Baseball

Ways to Fix Baseball

Not that I think that baseball desperately needs fixing, but there are things that I would like changed, so I took the liberty of making a list and fixing them all at once.

- First of all, no more designated hitter. I am from the old school I guess, but to me, it’s just not baseball when you have a steady hitter and steady pitcher. That’s wiffleball, not baseball. If a player wants to hit, he should play the field. And just as equally, a pitcher should take his turn at bat like the other eight guys who share the duty of playing defense. The American League right now is simply a game of outscoring your opponent.

I know there are a lot of people that love the DH rule, and think it’s worthless to have pitchers hitting. To that I say the only reason pitchers are so worthless at the plate is because they are allowed to be. There is no rule that prevents a pitcher from taking batting practice. Since the AL instituted the DH over 30 years ago, it’s made its way into the minor leagues, college baseball and even high schools. If you stop babying pitchers at 15-years old, maybe they’d be able to swing the bat a little better. It’s no coincidince that of the 10 starting NL pitchers with batting averages over .242 right now, eight of them have winning records. They don’t all have the best ERAs, but they are being supported by an extra hitter…themselves.

Why National League teams don’t make their pitchers spend more time on their hitting is beyond me. You only have nine guys in your lineup. If your pitcher can’t hit, that pretty much eliminates the effectiveness of your number eight hitter, so you really are playing with just seven real hitters in the lineup. If you have a pitcher that can hit, you can give your team a huge advantage. But everybody keeps babying these pitchers. Between not swinging the bat and the ridiculous over-usage of the pitch count, it’ll only be a few years before they send somebody out to the mound to catch the ball from the catcher.

So with all of that implying that they should just use a DH, I’m still against it. My first move as commissioner would be to eliminate the DH, which would be step one in bringing the hitting pitcher back, and bring baseball back to being baseball.

– My next move would be to reverse the scheduling and logistical changes that Bud Selig instituted. That means no more wild-card and no more interleague play. Of course, to get rid of the wild-card, you’d have to realign again to get back to two divisions per league.

- It’s time for contraction. To fix all of the scheduling problems I want fixed, this is going to be necessary. That’s not going to be a popular move in a few cities, but it needs to be done.

We’ve seen in the last 20 years that baseball does not handle expansion well. The pitching is watered down which makes for worse baseball, and the schedule is too long which leads to empty ballparks. If you cut the weak cities and redistribute the talent in the majors and minors, you create a better product in the surviving cities. Come on, in ten years will Tampa and Washington, D.C. really miss their teams.

So this is really one big change. Cut two to four teams and re-align the divisions accordingly. Two divisions per league, with each division winner going to the playoffs. This eliminates the wild-card and takes us back to just an LCS and a World Series.

- The next step in this process is to fix the scheduling. No more interleague play, or at least much less of it. Fifteen games where the two teams are using different rules than they are used to is too many. Cut the interleague schedule to six games. I’d say get rid of it altogether, but the fans really like it, so one home-and-home per team is fair enough.

- And while we’re on scheduling, no more unbalanced schedule. It’s hard enough to compete in the AL East, but do you really have to make the Blue Jays, Orioles and Devil Rays play 38 games against the Yankees and Red Sox? What makes this unfair is that the teams in the AL West don’t have the same schedule. The teams are essentially fighting for the same playoff spot, but the unbalanced schedule makes it very possible for a team to have a huge advantage just by being in a different division. The schedule should be slightly unbalanced, so you play in your division more than any other, but not to the extent that it is now.

- Another scheduling change, and that is to bring back the scheduled doubleheader. This allows for much more leniancy with the scheduling. If you promise more days off to the players union, I think this could be done. You could give a team five or six more days off during the season, and play doubleheaders on Sundays. This would also allow the league to move back Opening Day a week or so, thus avoiding the midwest snow debacle that we saw this year. Plus, you get to give the fans a treat during the season. Teams could do the day/night doubleheader if they want, or they could do the twi-night doubleheader and give the fans a true two-for-one experience at the park.

