Updating baseball for 21st century

Sport still struggling to attract that coveted younger fan base

Does baseball have a future in America, the land of its birth? Our nation’s culture seems to be working against it. Baseball has to compete with an overwhelming array of other sports, as well as distractions and entertainments of all sorts, at a time when fans are busier and the younger generation’s attention span has putatively diminished.

But as potential fans have less time and, perhaps, less patience for the stately pace of play, baseball games themselves have gotten longer.

In 1950, the average game was played in 2 hours and 23 minutes; in 2016, a game required more than 3 hours.

Games these days are longer for various reasons. Some of them involve strategy. More specialized relief pitchers entail more pitching changes. Strikeouts are up, which means more batters going deeper into the count. This takes time.

So do commercial breaks and inter-inning entertainments. Some commentators even blame the invention of Velcro, which tempts batters to constantly step out of the box to readjust their batting gloves.

Recently The New York Times asked its readers how to make baseball games shorter and livelier. The suggestions ranged from the immediately practical — make all games seven innings, instead of nine — to the fanciful — give umpires bonuses for shorter games.

In the meantime, Major League Baseball and the players’ union have agreed to speed up play by eliminating the requirement that a pitcher throw four balls to issue an intentional walk. Thus a manager can bypass a powerful hitter or set up a double play with a signal to the umpire that moves the batter directly to first base.

This will save time, of course. Last year in the major leagues 932 intentional walks were issued. Four lobs per walk equals 3,728, which at, say, 18 seconds per pitch amounts to 18 hours and 38 minutes of watching two grown men play catch.

But the actual pitch total was a little short of 3,728. On a few occasions, pitchers overthrew the catcher, allowing baserunners to advance. Even more rarely, a careless pitcher makes a throw too close to the strike zone and an alert batter punches out a hit.

Baseball is about speed, power and strategy, of course, but above all, it’s about control, keeping the leather-covered sphere out of the mitts of your opponents and in the mitts of your teammates. A moment’s inattention and the ball is loose. It could cost a run or a game.

That’s why I’m reluctant to see baseball modify the intentional walk rule, just as I would hate to see the batter retire directly to the dugout after hitting a home run. It would save time, but it’s not a run until the slugger carefully touches every base.

So how does baseball accommodate fans with less time and younger potential fans to whom baseball might seem tedious? Here’s a suggestion:

Twice a month during the regular season, Major League Baseball should televise a game of spare, oldstyle baseball, without commercial breaks. Make these day games, on weekends, when kids can watch.

Encourage the players not to dawdle, but let the game develop its own pace. Provide no interinning entertainment, no kiss cams, no T-shirt cannons. No attempts to rouse the crowds to cheer. No designated hitter.

Provide thoughtful play-byplay and color commentary; the viewer can always turn down the sound. Instant replay is great, but don’t permit challenges to calls on the field. Let the ump make an occasional mistake, just like the rest of us.

Of course, this isn’t a sustainable model for baseball; night games are inevitable and so are commercial breaks. But out of 2,430 regular season games, the league can afford to subsidize, say, 10 games in the effort to connect or reconnect fans to a quieter version of the game that provides the peace to chat between innings or to ponder the progress of the game. Consider it a public service that might eventually pay off for baseball.

It’s a step back from the noisy, lengthy spectacle that baseball has become. But it’s also a way of finding out if pure baseball still works in America.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has re-ignited the national conversation over health care policy by introducing his American Health Care Act.

Ryan himself concedes that even if his legislation passes, additional laws will be needed to do things such as allow the sale of health insurance across state lines or encourage “association health plans” that give trade groups the ability to provide health insurance to their members. Those provisions weren’t included in the American Health Care Act so that Senate Democrats won’t be able to block it with a filibuster, Ryan says.

I read the full 123-page text of the American Health Care Act. You can too at readthebill.gop. It struck me as unduly obsessed with abortion — the word appears 32 times in the bill. It also is complex.

For example, one provision reads: “FAILSAFE. — Clause (iii)(II) shall apply for only if the aggregate amount of premium tax credits under this section and cost-sharing reductions under section 1402 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for calendar year 2018 exceeds an amount equal to 0.504 percent of the gross domestic product for such calendar year.”

Any time you have Republicans making laws conditional on some pretend-precise amount such as “0.504 percent of the gross domestic product,” it’s a warning signal.

Maybe Speaker Ryan and President Trump will succeed in using the reconciliation process to ram the legislation through. Regardless, if Republicans in Washington are looking for more health-insurance reform ideas, here’s one that fits perfectly with the Trump agenda: If you’re a politically outspoken left-of-center billionaire, you’d better provide health insurance for everyone who works for you, or else the president is going to call you out about it.

Call it the Bezos rule. Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon.com and the owner of the Washington Post, an ardently anti-Trump newspaper. The Post editorial about the American Health Care Act was headlined “An ObamaCare repeal that’s both heartless and reckless.” Yet the Post newspaper that contained the editorial was delivered, as virtually all newspapers are, by an independent contractor who doesn’t get Washington Post-provided health insurance.

Bezos, whose net worth according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index is approximately $73 billion, has Amazon.com packages delivered much the same way — relying in part on “Amazon Flex” workers who are classified as independent contractors and therefore don’t get employer-provided health benefits. Bezos is also reportedly an investor in Uber, whose more than 100,000 drivers are also “independent contractors” responsible for their own health insurance.

Nor is Bezos the only billionaire to whom the Bezos rule might apply. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, a big backer of Hillary Clinton, is richer than Bezos. Does every one of the 27,800 real estate agents who work for Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices have employer-provided health insurance?

If we were starting from scratch, it would probably make sense to divorce health insurance from employment altogether. Our current system is a relic of World War-II-era wage controls. But so long as the left is complaining that repealing ObamaCare is “heartless” — out of concern that some people may lose coverage — the least that these businessmen can do is to address the problem of lack of coverage by starting at their own companies.

Long term, solving this through a generally applicable law would be better than bullying individual businessmen. So far, though, when it comes to keeping jobs here rather than overseas, Trump hasn’t hesitated to single out individual firms. If that’s the route the president is going to take, extending the same approach to health insurance would only be consistent.