There’s been a lot of discussion whether baseball’s offensive explosion of the past two decades is good for the game. I don’t think it is and would like to see some rule changes to rein in the hitters. One idea would be going back to two 1968 rules. At that time the strike zone was defined as armpits to knees. The next year it was redefined as letters to knees. (Of course the zone as called by almost all umps is considerably lower.) The mound at the time was 15 inches high; in 1969 it was reduced to 10 inches high. Do you think these moves would be good ideas, or am I missing something?
No. Offense sells more tickets, which is good for the game.
A lot of the increased offense can be attributed to the expansion of the league. Pitching talent is rarer than hitting talent.
Looking at this table, hits per game and batting average look pretty flat to me since the mid-70s (and not that different from earlier eras), and runs per game and slugging % are already on the way down a little bit. It doesn’t seem that out of balance to me, and I think a lot of it can be explained by the greater number of smaller parks.
I like watching small ball, myself, but I prefer the current balance of power than one where a guy leads the league hitting .301.
They should make ALL foul balls strikes , as in “YER OUT”
Why should a pitcher be penalized for throwing the ball where the hitter doesn’t like it? I understand that it is exciting to watch a great hitter intentionally foul off ball after ball until he gets the pitch he wants (Kirk Gibson 1988) but the games are too long, too boring to watch
And baseball records are really a joke when you look at all the rule changes (astro-turf, DH, indoor games and Whites Only before Jackie Robinson) so speed the game up with one, two, three FOULS you’re out.
A 2 strike foul is a draw, which is as it should be (the pitcher failed to strike the hitter out, the hitter failed to hit it fair). Some of the more exciting ABs often involve lots of fouls.
We already are at an all-time high in strikeouts (hit the 7.0 K/9 mark for the first time just last season in fact). If you raise the mound and widen the zone, it will just drive those numbers even higher, lowering batting average & OBP in the process. Eventually the only way to reliably score will be via the longball, the league will be dominated by slow sluggardly guys like Jason Giambi (“Three True Outcomes”, as in lots of walks, K’s and homers), and it would make the 60’s look like the 20’s relative-wise.
Where? I’ve not heard of this discussion at all. Please explain why offense would be bad for the game.
The general complaint is about inflated power, not inflated offense – and anyway, the reason steroids are banned is their health effects, not their effect on the game. The MLB does not want to go back to the Dead Ball era.
These stats bear that out a power increase to some degree, although the rates of home runs per game from the mid-80s on is not all that different than that of 1955-1962. I would hate to watch a lineup full of Dave Kingmans myself, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening, and I don’t think counting fouls as third strikes would improve the game (ie, a huge increase in strikeouts to save 5 minutes).
I think the OP needs to click this link and look at the rate of strikeouts/game over the years, and tell me a) if he still maintains a link between strikeouts and power and b) how a further increase in strikeouts would help the game.
And making a 2-strike foul into a strikeout would result in turning the game into the slappiest, grittiest, slow-grindingest, run-manufacturing process ever. And that would be mind-numbingly boring.
And anyway, last year’s home run leaders hit 47 (Pujols) and 39 (Pena and Teixeira.) Those aren’t particularly unusual totals.
Home runs are still high in total not because we have a lot of monsters hitting 50-60 homers, but because EVERYONE hits a few homers now and then. For instance, in 1980, the major league leading totals were 48 (Schmidt) and 41 (Ogilvie and Reggie Jackson) - about the same as today. But there were far fewer homers, becuse there were so many players who didn’t really hit home runs at all.
Schmidt’s team, the Phillies, hit 117 homers; Schmidt singlehandedly hit 40% of his team’s homers. Lots of players on that team simply didn’t hit homers. Pete Rose hit 1, Larry Bowa hit 2, Manny Trillo hit 7, and they were regulars. The team’s second adn third best homer men hit just 30 between them. And the Phillies were the World Champs. They were actually the third most proliifc home run hitting team in the league.
Contrast them with the 2009 Cardinals, for whom Albert Pujols hit 47 homers. The Cardinals hit 160 homers, more than any NL team hit in 1980, but in 2009 they were just middle of the pack.
The home run levels now are now the product of steroid-laden supermen like Mark McGwire, but are a baseball-wide strategic shift. They’re a reflection of a simple fact; Hitting home runs and drawing walks is the best way to win in the major leagues. Small ball does not work. If you get guys who can steal bases and bunt and stuff, and I get guys who can draw walks and hit homers, I’ll win.
If you want fewer home runs and more action on the basepaths, increasing strikeouts is the absolute worst way to do it. That just makes it MORE profitable, relatively speaking, to try to hit home runs. Making it easier to strike batters out will reduce batting averages, so it becomes harder to string together base hits and makes it all the more important to wait for your pitch, crush it when you get it, and take the walk if possible if you don’t get a pitch you can crush.
If you wanted to reduce home runs you could do two very obvious things:
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Move the fences back. Moving the fences back makes it more difficult to hit home runs while making it no harder to get base hits (if anything, in fact, it raises the likelihood of base hits a bit by forcing the outfielders back and apart. It would also reward speed, since outfielders further apart are easier to get extra bases off.) If more fly balls are dying before they get over the fence, fewer home runs can be hit, and the value of low-power speedsters and slap hitters goes up. This is turn raises the value of defensive specialists.
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Regulate the thickness of the bat at the handle. One of the reasons marginal players hit home runs more often today is that bats are designed to hit home runs by using very thin handles and weighting the bat towards the barrel. You could reduce this by mandating a minimum handle thickness.
I can’t comment on the historical trend of offense in baseball (I’m youngish), but I can say one thing. Like most anyone who loves the game of baseball, I really enjoy watching a 2-1 game pitched by two aces. A pitching duel is a lot of fun to watch…
…once. I don’t want to see it every day.
I would love to see a new ballpark open with rather distant fences. Problem is that the press (esp. the local kind) tends to get all in a tither if a ballpark is perceived as not being home run friendly (c.f. Detroit and now Citi Field), and with free agency sluggers are less likely to sign to play in your Death Valley ballpark.
Why do the umps ignore the strike zone rule? From what I hear they won’t call anything a strike above the belt.
They have more often than c. 10-20 years ago, but not all of them do. Keep in mind camera perspectives (and hunched-over batters) can distort how high/low a pitch is.
Well of course YOU would say that, Sandy. ;)
I errrr I mean Sandy Koufax didn’t need that rule changed because it was hard just to FOUL a ball off against him.
Check out his last year.
He had to retire after this year because of his arthritic elbow.
27 wins and 27 COMPLETE games. If he pitched today he would be making 40 million a year.
Of course he would probably be in pinstripes…a horrific thought.
'Course, if Koufax were around today, I doubt the Dodgers (or anyone else) would let him throw 27 complete games. They’d probably do everything they could to protect his elbow–pitch count, inning limits, the DL if his elbow starts acting up, etc. He’d probably go something like 16-6 instead of 27-9, but he’d probably have a longer career, maybe even pitch at age 40.