MLB’s extra-innings experiment is untraditional and worth keeping

I like baseball’s new extra-inning rule. So shoot me. Or use the hidden-ball trick to pick me off second base.

If there is reincarnation, I want to come back in scoring position as the “free runner” who jogs smirking to second base — unearned, alien to all baseball justice — to begin the 10th inning, and every half-inning after that. Why not symbolize a rule that says, “While we’re young ...”

Extra innings, at their best, provide some of MLB’s most exciting, strategic, improbable and memorable moments. At their worst, they’re baseball’s biggest bore.

Harvey Haddix once pitched a 12-inning perfect game, then lost in the 13th. Washington’s Tom Cheney struck out 21 men, still the record, in 16 innings. The O’s Tippy Martinez once picked off three men in the 10th inning. Fans remember regular-season games like that forever.

But there are also games they want to forget — with a refund for lost time. In Triple-A, Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs played in the longest professional game: 33 innings. After midnight, players burned broken bats and benches for heat. Play was halted in the 32nd inning at 4:07 a.m. tied at 2-2, and resumed months later. An umpire took his nephew; the boy couldn’t leave.

I never realized how much I disliked extra innings in the regular season, which occur about 14 times per team per season, until I saw MLB’s experimental new rule.

In the postseason, of course, MLB should always be played the right way, with innings unto eternity if needed. But in a sport with a time-of-game problem, in which every club plays almost every day, and fans must go to work (or catch the last train home), baseball’s lucky it came up with this pandemic-year experiment.

Maybe the rule can even be made permanent but, I hope, with a tweak. Perhaps it’d be better to start the Gift Runner Program in the 11th inning, not the 10th, so as not to punish teams with deep bullpens. Also, in the 10th inning, a buzz would build for the 11th.

Traditionally, a single extra inning produced a winner 45% of the time. The new rule, used in the minors in ’18 and ’19, lands on a winner in the 10th inning 73% of the time. That’s a big gap. But erasing marathons is the true bonus.

Historically, the odds of playing four extra innings once you got to the 10th were about 1 in 6: perfectly plausible. That’s almost 90 extra minutes. The chance of enduring six extra innings — I’ve never met a 15th inning I liked — was 1 in 20. With the new rules, those odds evaporate to 1 in 50 and 1 in 700, respectively.

Extreme example: Throughout history if you watched an MLB game, there was about a 1-in-800 chance you’d see a game of 16 or more innings. Sooner or later, you’d see one. This season, the odds are one in a million.

The view that the free runner should be anathema because it creates two versions of the game seems antiquated. The NFL has had two versions of its sport since 1974, when it established a sudden-death overtime session, with a tie if there was no winner. But playoffs still had infinite overtime.

The NHL solved its excessive-overtime problem more than a decade ago by introducing a five-minute four-on-four (and later three-on-three) fire-wagonstyle overtime, and then, if needed, a goofy but exciting shootout. It was make-thefans-happy hockey. Purists, bite your lips. (I loved it.)

Of course, the playoffs still have endless sudden-death OTs.

The NBA is the only major sport with one version of overtime. Why? Because only 6.3% of games go to OT and only 1 in 50 overtime games has a second session. No problem. The NFL and NHL believe enough is enough. Take note, MLB.

For years, I’ve winced as hitters spent an hour lunging for one walk-off swing. I’ve resented the way superb close games, worthy of a classy finish, ended deep in extra innings with some donkey or scared rookie issuing walks and wild pitches.

With the new rule, we’ll see close games decided by the best relievers, because the 12th inning, on average, will only arrive once a season per team. Keep the tail-end guys where they belong: in blowouts.

Why did it take MLB so long to find a better way? Because the sport needed sabermetrics to refine its ideas about situational strategy. That evolution helped the designatedrunner idea emerge as something energizing that wouldn’t cheapen the game, but would instead underline its elegance while bringing its range of strategies and tactics into focus.

In a monochromatic era of long balls and strikeouts, it would reemphasize small ball: speed, contact hitting and defensive soundness. There’s not much that focuses the minds of teams and fans more than a leadoff double. Now, every extra inning begins with one — by fiat.

To evaluate this new world, we need some core facts. Both study of stats and minor-league experience have dispelled the biggest fear — that the top of every extra inning, and many bottom halves, would start with a sacrifice. Oh, joy: more bunts.

Fortunately, that’s not quite right.