Pitch f/x is a fantastic tool that the announcers are just now getting used to using.

11

Scoring is down over the last few seasons, I think, but recently it was at its highest levels in a long time. And Munch makes a good point that the games are taking longer and longer as it is. More scoring would make this worse.

12

The longer game times could be decreased in some rational ways. The league could instruct the umpires and players that batters are not to be allowed to step out of the box and pitchers need to throw the ball when they get the ball. Batters and pitchers use to work at a faster pace and it made the game better even though offense was far less in the 60s and 70s.

Of course the other factors in slowing down the game are:

  1. The increased time between innings for commercials.
  2. Players taking more pitches now and pitchers being less likely to throw inside in general.
  3. The massive increase in use of relievers of course.

Nothing can really be done about these three items, but the time that batters waste stepping out and adjusting batting gloves and pitchers waste trying to stare down the batter could shave a lot of time off the games.

More offense has slowed the games down but I think it is the stuff I list that has made the games less exciting.

13

You to speed up games? Fire the Yankees’ piching staff and coaches. There, we’ve just gained a year and a half of time over the course of a season! :smiley:

14

I have never felt baseball needed to be speeded up. It is a thinking sport. The catcher and pitcher trying to fool the batter. The batter trying to figure out what pitch will be thrown so he has a better chance to hit it. Managers trying to put the best players in against the proper pitcher. That is the game, within a game that baseball is.

15

It’s kind of silly for them to agonize so much over each pitch, for even though the players are skilled professionals, there’s a fair bit of chance involved that no amount of acting like they’re defusing a live bomb in a nursery school will mitigate.

16

That barely makes sense. Yankees games go long due to the batters being extremely patient. The pitchers are not the fastest workers, but they are around average to be fair. I really love pitchers like Boomer Wells that would get the ball and throw the ball. Fast, sharp games and it seems like the defense played batter for this type of pitcher.

17

This.

Baseball is a game of tradition, history, and record-keeping, in which a fine balance has been struck between offense and defense, the pitcher and the batter, base hits and outs. Home runs (real home runs) are rare enough to be special, common enough that it’s not unreasonable to hope for one at any time.

In this context, any change to the sport is going to be a hard sell. But it would have a better chance if it came from someone who actually knew something about the game. If you want to start your own rival league, like the XFL, or invent a new, “more exciting” baseball-esque sport, like Base-ketball, you go right ahead and give it a shot.

18

I find the whole notion that someone who knows so little of the sport that they don’t even understand what a home run is has attempted to conceive what the “underlying theory of play” for the game is to be quite fascinating. Perhaps Sage Rat will next take a crack at deciding how to make sepak takraw more entertaining to the Cambodians…

Nevertheless, let’s dispatch the underlying thesis behind the attack on baseball contained in his post: a sport is more entertaining if it allows the offense and defense an equal opportunity to be successful.

As exhibit A against this concept, we introduce the world-wide #1 sport: football. No, not that bastard version we play in the US, but the one that is termed the “beautiful game” in the rest of the world, which we call soccer. Soccer is intensely popular in large part because scoring is HARD to accomplish, not easy. So hard that some games never see a score, some games only see one or two, and a game with more than two scores is perhaps less likely than one with 2 or fewer. The defense has an awesome advantage in soccer.

The result is that scoring is put at a premium. The whole ebb and flow of a soccer game centers around the difficulty of success, and the attempt of each team to control the game and create enough chances at scoring that one or two of them succeed. The game’s tension is centered on this very concept. The game’s inherent tension, combined with the fact that it only takes just under 2 hours to complete a game (no commercial breaks!!) makes it a very fun spectator sport.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have basketball. In basketball, the success to failure ratio is usually greater than 50:50. In pro basketball, it is usually substantially greater. Thus, defense is handicapped in an attempt to increase the chance of success by the offense. The game retains popularity with this over-balanced approach.

So the question with baseball is not answered simply by saying that all sports should be balanced. Baseball’s inherent fun centers on two aspects: the fact that the sport is not filled with a lot of “action” (a lot of it is standing around doing not much), so that you can casually watch it without worrying too much about missing something vital, combined with the fact that success is relatively hard to achieve, so the reward for success is substantial. This makes the effort to scratch and claw one’s way around the bases that much more exciting to watch. Indeed, the fact that the average player is successful in making it safely to first base only 3 out of 10 times, combined with the strategy involved in trying to maximize the permutations of success, is about the only good reason to watch the sport.

I, frankly, can’t stand the 8 - 6 baseball game. Give me a 2 - 1 pitcher’s duel any day.

19

…even though whatever a home run might be, it doesn’t average nine a game.

I really don’t get this argument. Football is a few seconds of actions followed by a bunch of walking around. Basketball is longer bursts of actions followed by a bunch of standing around. I’m not claiming that baseball is up there with hockey or soccer but the “standing around” argument gets old, and I think it just gets gets thrown around in an echo chamber by people who want to see people get hurt more often.

20

Also, football scores would be almost identical to baseball scores if they weren’t assigned more than one point. The odds are that the guys with possession aren’t going to make it to the end zone.