San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Extrainning rule will take getting used to
So, let’s say baseball is gifted with a boxful of miracles and the coming “season” actually takes place. If it survives even a week through the escalating coronavirus nightmare, here’s a livingroom scene certain to unfold as a son joins his father to watch a televised game heading into extra innings: “Dad, there’s a guy on second.” “I know.”
“But how did he get there?” “Don’t ask. He just ... did.” “I don’t get it.”
Will we ever reach the stage when everyone gets it? When we just accept the fact that under a new extrainnings rule, every halfinning will begin with a runner on second? Sorry to say, we won’t have a choice. It’s bound to stir up some conversation, though, and that’s not such a bad thing.
Popular first impression: After bunting the runner to
third, you ask the next hitter to loft a sacrifice fly, and there’s your winning run. Boring! And in many cases, the strategy will play out exactly that way. But the element of nuance will come into play, leaving plenty of room for suspense.
Major League Baseball is explaining this rule as a nod to COVID19, so people don’t stay too late at the park and increase the risk of infection. That’s true, but this has been in the works for years. Taking no sensible steps to shorten the games — like minimizing the replay process, reducing the TV commercial breaks or enforcing the existing paceofplay rules for pitchers and batters — MLB has turned to novelty, a touch of the carnival.
As the halfinning begins, check to see who’s leading off. The runner placed on second will be the player who bats before him in the lineup. So if Pablo Sandoval flied out to end the ninth, leaving Buster Posey in the ondeck circle, it will be Sandoval sent to second base while Posey steps in to open the 10th.
Among the many things to consider: It’s within the rules to pinchrun for Sandoval, or whoever the impostor may be, and that makes it highly advisable for teams to have speed on the bench. The Giants’ Billy Hamilton, particularly adept at stealing third over the course of his career, will be a natural. So will backup outfielders like Houston’s Myles Straw and Arizona’s Tim Locastro, the latter measured by Statcast as having the fastest average sprint speed (30.6 feet per second) in the majors last year. Take anyone who can run like the wind, with some baseball instincts, and he can be of immense value. Bunting has been ridiculed by the analytics crowd in recent years, to the verge of extinction, but now it’s back — and it’s hardly an easy task against pitchers who throw 98 mph fastballs, sweeping sliders, nasty cutters and dropoffthetable changeups. You’re likely to see a lot of bunting in training camps as players refresh (or invent) their skills, knowing they’ll likely be facing a fresharmed reliever with only one thing in mind: strikeout. The pitcher can unleash all manner of crazy stuff up there — sailing fastballs, stuff landing in the dirt, all of it difficult to bunt — looking for that strikeout. If he walks the hitter, no big deal. Now you’re looking for a doubleplay grounder. Speaking of which: If the runner does reach third with less than two outs, an obvious call will be a pair of intentional walks to load the bases. This will not be particularly thrilling. Worst case while bunting: The ball rolls about 2 feet, the catcher scoops it up, and there’s a wasted out. Best case: A perfect bunt to the right side, past the pitcher and into noman’s land, where no one has a play and it’s a beautifully crafted single. That can be discouraged by a drawnin infield, but then the hitter just might swing away — ideally driving home the run with a single to right. You read that correctly: oppositefield hitting. Small ball. The intelligent game. There is plenty to be said for that. In this era of voluminous home runs and launch angledriven hitters trying to put everything in the air, “you get to extra innings and everybody’s trying to end the game with a home run,” retired pitcher John Smoltz said on ESPN. “We won’t see that with the new rule, and I like that part of it.” If you’re into hasty conclusions, there is good news from the minor leagues, where this rule has been in place for four years. According to Baseball America, 73% of extrainning games were resolved after a single inning during the 201819 seasons. It’s easy to say that you score in the top half of the inning and everything is wonderful, but be careful if the home team leads off the bottom half with a power hitter. Wrong pitch, wrong location, tworun homer and it’s over. This is a ridiculous concept when it comes to the game’s statistical integrity. How does the box score explain a runner who didn’t earn his way to second? As explained by MLB this week, he will have reached base by “a fielding error.” On who, the ghost of Moonlight Graham? It’s nice to know the pitcher won’t be charged with an earned run, but there’s nothing like an error you can’t actually locate.
If you sense a theme developing when it comes to baseball in 2020, it’s called patience: with the owners, with the players, with a pandemic threatening MLB’s bold experiment and keeping you away from the ballpark. Nobody ever seems to mention fun or the game’s timehonored sense of renewal. With any luck, we’ll get to that someday.
Bruce Jenkins is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: bjenkins@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Bruce_Jenkins1