Seven may be the number MLB needs to rely on
At spring training two years ago, former Kansas City royals manager Ned yost was speaking with some journalists about baseball’s longgame problem.
The issue of games that are too long, which is really about them being too boring, had been festering for years, but because everything is tribal these days opinions on the matter tended to fall into two camps. The newschool types thought Major League baseball needed creative solutions to address trends in the sport that were not going away: more pitchers throwing more pitches, and fewer balls in play. The traditionalists felt the game shouldn’t be fiddled with. If it took four hours to play a nine-inning game, so be it. More baseball!
It was clear what camp yost belonged to, and not just because his name was “Ned.” He’d won a World Series with a royals team that was so old-timey they ought to have worn baggy pants and put spittoons in the dugout.
“Make it a seven-inning game,” yost groused about possible pace-of-play rule changes. “That’ll speed it up.”
He was being sarcastic. but it turns out he was on to something.
In their efforts to navigate a 2021 with a full schedule amid a pandemic, MLB and its players’ union are said to be in agreement on a couple of temporary rule changes that were brought in for last year’s bunt of a season, which will bring back seven-inning doubleheaders and put a runner on second base at the start of extra innings.
These things might seem a little beside the point amid health-safety protocols about mask-wearing and contact-tracing and other familiar pandemic terms, but there’s a logic to the rule changes, too. The league and the players are aware that postponements and rescheduled games are likely, as they certainly were last season, and shortened doubleheaders are a way to cram them back into the schedule with less risk of wearing out pitching staffs.
The runner-on-second rule for innings after the ninth means games are much less likely to go four or five extra frames, which would be a disaster for any roster that has been shortened due to Covid-related absences. Given the many things that various sports have done to try to play during the pandemic, neither of these rule changes seem all that dramatic.
but a full 162-game schedule for all of Mlb’s 30 teams opens the possibility of a lot of seven-inning games, especially if they have to do as much schedule juggling as they did in the wee little 2020 season. And that means another intriguing question: What if seven turns out to be just the right number of innings?
Before you smack me upside the head with a copy of the 1968 baseball Almanac, let me note a couple of things. I like baseball just fine, and not only the highwire act of the playoffs. The slow rhythms of a season are part of its charm.
but the sport has also evolved in ways that are not spectator-friendly, and not because anyone has any ill intent. The quest to maximize run-scoring and run-prevention probabilities has led to more walks, more strikeouts and more home runs. Fewer players, batter and pitcher alike, are trying to put balls in play. Managers use more pitchers per game, armed with data that say starters are less effective after hitters have seen them a couple of times and that relievers are best deployed in short bursts. defensive shifts, also the product of simply studying opponent tendencies, have further smothered action. And all of it has led to longer games with less stuff happening in them.
Some rules have already been brought in to try to fight the trend toward long slogs, while others are often debated, from the tactical (banning infield shifts) to the extreme (making a foul ball a third strike).
but what if the best way to make games shorter was simply to make them shorter? Nolan ryan and Jack Morris might be aghast at the idea of seven-inning games, but teams rarely let their starters pitch into the late innings already, if they even use a starter in the first place. One of the big controversies of last year’s World Series was Kevin Cash’s decision to yank Tampa starter blake Snell in the sixth inning of the deciding game, but meanwhile Snell hadn’t pitched past the seventh at all in 2019 or 2020.
He hasn’t pitched past the eighth inning in his career, even when winning the Cy young in 2018.
He’s simply a starter in the modern game, where the team wants him to go hard twice through the order, and then turn things over to a succession of fireballers out of the bullpen.
In a seven-inning game, this becomes simpler. Gone would be the days when managers have to cobble together five arms and four pitching changes to navigate the required outs between the fifth and ninth innings. Instead, five innings from the starter, setup guy, closer, done. everyone gets home by a reasonable hour.
Would there be other knock-on effects? Absolutely. There would be less of a market for middle relievers, for one. There would be fewer at-bats to go around, which could require a rethinking of what constitutes a good offensive season. Owners might want to employ fewer players in total, which would probably kill the idea right there.
but the season’s coming seven-inning games should provide a window into what such a significant change would look like in a practical sense. Perhaps it has been the solution that has been sitting there all along. Good idea, Ned, even if you didn’t mean it.