Let's Fix Baseball
Unless you don’t care about sports at all, you’ve probably heard that Major League Baseball players have been locked out by the owners. It’s all part of a labor dispute. You can read up on some details of the issues at stake here. Labor issues aside, baseball is facing a number of other on-field problems that are hurting the long-term viability of the league. So let’s take a look at those and see if we can make baseball a little better.
The chief complaints about the product of baseball can be broken down into a few topics. First, is the pace of play. With games over time gradually creeping closer and closer to 3 hours+ younger fans aren’t tuning into games. It also hurts what should be (and used to be) their biggest draw: The World Series. A west coast game that starts at 6 pm ends around midnight for east coasters. That’s wayyyy too late for kids to get into. Compare that with the time it takes to play a soccer match: 90 mins plus a little bit more for halftime and extra time. You can be done with a game in half the time it takes Captain America and Iron Man to save the world.
Second, is that the game doesn’t do enough to promote its stars. In truth, I don’t think there are many baseball players I would recognize walking by on the street. Unlike basketball players, whose incredible height and obvious athleticism make them easily noticeable, baseball players tend to look more like average people. And without their faces being plastered on every billboard in America, it can be hard for the public to notice them.
Last, some people feel that the game hasn’t done enough to embrace how the sports landscape has changed with the advent of social media and other advances in how people consume their content. This last one is probably the easiest to fix. For starters, they could hire some young people and people of color in their media offices. This starts at the top. Looking at their executive page, there’s one person of color and two white women. The rest are white men. They also need to address the culture of “unwritten rules” that takes a lot of the fun out of the game. This last issue is pretty easy to fix. All the people in charge need to think about is how to get the most number of people watching their games. Let all their decisions flow from that.
As far as speeding up games, there are a couple of ways to do this while still maintaining what is nice about baseball and differentiates it from other major sports. Basketball, football, hockey, soccer, and many other sports are all reliant upon a clock. Baseball isn’t. Baseball plays until the game is decided. I kind of like that. So we need to preserve that without implementing a clock. That has been the main way of fixing this issue proposed by the league. And it looks like they might give it a go:
Personally, I don’t really like that idea. I think we can speed up the game in other ways without adding in a pitch clock. It’s good, in theory, but I don’t think it will do much unless it’s 5 seconds or less. I’m not alone, just look at all the replies to that announcement. So how can we do it? I’ll explain.
I think we can use the structure of the game itself to quicken the pace. First, I would get rid of the mid-inning TV breaks. We can make up the ad revenue in other ways. Say the average commercial break is two minutes. In a nine-inning game, we can make up close to 20 mins right there. The teams have 30 seconds from the end of one half to start play in the next. Between innings, it’s two minutes. If there isn’t a batter in the box, every 5 seconds is an automatic strike. If there is no pitcher ready to go it would be automatic balls.
Second, I would limit the number of substitutions to 5 per game, across all positions. Want to pinch-hit a guy? Then that’s one. Change a pitcher? That’s two. You get 5 per game, including injuries so managers will have to plan for the unexpected. No more left-right pitcher swaps that take 5 mins. If 5 doesn’t seem like enough, we can negotiate. But the idea is the CHANGE the game, not keep it the same.
Third, no more leading, no more pickoffs. If a guy wants to steal a base, he can still do it. But let’s stop with the head starts and constant wastes of time that are pickoff plays. Runners will have to time their runs better and pitchers will be able to concentrate on throwing to one place. Yeah, it removes a potentially exciting play from the game but I think the tradeoff is worth it.
Fourth, I would remove any on-field replay and replace it with an eye-in-the-sky ump who watches the game remotely and has access to video feeds. Their say is final. If something is contentious they are obliged to intervene and make a ruling. No more challenges, no more breaks in play for a sexagenarian umpire to waddle over to an iPad. We can do this much faster and with greater accuracy.
Finally, no more human umpires calling balls and strikes. We have the technology to speed this whole thing up and improve accuracy and consistency. Plus, there won’t be anyone to argue with. Every stadium, every game, will have the same size strike zone. I’ll leave it to a panel of experts to figure out what that means and how to implement it. It’ll make the game fairer and move things along.
Next up, the league needs to do a much better job of promoting their stars. It is easy to see why they haven’t been as proactive as other leagues. If a player has a high profile, he’ll likely require a higher salary. By promoting their stars, the owners of MLB teams are working against their own financial interests. But only in the short term. In leagues with salary caps and max contracts, the owners don’t have to worry about this. Mike Trout should be one of the most famous people in the world, along the lines of LeBron James and Tom Brady. And yet, I can’t think of his face. This is a problem. Stars sell tickets, subscriptions, and jerseys. Whatever short-term loss the owners pay will be made up in future sales.
The owners also need to stop crying poor every time they’re expected to write a check for something that will improve the game without necessarily making them richer. Sports are a business but they are also a public trust. Owners need to focus a bit more on that last part. Heck, it’s not like owning a team is a bad investment:
Teams purchased for millions of dollars are selling for billions. So save the crying poor for someone else. A note about who to “root” for in this labor dispute. Personally, I always choose labor. The owners have more than enough money and a player’s career could be very limited in earning years. And before you start with the “but they get paid millions to play a game” just stop. You know damn well baseball and other professional sports aren’t just games anymore. They are worth billions upon billions of dollars. And in case you need a reminder about the difference between millionaires and billionaires, here you go:
Seems like a big difference to me! I’m going to root for the working man every time, even if they’ll see more money in a year than I’ll make in a lifetime.
I’ll be curious to see how they implement a pitch clock and enforce a banning of the shift. What constitutes a shift? It’s not like baseball has set geographical positions (outside of a general area). I guess just divide the field up into quadrants and ensure that the players stay within them? They’ll figure it out. In any event, it is good that the MLB and MLBPA are taking steps to address what ails baseball. I used to enjoy watching games. But now, it is too costly (streaming MLB games out of market costs about $130 a year; tickets start at $20 a pop plus the insanely high prices of food). They have to find a middle ground somewhere and concede some money.
Will they do this? I doubt it. But a guy can hope.