so what happens if you find a pitcher who can hit make him the dh and put him in the outfield on non pitch days ?
Unless they changed the rules, pitchers cannot DH for themselves. So in the case of the only pitcher that qualifies (Superstar on the Angels) they lose the DH when he exits the game and all pitchers for the Angels afterwards would bat for themselves
Pitch clock.
Batter has to stay in the box.
Reduce commercial breaks by 20 to 30 seconds each.
These are the big 3.
Eliminate replay would be a good step in my book. Especially ticky tack replays.
Face 3 batters is a small help.
Less mound conferences still needs refinement.
Shifts don’t slow the game down, so who cares. This is minor.
Three batter minimum doesn’t do squat for game time. The time problem is on the batter. I say put a clock on the batter and keep official stats on the number of times he exceeds say 5 seconds to get ready for the next pitch. Then have him return a portion of his salary based on the number of times he’s dawdling at the plate.
Yes, limit replays. Fair or foul, beat the throw or not, avoid the tag or not. Leave the bag by a millimeter when he’s already beaten the throw- no. Have a replay official on site to be the one to initiate the review. No more dilly-dallying while the manager makes up his mind whether to challenge or not.
I think the problem with trying to “fix” any given sport is that different fans may want vastly different things; you can try to get a sense of consensus with polls or whatever, but even those can’t really separate out issues that actually affect attendance/spending from issues that ultimately don’t.
Take What Exit’s list above. Speaking only for myself (but I assume I’m not literally the only one in the world), I don’t really care about commercial breaks. I like time to get a snack, take care of biological business, check scores from other games, or look up how many home runs Mike Trout hit as a rookie. And I’m really, really opposed to a pitch clock and a “batter-stay-in-the-box” rule. They sound practical in theory, as long as you’re willing to accept that ultimately, a playoff game will be decided by whether or not a pitcher actually released a ball with 00:01 or 00:00 left. I would find such things deeply unsatisfying.
If you were trying to please me personally, you’d stay far away from pitch clocks or rules about the batting box. You’d keep the DH out of the National League and keep it in the American League, and then eliminate all interleague play except for the World Series (yes, you’d have to realign to do this. I’m OK with that). You’d eliminate all instant replay forever and ever and ever, and never consider robo-umps. You’d move every outfield fence back about 20 feet. You’d make the total number of playoff teams six (you heard me). You’d make financial changes so that younger players aren’t screwed over and teams are motivated to promote top prospects more quickly. And most of those changes would annoy the crap out of a lot of people in this thread.
So it’s really hard to find the balance that pleases as many fans as possible while alienating as few as possible. However awful a job they do in other areas, I don’t envy the MLB PTB in that department.
There is no way in Hell they will ever reduce commercial breaks - not to mention this is not something that would ever be collectively bargained.
Pitch clock was bargained. Batters having to stay in the box (at least one foot) is also in the official rules as of 2015… umpires just don’t enforce it.
People have been talking all about more action, less 3 true outcomes. Sure if you don’t care about that and just want games to end sooner, that doesn’t matter. But banning the shift and larger bases incentivize small ball. Studies have shown that batters have increased launch angle in response to the shift (no surprise). Allowing for more opportunities to get a base hit and making the running game slightly easier allows for more options rather than jack a HR.
What about banning shifts, bigger bases, pitch clocks are about money? I’ll concede that the DH can be about money, though the owners want it because they consider it more interesting than having the pitchers hit.
Personally, I don’t want shorter games, I want games with more action. It takes me at least 2 hours, door to seat, to get to the game. I don’t want it over in 2 hours. I want to make a day of it. But I do want more hits, base running, tags, etc.
^^^This, for sure. Quick games are NOT the goal.
And I think this is definitely what @storyteller0910 was getting at. Some people think the games are too long. Some people want more action (which may indeed end up making the games longer)
I don’t even mind long extra inning games. Has anyone seen an analysis of putting a runner on second after nine innings? Have extra inning games ended earlier? I was against it, but I have to say, it no longer enrages me. Still, I’d prefer it go away.
