Offseason topics: Harper, Machado, rule changes
NEW YORK – The World Series was baseball 2018 in a microcosm.
Half the 44 runs scored by the champion Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers came across the plate on home runs. That’s the second-highest percentage in baseball history, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, behind only last year’s 57.4 percent.
There were 109 strikeouts and 76 hits, a 1.43 ratio that was the secondhighest behind 1.48 in 2012. That followed the first regular season in major league history with more strikeouts than hits and with the lowest overall batting average since 1972 – the year before the start of the designated hitter.
Discussion of possible rule changes to increase action will dominate the offseason, along with speculation about a free agent market that includes Bryce Harper, Manny Machado and Josh Donaldson, and possibly David Price and Clayton Kershaw if they opt out of their contracts.
“What we try to do is pay attention over the course of the season,” baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said last week, “think about what we’ve learned during the postseason and see whether we may need to make some change in response to what we’re seeing.”
Analytics have transformed the sport, from offense-suffocating shifts to shortening starting pitchers’ time on the mound and constantly rotating relievers from the major leagues to the minors in order to have an array of fresh bullpen arms each game.
“I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether analytics are a good thing or a bad thing, and the reason for that is they are a real thing,” Manfred said. “We have them. They’re going to continue to use them. There’s nothing you can do to stop people from thinking about the game, however the heck it is they want to think about the game.”
Discussion will start next week, when general managers meet in Carlsbad, California. Owners gather Nov. 1415 in Atlanta, and the major offseason get-together will be the winter meetings at Las Vegas from Dec. 10-13.
Manfred and players’ association head Tony Clark already have been talking – they appeared together at a World Series news conference last weekend, which would have been unimaginable a year ago given the tension between management and players.
Both sides are concerned about a 4 percent attendance drop that left the major league average below 30,000 for the first time since 2003. Six ballparks set their record lows and 17 of 30 experienced drops, partly because of historically bad weather that caused 54 postponements, the most since 1989.
Management wanted to introduce a pitch clock at the major league level in an effort to speed the pace of games but players refused to agree, and Major League Baseball backed off a threat to impose one over the union’s objections. Instead, a more modest change restricted the amount of mound visits by players and coaches without pitching changes.
The average time of a nine-inning game dropped to 3 hours, 44 seconds during the regular season from 3:05:11 for last season, and mound visits without pitching changes fell to 4.01 from 7.41.