THEY CHANGED THE GAMES, FOR BETTER OR WORSE
The second game of the World Series was played on Wednesday night, won 6-4 by Tampa over Los Angeles. It took three hours and 40 minutes from first pitch to last.
And in news that's technically unrelated but also vaguely related, Billy Beane is reportedly leaving his job as the top baseball executive with the Oakland Athletics to take a non-baseball role with the sporting conglomerate that owns Liverpool FC and the Boston Red Sox.
Beane's move hasn't been confirmed, as it involves a corporate merger that hasn't been completed, but meanwhile, Daryl Morey has stepped down as the Houston Rockets' top basketball executive. In his farewell, he sounded like someone planning to do something other than make basketball decisions for a bit.
There's an obvious bit of symmetry here. Beane and Morey are spiritual kin. While Beane kicked off baseball's analytics revolution almost two decades ago, Morey's Rockets did much the same thing in basketball years later. Each had success, and while neither won a title, the team-building strategies they developed were copied by many of their competitors.
Whether they leave their sports having caused them considerable damage is also a fair question.
Back to that baseball game from Wednesday night. A nine-inning game that lasts 3:40 isn't unusual by baseball's modern standards. Just last year, two of the first three World Series games took more than four hours to complete, despite neither going to extra innings.
But 3:40 is also stupidly long for a baseball game. That's longer than The Irishman, a film that I still haven't managed to watch in a single sitting. It's longer than the combined running time of the first two John Wick movies, minus the closing credits, and exactly as long as the first eight episodes of Emily in Paris, if that's more your thing.
Beane didn't set out to make baseball games longer and with less on-field action, but the path he charted has had that effect. By realizing the value of a walk, he sought players who worked counts in favour of those who went up to the plate looking to take hacks at whatever was thrown. As that strategy was adopted across the sport, the number of pitches per plate appearance has slowly but steadily increased.
And as every team started paying more attention to what statistics told them, the game changed in other ways. Pitching changes are more frequent, and bullpens are stacked with between one and four fire-breathing dragons who are deployed at the first sign of trouble, rather than let pitchers try to escape problems of their own making. More hitters wait for a pitch they can drive rather than just try to make contact.
All of it means longer at-bats, more delays as fresh pitchers are brought in, and more plate appearances that result in either a walk or strikeout rather than a ball in play. The pitching-change problem was supposed to be combated by the three-batter-minimum rule instituted for this season, but the average number of pitchers used in a game has still ticked upward.
Consider Game 2 of the World Series, when Tampa and Los Angeles combined to use 12 pitchers. Rays starter Blake Snell threw almost five innings, closer Diego Castillo had a one-out save, and the other 10 pitchers all threw between one and two innings.
Morey's influence on basketball probably isn't quite as profound as the analytics revolution in baseball, but with the Rockets he took a leaguewide offensive trend toward three-point shots and free throws — the most efficient ways to score — and tried to maximize the crap out of it. It worked to a degree, most notably with a 65-win season and a conference finals appearance in 2018, and much of the league has tried at least Rockets-lite offence: spread the floor, shoot three balls, draw fouls. It can be not much fun to watch, especially if both teams on the floor are having grim shooting nights.
None of this is to say that Beane or Morey were wrong to pursue the inventive strategies they embraced. It's just math.
If X is more likely to win games than Y, it's a smart executive who will try to do as much X as possible, even if the sport's orthodoxy has long been heavy on Y.
But that's the tricky thing about the legacies of the strategy changes they leave behind: there might be no going back.
What baseball team is going to take a 1980s approach to roster construction when the modern way has been proven to work? It's no secret Tampa adopted Beane's small-market, low-budget philosophy, but big and rich teams like the Dodgers and Red Sox have been doing the same things to great effect.
In the NBA, teams that have individual superstars still don't have to rely on the three-pointer — both Los Angeles teams come to mind — but for everyone else, it's the great leveller, a way to maximize points per possession, even if you lack one-on-one scorers. The Rockets, even with James Harden, took more threepoint shots than they did twopoint shots this past season. Two decades ago, a team that took even 20 per cent of its shots from beyond the arc was unusual.
Farewell, then, to two of the biggest game-changers in sports. Viva la revolution?