I made a point of randomly choosing an old game and yeah, they simply worked faster. It’s only a few seconds per pitch, but three seconds per pitch is 9-10 minutes a game right there. Batters waste a lot of that time too.
I think a 70s game is truly a dramatic difference. The batters rarely left the box and most pitchers got the ball and threw the ball. And the commercial breaks were shorter. Instead of being over 3 hours, the games averages closer to 2½ hours. That 40 minutes is dramatic for watching the game.
Now maybe it is a little worse for me as I am a fan of one of the teams with the longest average games, but I want the rules to speed things up to be enforced against them as much as every other team.
Even in the 90s you still saw 150 minutes games when you got pitchers like David Wells on the mound. Yankees vs. Red Sox today? Pack two lunches.
Ha. You obviously didn’t grow up in Cleveland in the 70s, when the Indians’ starting first baseman was Mike “The Human Rain Delay” Hargrove. I was going through my growth spurt then, and I swear, I’d be a half-inch taller at the end of a Hargrove AB than I was when he stepped into the batter’s box.
I remember that a$$hole all too well. He was the prototype for the modern batter.
Troubles with the game as I see it:
1- Every single batter is Mike Hargrove. Unless you get knocked down by a pitch, you should stay in the box and be ready to hit.
2- Players are selfish. If you step up to the plate and see no infielders to the left of second base, try to hit the ball to the third base side of the diamond. You’ll be able to walk to first and probably run to second. Instead, everyone wants to pull the ball in hopes of hitting a homer, but more likely hit right to somebody. As they used to say, hit 'em where they ain’t.
3- Way too many pitchers on the roster. Pinch hitters and pinch runners are far less common than they used to be. Should limit the number of pitchers and give managers more flexibility in game situations.
4- Strategy is a thing of the past. When was the last time you saw a pitchout? Hit and run? Sac bunt? Squeeze? It’s all a bloop and a blast mentality, a one-way ticket to snoozeville.
5- Replays take too long. There are also delays while teams decide if they want to challenge. Scrap the replay.
6- Cut down between inning breaks and pitcher change breaks. One less commercial between innings, give the incoming pitcher 2 tosses from the game mound and then get to business.
7- The schedule is too unbalanced. I want to see teams visit cities in other divisions more than once a year. Add a team to each league, make each league 4 divisions of 4 teams each, and eliminate interleague play.
8- Bring back Sunday doubleheaders and cut a week or two off each end of the season. Get the World Series done before snow is a major threat.
9- If you want to build a fan base in the future, stop playing the World Series so late at night. Start at 7 ET if you have to, give the kids in the east a chance to watch a full game before going to bed on a school night. Take a page from the NFL and give the fans a chance to watch before they go to bed.
Of course, this will lead to more games played in different time zones, especially if it’s an Eastern time zone team playing on the West Coast or vice versa.
In many cases, I suspect that that is as much a case of the manager and coaches instructing the players to hit a fly ball, as it is the players choosing to do so on their own.
That’s fine. We’re used to stretches in the middle of the season where our team is on the west coast. Being a Yankee fan in Michigan, I want to be able to see them in Detroit twice a year. Often, their only visit is in the early spring or in the dog days of August.
I agree with all your suggestions. I was thinking about this one just last night. The Mariners will hardly ever face the Red Sox, Tigers, or Blue Jays. Instead we get game after game within our division. We play the Angles six games straight (before and after the All Star break)
I preferred the balanced schedule from the old days.
I also agree with earlier start times, even during the regular season. I love the games when we’re playing Central Time Zone teams. Game starts at 5:00, I can start watching around 6 and miss all commercials, and be done by 8:00.
Why can’t West Coast games start at 6:00 or 6:30 local time?
I agree with some of these, but calling players selfish is fundmentally misunderstanding the problem. Teams and players have gotten exceptionally smart and good at baseball. Players aren’t hitting the ball the other way because it is really hard when everyone throws 97 with movement and the returns of the occassional single just aren’t worth it. You might not like it, but this style of play is how batters most help their team right now. You want to fix this then you need figure out how to making contact a little easier. Otherwise you will continue to things like the Reds leading the league with a 249 avg.
How’s this for a baseball oddity you’ll probably never see again: on 04/26, Shohei Otani was tied for most home runs in the league when he took the mound for the Angels. The last starting pitcher to lead the league in homers? Babe Ruth, back in 1921.
But that’s exactly the point. Hargrove was an outlier. Cleveland games weren’t all that long because it was just him futzing around. If he’d come up in 2004 instead of 1974, you wouldn’t even have noticed he did that because he’d be just like two hundred other guys and nowhere near as bad as some.
