Youngsters dot All-Star rosters

Miami hosted the 2017 All-Star Game on Tuesday night with youngsters such as Aaron Judge, George Springer and Cody Bellinger making their mid-season classic debuts.

MIAMI — With home runs, strikeouts and game times at record levels, Commissioner Rob Manfred says baseball is open to making changes in the sport’s rules.

Major League Baseball proposed several initiatives last offseason, including a 20-second pitch clock, a limit of one mound trip by a catcher per pitcher each inning and raising the bottom of the strike zone slightly to its pre-1996 level. The only change the union agreed to was to allow intentional walks to be signaled without throwing pitches.

“There have been dramatic changes in the game, the way the game’s taught, the way the game is played at the big league level,” Manfred said Tuesday during a meeting with the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. “There is a dramatically increased tolerance for strikeouts by offensive players. There’s much, much more emphasis on the home run as the principal offensive tool in the game. There’s a dramatic increase in the use of relief pitchers, even to the point of kind of a rotating bottom of the roster between TripleA and who’s in the big leagues.”

The percentage of plate appearances resulting in home runs peaked at 2.99 percent in 2000, the height of the Steroids Era, according to data compiled by the commissioner’s office. After sinking to 2.28 percent in 2014, it rose to 2.67 percent the following year, 3.04 percent last season and 3.30 percent this year.