- Add a salary cap, and a salary floor. While I think that an owner should be able to do what they want with their team, it’s about time we put some restrictions and guidelines in place. The league needs to step in now and then and make sure that their product is fair and competitive. Baseball is no longer either of those. While some small and midsize markets do pretty well, the generally lack the resources to compete every year the way the big boys do. Billy Beane does more than most with what he has to work with, but you always know that their best players are leaving in their prime because they can’t afford to keep them. In the NFL, there is always somebody who comes out of nowhere to compete. In baseball, it just doesn’t happen. By the time you build a team from the ground up, your players are up for free agency and you have to start again. So if you can’t compete in the free agent market, you can’t compete year-in and year-out.

But on the other side of this is the teams that don’t try to compete. There are owners that are content to make their money without trying to win. While they can do what they want under the current rules, it’s just wasting our time, the fans money, and the players window of opportunity to not build the best team you can.

So my proposal is to put in a salary cap and a salary floor. Each team would have to spend X amount of money on their payroll, and you couldn’t spend more then Y amount on your payroll. I’m not an expert on salary caps and economics so I won’t propose the details, but I think it should be a combination of the NFL and NBA’s structures, which I think both work well. I think this not only makes the league more competitive, but more interesting as well. It makes it tougher to build a dynasty and encourages creativity, since you can’t just throw money at players. There is too much resentment of the rich teams in the league, which is just bad for the sport. The cap and floor should still be far enough apart to reward an owner that wants to spend more and punish those who don’t but it should help close the gap.

- One thing I’m putting in here may not be popular, and that is to grant “amnesty” to any players that have used steroids in the past. Right now the league is stuck in a no-win situation trying to figure out who broke today’s rules yesterday, when the rule wasn’t there. The league should just say, “everyone has a clean slate, the new rules start now.” From the time this is issued, the new and improved drug testing program could be instituted. The league should be using it’s deep pockets to hire the scientists that are making the drugs to help them test for them. The same reason the computer companies and the government hire computer hackers, they know what they’re doing. Bring in the brains and let them figure it out. This may not fix the past, but it may save the future.

- The last one is personal. While I don’t think it’s hurting the game, per se, I absolutely loathe the “defensive indifference” rule. The official rule, rule 10.07(g) says, “The official scorer shall not score a stolen base when a runner advances solely because of the defensive team’s indifference to the runner’s advance. The official scorer shall score such a play as a fielder’s choice.”

First of all, in a game with no time limit, everything can have a meaning. To me, there is no such thing as defensive indifference. It is a strategic choice made by the defensive team to not attempt to get the runner out on the steal attempt. Leaving this rule to the scorer’s judgement is wrong in my opinion. The runner is stealing for a strategic offensive purpose.

Here’s a hypothetical situation. Runner on first, no outs, 8-0 score in favor of the team in the field, ninth inning. The runner on first takes second base without a throw. The scoring will likely be “defensive indifference.” The next batter hits a ground ball up the middle that the second baseman dives for near the bag. There is no play at first and everyone is safe. This would have been an out except for the steal. The batting team goes on to score eight runs with two outs. The force at second that wasn’t there due to the steal may have cost them the game. Obviously, this is an extreme example, but in a game with no time-limit, everything could have an impact.

I understand that the defense is indifferent, but the runner is not. The runner, statistically, is being punished for doing something that is helping his team. On a sacrifice fly, when there is no throw home, isn’t that defensive indifference? There are many situations in a game where a player advances on a play due to the defense’s indifference. How about a runner scoring from second without a throw on a shallow single in the same situation as above? I find it unfair to pick and choose which stats are legitimate during the game.

I’ll admit that “defensive indifference” is not ruining baseball, but it bothers me. The constant tweaking of stats could hurt baseball because people like Scott Boras can manipulate every number they come across, therefore pricing a free-agent out of certain markets by using these stats to over-value their clients. Just like they do with the save, and it’s ugly step-child, the hold.

These are my proposals to help fix our National Past Time and restore it to it’s rightful perch atop our nations sports. I’ll add more thoughts as I deem them worthy. Feel free to suggest some more…

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