This, exactly. Games are, on average, a half-hour longer than they were in the '80s, but despite the longer time, the amount of action (hits, stolen base attempts, etc.) is actually less than it was back then. The additional time is largely longer commercial breaks between innings, additional pitching changes, more mound conferences, and the f***ing around (both by pitchers and batters) in between every pitch.
Yes, home runs are exciting, but they are often about the only excitement left in a game. A three-hour baseball game would be just fine by me (after all, I also watch football games, which are 3+ hours), if that additional time (compared to the past) was actually interesting. Baseball has never been a fast-paced game (and for fans, that’s a feature, not a bug), but most of that additional time is just dead air.
The length of commerical breaks is not that significant of a factor
It’s gone, and so are seven inning doubleheaders. So happy to see Manfred man’s berth banned.
What is the playoff bracket like? They said the top 2 division winners (call them D1 and D2) get byes into the Division Series. But what does the wild card format look like? I’d think D3 hosts W3 and the winner plays D2, while W1 and W2 play and the winner plays D1.
As of now, unvaccinated players won’t be allowed into Canada. https://www.cbc.ca/sports/baseball/mlb/unvaccinated-mlb-players-not-able-to-travel-to-canada-1.6381612
MLB players haven’t been as loud about the vaccine as other sports. But, MLB definitely leans towards the right wing of the political spectrum. Will there be any prominent AL East player stubbornly holding out and potentially hurting his team in road games against the Blue Jays.
My impression is they lean right mainly over tax issues and not the whole spectrum. If you were in their tax brackets, it would probably be tough not to favor the party of loopholes for the super-rich.
They were saying on the local sports radio station that AL East teams are quietly working this into their roster planning because they don’t want the bother of worrying about this for three trips a year to Toronto. Obviously, the Blue Jays themselves cannot carry unvaccinated players at all.
I’m sure that’s true for many of the nouveau riche ballplayers, but there is also a huge contingent of conservative, evangelical, hard-right, god-squad players in MLB.
Let’s take a look at how the new playoff structure would have played out last year, my understanding of it:
In the National League, because they had the best divisional records, the Giants and Brewers would have gotten byes.
The Dodgers would have faced the Cardinals in one series (they had the next best records) in a best-of-3. Note that all games would have been played in LA.
The next two best records were the Braves and Reds, all three games played in Atlanta.
So only the Reds would have made the playoffs when they didn’t in reality.
The Dodgers would have likely beat the Cardinals (they actually did in the Wild Card game) and the Braves likely beat the Reds.
Thus in the next series, it would have been the Brewers, by virtue of having the best record of the divisional winners, face the winner of the Dodgers-Cardinals series and Milwaukee would have home-field advantage. The Braves actually beat the Brewers in the division series, could they have beaten the Dodgers after 5 days of rest and the Dodgers having used their top two starters?
The Giants would have faced the winner of the Braves-Reds series. Same scenario here, Giants having rested for five days, assuming one off-day after the end of the regular season, three games in three days and one day of travel.
So right away, the NLCS would have been different as well as the World Series. Maybe the Giants beat Atlanta, maybe the Brewers beat the Dodgers thus leaving a potential NLCS of Giants and Brewers, although we were hoping last year of a Giants-Dodgers series that we got in the divisional series instead.
In the American League, the Rays and Astros would have the byes.
The Red Sox would face the Yankees in New York. Boston won the Wild Card game there last year. Would the Yankees be able to come back and win two in a row?
The other series would be the Blue Jays who just missed the post-season last year against the White Sox, all games in Chicago. Toronto was on a roll and feared at the end of the season. Could they have won?
The Rays would face the winner of the Toronto-Chicago series while the Astros face the winner of the Boston-New York series. Again, this after five days of rest, the other teams having used up their top two pitchers at a minimum. In reality, the Astros won over the White Sox and Red Sox over the Rays.
The NLCS last year with this new setup could have been Giants-Brewers or Giants-Dodgers while the ALCS really different too, maybe Rays vs Astros, Red Sox or Yankees instead of Astros and Red Sox. The Braves may not have won it all or even make it that far.