Baseball’s flaws no cause for real concern
It’s time for baseball’s state-of-the-game address, requested by no one, but perhaps an acceptable notion as the game takes its midsummer break.
Start with Tuesday night’s All-Star Game, blessedly relieved from absurdity. For the past 14 years, the result of this fanciful exhibition translated directly to home-field advantage in the World Series. In a perfect world, you imagined a game-winning home run by the likes of Mike Trout or Barry Bonds — or at least something memorable. Too often, leagues gained this advantage because someone threw a wild pitch or lofted a sacrifice fly in an All-Star Game nobody quite remembers.
It was all about hotel space, truth be told. With the list of potential World Series hosts reduced to a single league, it was easier to make long-range plans. In any case, this “reward” seldom had any effect on the game. Most players didn’t give a damn about home-field advantage, largely be-
cause they had so little say in the matter. The All-Star Game is all about participation: employing as many players as possible, preferably everyone on each roster. That automatically turns it into a farce, if it’s supposed to mean something. By the fifth inning, most of the big names are lounging in the dugouts or clubhouses, and get ready for a new pitcher every half-inning.
The new incentive is a $20,000 check for every member of the winning team (zero for the losers). And with common sense prevailing, the team with the best regular-season record will get that home-field advantage.
Something to remember: Before interleague play and the rapid increase in player movement, the All-Star Game was very much authentic. League pride really meant something, and it was common for the elite players — such as Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle — to play the entire game. Joe DiMaggio went seven years (1936-42) without being taken out. Willie Mays went the distance 13 times, Stan Musial 10, and it was common to let big-name starters handle the pitching, three innings at a time (in the first eight years of the game, 1933-40, the American League did not use more than three pitchers).
Other issues worth scrutinizing:
Shifts: People act as if this is a radical new development that must be stopped. In fact, there is evidence that shifts date to the 1870s. The great Ted Williams often faced shifts in 1941 — and he hit .406. Now there’s talk that these radical defensive alignments will eliminate the high-average left-handed hitter with power (say, 25 homers). Watching the likes of Cody Bellinger, Anthony Rizzo, Robinson Cano and especially Daniel Murphy, who wields a bat with the sublime majesty of a Rod Carew or Wade Boggs, you figure that simply isn’t true.
The key is simple ingenuity. Brandon Belt dropped a surprise bunt in Game 5 of the 2014 World Series, confounding a shift, and he has done it a couple of times this year with the thirdbase area completely vacant. Stash your dead-pull pride and expose a weakness. Don’t just steal second; keep right on going to third if the base is unoccupied. Things change quickly when you embarrass the opposition.
Strikeouts: One of the game’s most fascinating trends is the so-called “launch angle” and the focus on home runs. You don’t get the big money by hitting groundballs, so put some uppercut in that swing — if you haven’t taken that approach already — and drive the ball to distant locations. If you strike out (the ever-increasing numbers are stunning), hey, at least you went for it.
This is a spectacular development in the hands of Josh Donaldson, Kris Bryant, Justin Turner or Wil Myers, who approach every swing with a towering blast in mind. Locally, Yonder Alfonso and Buster Posey have retooled their swings to good advantage. For too many hitters, though, the savage uppercut is a bad idea — structurally and fundamentally.
“Playing Home Run Derby, and seeing so many strikeouts, that drives me nuts,” Arizona executive Tony La Russa told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “If you’ve got a leadoff runner at second and swing from your butt, instead of trying to get him over (to third), you’re not going to score, and you’re going to lose. Some things should never fall out of favor: the bunt, the sacrifice, the steal, getting that one crucial run.”
It’s no accident that the Houston Astros, probably the best and definitely the most entertaining team in baseball, hit for power but keep the strikeouts down (fewest in either league). Aside from their core of stars, they’ve sought out Josh Reddick, Carlos Beltran, Brian McCann and others who emphasize contact and situational hitting.
That’s a model for all to follow, and the way Colorado manager Bud Black sees it, “I’m not worried. The game will find its way back to higher scoring. Hitters will be more focused on contact, fewer strikeouts, beating the shifts. It won’t happen overnight. But it’s always cyclical.” Home runs: Aside from cozy ballparks, the pitchers’ increased velocity, launch angle and the ongoing presence of performance-enhancing drugs (the cheaters will always be ahead of the testers), the ball itself seems to be different this year, with flatter, tighter seams. That means less drag — batted balls traveling farther — and the need for pitchers to grip the ball with greater pressure. Johnny Cueto, Chris Archer, David Price and Marcus Stroman all claim to have developed blisters this season for the first time.
So forget MLB’s claim that the balls are unchanged. There’s too much evidence to the contrary. Seriously, though, who grows weary of the home run ball? It’s one of the game’s great treasures. The power-starved Giants certainly didn’t mind in Atlanta last month when Posey hit a routine flyball that cleared the fence down the right-field line.
History shows that baseball corrects its most disturbing trends. In 1930, the entire National League hit .303. Carl Yastrzemski won the 1968 American League batting title with a .301 average, and nobody else cleared .290. Quirky stuff at the time, but without staying power.
Replay: It doesn’t get much more ludicrous than a bunch of umpires gathering with their headsets, communicating with New York’s replay headquarters and delaying games into eternity. In a recent Giants-Braves game, Belt was called out after sliding into second with an apparent double. An NBC Sports Bay Area replay quickly revealed that he was safe. Exactly two minutes and 45 seconds passed between that point — a result obvious to every television viewer — and the umps’ decision (which they got wrong!). In Miami, manager Don Mattingly said he’d lost his affinity for replay when, in a reviewed call against the Mets, the process took 3:16.
Someday in the future, there will be no challenges from the managers. The umpires on the field will not move. There will be on-site replay crews in every stadium, the calls will be virtually immediate, and we’ll look back with disdain on a system hopelessly stuck in the dark ages.
Pace of play: Gripped by fear and uncertainty, today’s umpires refuse to crack down on stalling. It’s right there in the rulebook, specific time limits for pitchers and hitters, and some progress was made (with the threat of fines) two years ago. Today, the games last longer than ever. The umpires have given up, and you get a travesty such as Tampa Bay reliever Xavier Cedeño taking 36 seconds before delivering— or Philadelphia outfielder Odubel Herrera averaging 43 seconds between pitches.
“You can’t really tell some of these guys, ‘Let’s go, get in the box,’ ” Arizona bench coach and former Minnesota manager Ron Gardenire told reporters. “They just look at you like, ‘Why? I haven’t heard the second verse to my song yet.’ You just live with it. Baseball’s not a timed game. There is no clock.”
The man speaks the truth, but the pitch clock is coming. Commissioner Rob Manfred has the power to unilaterally change the rules, as long as he gives the players’ union a year’s notice, and he has done that behind the scenes — with pitch clocks at the forefront of his plan. They have been employed at the Double-A and Triple-A levels of the minors since 2015, with very little outcry from the players, and it’s said such a mechanism could cut 20 minutes off the average majorleague game time.
Perhaps we’ll all get used to it. We probably won’t have a choice. Just remove those clocks when the postseason rolls around. The idea of boisterous, derisive fans counting down the clock at the World Series — Game 7, tie game, bases loaded, excruciating pressure — is absolutely unconscionable.