Baseball is Back, But They Changed the Rules – Part 3

Which is going to be every bit as good as the third Godfather movie…

As I wrote in Parts 1 and 2 – in which Michael discovers Fredo betrayed him – the new Collective Bargaining Agreement included some new rules that will change baseball and most of the media kind of ignored those changes so I figured I wouldn’t.

Here are some of the new rules and how they’ll change the game. 

A pitch clock

As I’ve pointed out before, baseball already has a rule 5.07(c) that says if there are no runners on base, after a pitcher receives the ball and the batter is “alert” – which seems to make concessions to hitters with hangovers, which would be a great title for my next baseball book – the pitcher has 12 seconds to deliver a pitch and if he doesn’t do that the umpire will call a ball, but umpires don’t enforce this existing rule so pitchers feel free to ignore it.

Which is an important principle to keep in mind:

No matter how strict a rule sounds, if it’s not enforced there actually is no rule.

Which means about six of the 10 Commandments are pretty much irrelevant because nobody is going to punish you if you worship a false idol (like any of the highly attractive women who have played Catwoman, which reminds me when I went to the 1980 Super Bowl I was sitting about six seats away from Julie Newmar…but the young Julie Newmar) and I think it’s safe to say you can also covet your neighbor’s donkey without fear of reprisal.

(If you get to the Pearly Gates and it turns out I’m wrong and you get demerits for donkey coveting, tell them you got some bad advice off the internet which is an excuse I imagine a lot of us will be using in the not-too-distant future.)

Anyway…

Since the Dawn of Time (give or take an hour depending on Daylight Savings which was started to save energy and if that’s the case, makes me wonder why I’m so goddamn tired every time we screw around with our clocks) pitching coaches have been urging pitchers to work more quickly and it’s a little-known fact that when David faced Goliath, David’s pitching coach – Sol Greenberg – was on the sidelines yelling:

“So fling the rock, already.”

( And that’s a little-known fact because I just made it up. Also, it really helps that joke if you imagine a grumpy Jewish grandfather yelling at David, which might be anti-Semitic, but David was Jewish so I’m guessing his fictional pitching coach would not be Latin, but if it makes you feel better, go ahead and imagine the pitching coach with a Cuban accent. Here…I’ll help…imagine Ricky Ricardo saying: “Loocie, you got some pitchin’ to do.” )

Pitchers who work slowly frustrate the crap out of everybody including their own teammates because:

When……you……work……slowly……it’s……really……really……boring.

And baseball already has enough problems with pace of the game even without pitchers who have to meditate on the Meaning of Life between every pitch. So maybe a pitch clock is a good idea, because then the rest of us can see when an umpire isn’t enforcing a rule.

But…

Placement of the pitch clock will matter because if it’s at field level (and it needs to be someplace convenient for the pitcher to see) the pitch clock could become the visual background for some infielder who just had a 100-MPH line drive hit directly at his lips and that can be a problem which is demonstrated by the fact that the field-level scoreboards at Kauffman Stadium blind the players and coaches when they look into the outfield to see if somebody caught a fly ball.

So if it didn’t occur to anybody that a giant-ass, brightly lit “WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS!” type scoreboard at field level might be a bad visual background for players and coaches, I feel confident baseball can screw up a pitch clock as well.

12 teams in the playoffs

Owners like to have as many teams in the playoffs as possible, because that keeps fans interested – “We might be mediocre, but we still have a shot at the playoffs!” – which helps sell tickets and also means the owners don’t have to spend as much money on those highly-inconvenient players who have caused so much trouble by being what fans are actually paying to watch.

In the old days (yup, here’s yet another grumpy old man complaint) before they gave everybody a trophy so nobody’s feelings got hurt, you actually had to be good to win a trophy or go to the playoffs and in my lifetime we’ve gone from two teams in the postseason to 12, so in another 60 years I’m guessing every team will go to the playoffs and they’ll cancel the 162-game season and just hold a series of Home Run Derbies or Trivia Contests and James Caan will screw up Rollerball by being too good at it and if you didn’t get that movie reference you now have a pretty good film to watch.

(Watch the 1975 original, not the 2002 remake.)

Also…

As part of the new playoff format the two division winners with the best record will get first-round byes, which sounds like a good thing if you’ve never played baseball.

If a team has nagging injuries, time off might be appreciated, but if a team is healthy and playing well, generally speaking, they want to keep playing and time off can result in coming back stale and off-kilter and a team that has kept playing can take advantage of that.

If the internet is to be believed (and I’ve recently heard some sketchy information about donkey coveting) 13 Wild Card teams have reached the World Series since the Wild Card was introduced in 1995.

Nine-inning doubleheaders

After the pandemic messed up the schedule, in an effort to get more games played, they started playing seven-inning doubleheaders which is just fine if you’re in a beer league (I like to say I played in a beer-and-a-shot league), but is a real-game changer in a league where winning and losing theoretically matter.

If I’ve got the deeper pitching staff I want to play nine-inning games and force the other team’s pitching staff to cover two extra innings which they may not be able to do and gives me an advantage in the 8th and 9th innings.

So going back to nine innings is a good thing because it’s the way baseball is supposed to be played and I’m guessing football fans would lose their damn minds if the NFL decided to shorten games by playing just three-and-a-half quarters.

No man on second base in extra innings

OK, due to some sloppy writing and editing, it wasn’t clear if this rule was only going to be used in the post season and there would be a man on second in regular season extra-inning games and either way I hate this rule because it’s not the way baseball is supposed to be played and I’m not sure the rule worked the way it was intended.

Here’s the deal on extra innings:

Everybody – and that includes players, umpires and beer vendors…and most definitely includes reporters – wants to go home and when you have to watch 162 games every season and a game goes to extra innings, you do not say:

“Free baseball!”

That’s like waterboarding someone for three hours every day for six straight months and then one day you decide to waterboard them an extra hour and expect them to say:  

“Free water!”

And since everybody wants to go home ASAP the hitters all try to hit home runs to end the game and smart pitchers – who also want to go home, but not if it means a higher ERA – can take advantage of over-eager hitters by pitching to the outside part of the plate and letting the pull-happy hitters swing for the fences and instead hit “rollover” groundballs to the pull side of the field.

(I could explain what “rollover” groundballs are, but this thing is too long already so just accept that when you get a pitch away and try to pull it, you’re very likely to hit a weak grounder to the pull side.)

So if everybody is trying to hit homers and pitchers don’t make the mistake of pitching inside, games can go on for inning after inning and putting a runner on second would theoretically encourage hitters to settle for an opposite-field single which would win the game, but analytics has baseball so screwed up hitters want to use each and every at bat to hit the home runs that will get them paid.

In conclusion…

They’re also going to put advertisements on uniforms and helmets and eventually we might see a chest protector that says “Eat at Joe’s” and I could bitch about that, but those advertisements won’t change the game on the field and I’ve done enough bitching already.

The point of all this – and I definitely had a point when I started – is that people who don’t play baseball change rules without thinking about the unintended consequences which is exactly how baseball got into the mess it’s currently in because too many front office executives and owners watched Moneyball and thought having every hitter try to walk or hit a home run was a neat idea.

Turned out that made games too long and took action off the field and in an increasingly-fast-paced world, fewer and fewer people want to watch that.

Still…

It’s better than curling, so we’ll probably wind up watching baseball anyway and I’ll finish where we started – with an obscure reference to Godfather 3 which will make more sense if you watch this clip:

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

See you at the ballpark.