Radical changes worked before
Big brains in MLB need ideas to increase both action and attendance
In less than two weeks, baseball will hold its first Washington all-star game since 1969, in which 17 future hall of famers graced Robert F. Kennedy Stadium for a rain-delayed midsummer classic that featured the best the sport had to offer.
That summer, though, was important for baseball for more fundamental reasons than an annual exhibition. When Steve Carlton, then of St. Louis, and his counterpart Mel Stottlemyre of the New York Yankees toed RFK’s rubber to start the matchup, they did so on a mound that was just 10 inches above the playing surface, five inches lower than the previous summer.
If 1968 was the year of the pitcher — and it was, with Bob Gibson’s modern-era record 1.12 ERA cast as the leading data point —1969 showed that, faced with a crisis, baseball could adjust, and fundamentally so.
That time is worth revisiting if only because that’s what’s necessary to move forward. You’ll hear it in the run-up to and the coverage of the all-star game itself: Baseball is in crisis; it needs to fix itself. Being open to radical change must be part of the process.
The issue, right now, is elemental to the game. Hitters have long argued that the most difficult pursuit in all of sports is to hit a pitched baseball. Right now, it’s as if they’re trying to prove that en masse. Their collective batting average through last weekend was .246 — which, if it ended the year as such, would be the lowest mark since 1972 and the second-lowest since that offensive wasteland of 1968.
We can talk all we want about the length of games, and baseball is wise to keep tabs on that aspect of its health. Through the weekend, nine-inning games averaged 2 hours 59 minutes 44 seconds. That’s long, for sure. But it’s also down nearly 5 1⁄2 minutes from a year ago.
You know what else is down? Attendance, to 28,052 per game, off by more than 6 per cent from last year and would be the lowest average, should it hold, in 15 years.
There has to be a relationship, then, between how often hitters are able to put balls in play and how willing fans are to pay to watch them try.
In 2018, baseball games average 16.75 hits between the two teams. That number didn’t strike me as particularly low. Frame it with the time-of-game data, and it sounds alarming: A baseball game features a hit once every 10 or 11 minutes.
Other stats you likely will hear in state-of-the game assessments as the all-star game approaches: Batters are striking out 22.3 per cent of their plate appearances, an all-time high. Fastball velocity averages 93.6 mph, down a tick from last summer’s record (since 2007, when PitchF/x began measuring stats in all parks) but right in line with the previous two years. And teams are now using 4.23 pitchers per game, according to Baseball-Reference.com, which would be a record should it hold up.
Put aside the specific numbers, and the conclusion is easy: Fresher, more specialized pitchers throw harder. That causes batters to swing and miss more often. That removes action from the game. The result: Through Monday’s games, major-league hitters have produced more strikeouts than hits — which would be a first, should it hold. And it will.
There are potential small-step solutions. Try establishing a minimum of, say, three hitters that a pitcher must face. This would, in theory, make lefthanded relievers face some right-handed hitters, potentially increasing offence — particularly in the late innings, when flame-throwing relievers have deadened the game.
But the right way to construct and coach a team to win a baseball game doesn’t marry with making an appealing product to watch.
Smartly deployed fielding shifts play to probabilities. But fielding shifts also take away base runners, which decreases the action for the eye to follow. Clever front offices concluded that players should sacrifice contact for power and try to hit the ball in the air more frequently — increasing their “launch angle” — which generates more home runs but decreases sustained rallies and all the subtleties contained within.
Keep going. Smart business executives who are reluctant to overpay for assets prefer to use younger, cheaper players, but that leaves out veterans with whom fans have a history, a relationship. While a walk is as good as a hit for a player and a team, it’s not nearly as interesting to watch.
So something has to give, and it has to be more than pitch clocks. The smart people teams hire must be asked to identify their role in creating this problem — this game with less action than at any point in a century — and contribute to fixing it.
Back to that 1969 all-star game. All those hall of famers assembled at RFK, they dealt not only with the lowered mound, but with a smaller strike zone — both fundamental adjustments designed to give hitters a better chance. It worked: Teams scored nearly 20 per cent more runs per game than they had in 1968.
That’s the kind of radical change the sport needs now. In two weeks, a collection of the game’s most important people will be in Washington talking about it. Let’s hope they embrace it, too.