Players are not selfish, or certainly no more than they ever were. The reason they hit into a shift is because they are hitting the way they have been trained to hit, and have been practicing, since they were in high school, and changing the way you hit when the pitchers are MLB quality is very easy to type, and very hard to actually do.
I mean, if you could just tap the ball the other way and get a hit every time, wouldn’t a selfish player want to do that? You’d hit .400, which would surely earn you a big contract. (Of course it would only work for a game or two, but a few hits is a good thing for the numbers.)
I agree replays take too long but they need to happen. Umpire errors are a plague on the sport and much worse than a little delay. What needs to happen is the replays need to be faster; for the life of me I don’t understand why they take so long, which suggests MLB is not prioritizing doing them quickly. I don’t even get why the umps all have to walk over to the side of the field for it. Can’t the crew chief have AirPods in?
Quite a lot needs to change about umpiring; the way it’s done makes absolutely no sense in 2021, though it might have in 1921.
If strategy was a thing of the past, we wouldn’t be seeing the shifts we see today, we wouldn’t see an emphasis on launch angle that has been dominating the game, we wouldn’t be seeing openers and followers being employed, we wouldn’t see the massive trend towards rostering catchers whose main talent is pitch-framing, and a whole host of other things that has been changing the game.
Asking an inept and confused Jay Bruce to try to hit it to the other field is like asking my dog to figure out how to read a map. Hitting it opposite field is HARD. Hell, HITTING it is hard. Watch this clip of 32 year old journeyman pitcher Heath Hembree, who no one has ever heard of, make Mookie Betts flail spectacularly. It’s an overlay of his 2 pitches, with nearly the exact same delivery, doing 2 entirely different things in the air:
I’m amazed the Reds hit .249 as a team. I’m amazed teams out there are hitting more than .200 with pitchers doing what they do these days. What Devin Williams and Dustin May do with baseballs is witchcraft. There’s an arms race going on in baseball right now, and it’s going 95 MPH with movement.
Every now and then you see a hitter adjust. Mike Moustakas made an effort to start hitting opposite field about 5 years ago. It was a modern miracle of effort and determination. It’s a very specific skill that needs to be developed - it’s not something that a guy just does at the plate.
I am reminded of Jose Bautista’s suddenly becoming an excellent power hitter in the last month of 2009; it happened because of an adjustment the Blue Jays helped him make to his forward stride, an adjustment that you wouldn’t have even noticed had you not been looking for it.
The key to hitting at the MLB level is the ability to repeat a proper swing almost without thinking about it. If you just up and change the way you swing the bat today, you won’t hit the ball at all, or you’ll pop out or something. Changing one’s swing is incredibly hard; it’s something that took years of practice to master to get to the point that you can hit a major league slider.
In all likelihood a player who hits into a shift is almost certainly still doing the best thing for his team. I realize it might be frustrating for Cubs fans to watch Anthony Rizzo pull another ground ball at the short-stop-in-right-field, but Rizzo is a three-time All Star, and he deserved to be. He still gets on base and hits for power, and that sure beats the hell out of what might happen if he changes his swing.
I’m not even sure it is a training/repetition issue. If so you would see young players and prospects who started out in this type of environment develop swings more tailored to going the other way. Maybe that will still happen, but there are no signs of it. Pitching has improved in a way that batting hasn’t been able to keep up with. Teams have gotten so good at increasing velocity and spin rates. At somepoint the human body just may not be capable of reacting in time.
This is exactly right. I’ve always heard that one of the reasons for pitchers using substances on their fingers is for improved grip and control (rather than adding to turbulence etc. to create movement). That’s always been fine with me - I’d rather the pitcher control the ball better than to have the batter at risk. But know we’re hearing about the substances adding very significantly to grip, and it being necessary because velocity is so much higher. We’re going to start seeing smoother balls, and a ban on ALL substances - even rosin - to reduce movement and give the batters an edge again.
I would dispute this claim. Umpire errors are very rare, and for 100 years were just part of the sport and the world didn’t end. In fact, the occasional heated manager-umpire argument was much more entertaining than watching umpires stand around with headsets.
That is tricky as slick balls are legitimately dangerous. I think as least they need to develop some standards on what it allowed.
Agreed. In fact, replay has had unwanted consequences, such as the microscopic examinations of whether a runner’s finger comes off the base 1/10 of a millimeter for 1/10 of a second, after he has clearly stolen the base.
If you’re watching TV, you’re not just watching umpires stand around with headsets. You’re watching replays of the disputed play, in slo-mo and from several angles, while listening to the announcers (and anyone you happen to be watching the game with) try to decide whether the call will and should be overturned. As long as it doesn’t take too long, it can add an element of suspense and intrigue to the game.