The problem with Baseball

Sorry if I’m cranky, but I’m writing this on Thursday morning and last night I watched the Cardinals play the Dodgers in a Wild Card game that lasted nine innings, but took four hours and 15 minutes to play, which is completely ridiculous and one of the reasons fans are losing interest in what used to be a great sport.  

Jesus Christ on a bicycle.

(Which is a new curse I’ve picked up from Australian TV and British books and will now be incorporated into my vast profanity collection, selected parts of which I share with readers, so trust me; if you’re offended by the occasional F-bomb, I know what’s in my profanity collection and it could be way worse, so quit whining.)

Anyway…

The game started at 7:15 and ended at 11:30 which is an hour-and-a-half after my usual bedtime which used to be midnight until I collected enough Life Experience to realize if it hadn’t already happened by 12 o’clock, you probably didn’t want it to and every woman that ever took a “Walk of Shame” (that journey home in the morning, wearing the cute outfit that looked great in the nightclub, but is now wrinkled and stained with who knows what, carrying your high heels, with runs in your stockings and streaks of mascara running down your face and what you hope is gum in your hair) knows what I’m talking about.

Which is really unfair because while women are subjected to the “Walk of Shame” guys who got laid the night before, enter their workplace doing Mick Jagger’s “Rooster Strut” willing and eager to put on a Power Point presentation that will include whatever degrading photos they talked some poor, inebriated Future Walk of Shamer into allowing the night before.

But enough about me in the eighties.

One of the reasons the game took so long is 17 batters struck out and strikeouts take a lot of pitches and a lot of pitches take a lot of time and there were so many strikeouts because these days pretty much every batter is trying to hit a home run.

Why trying to hit home runs leads to strike outs

It’s easier to hit home runs into the shortest part of a ballpark and that’s the corners and for most batters that means trying to hit the ball out in front of the plate.

That allows right-handed batters to pull the ball into the left-field corner and left-handed batters to pull the ball into the right-field corner and if you’re one of those baseball douchebags who hates it when something fundamental has to be explained to people who don’t know or care what BABIP is or consider Moneyball masturbation material, cool your jets and wait for the rest of the class to catch up.

OK, so hitting the ball out in front of the plate means starting your swing sooner and starting your swing sooner means getting fooled by pitches more often and that means more strikeouts.

And since advanced analytics advocates decided home runs were the way to go, everybody is trying to hit them because if you hit 30 homers you’ll get paid a lot of money even if you strike out 100 times, can’t play defense and run the bases like Bigfoot with a learning disability.

Pretty much everybody is swinging out their asses and when you swing really hard your neck tightens and your head moves (pay attention to where a guy’s looking after a swing and miss), so you’ll miss hittable pitches and if you’re trying to hit a home run to the pull side of the field, you’ll ignore perfectly hittable pitches that would only produce an opposite-field single (like fastballs on the outside part of the plate) which is why teams feel comfortable putting all their available infielders and the occasional beer vendor on the pull side of the infield.

As a frustrated Ned Yost once said: “It’s almost like singles don’t matter anymore.”

BTW: Pitchers deserve some of the blame because if they get a hitter 0-2 they won’t go right at them. Instead, they’ll spend the next three pitches trying to make a perfect pitch on a corner of the plate and if they could do that consistently they’d do it all the time, so instead they miss the corners and go 3-2 and then we get to see the hitter foul off five pitches before he walks or strikeouts or loses the will to live which is pretty much how I feel every time I have to watch this crap.

But pitchers nibble because while hitters get paid for homers, pitchers get paid for strikeouts.

Jesus Christ on a unicycle.

Some home run history

In 2019 there were more home runs in the big leagues than ever before, but those home runs came at a price: in 2018 for the first time in baseball history there were more strikeouts than hits and the same thing happened in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and you don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that trend as a bad sign for a sport that lacks action.

So take those 17 Cardinal/Dodger strikeouts, add in the eight walks and two hit by pitches and that’s 27 plate appearances where a ball was not put in play and that’s extremely boring baseball.

The game was not always played this way.  

Greg Maddux once threw a nine-inning game using just 78 pitches because he didn’t mind if the batter put the ball in play; Maddux had perfected movement and location so batters could hit part of the ball, they just had a hard time hitting the middle and that meant balls in play which means defensive plays which – if you think about – is what makes highlight reels entertaining because unless a home run kills a fan (which would be OK with me as long as the fan was an analytics advocate), home runs all look the same.

I dimly recall (which accurately describes much of the last six decades) a story about Kansas City Royal Steve Balboni striking out 100 times which used to be embarrassing for a ballplayer and teammate Hal McRae giving him a bottle of champagne to celebrate 100 strikeouts because all those swings and misses meant Balboni must be a power hitter.

In 1984 when Balboni struck out 139 times, he was the only guy on the Royals with 100 or more strikeouts.

In 2021 the Royals had five guys strike out 100 times or more and they would have had six if Jorge Soler stayed with the team because he left KC with 97 strikeouts and struck out 45 more times after going to the Braves. Six guys with a hundred punchouts kinda sucks for a team that wound up with 163 home runs, which was dead last in the American League and brings me to my next point. 

Not getting what you paid for

Let’s say you buy into the “Let’s All Hit Home Runs” theory of baseball and decide strikeouts are the price you have to pay.

Way too many teams are paying that price without getting the home runs they paid for.

In 2002 (and I picked that year because that’s how far the website I looked at went back) 73 big league players struck out 100 times or more.

This season 145 big league players struck out 100 times or more (Joey Gallo and Matt Chapman managed to strike out over 200 times which means Hal McRae owes them at least four bottles of champagne) and of those 145 guys, by my count (and it’s way too early in the morning to go through those numbers again) 58 of those guys hit less than 20 home runs and 12 of those guys hit less than 10.

Hey, if a guy shows he’s got the talent to hit 30 bombs let him try, but if a guy shows he doesn’t have that kind of power, maybe he ought to concentrate on making contact.

In 21 big league seasons George Brett never struck out 100 times and his all-time high was 75. His 162-game average was just 19 home runs, but 189 hits, 40 doubles, eight triples, 96 RBIs, and 95 runs while striking out just 54 times.

That’s a ballplayer worth watching.

(Jesus Christ on a Vespa…I sound like every old, cranky dude that ever lived and I need to wrap this up because I have to go outside and yell at some kids playing on my lawn.)

Length of games

Baseball knows it has a problem.

Attendance has been dropping every year since 2012 and that’s why they’re doing goofy stuff like limiting mound visits, forcing relievers to face more hitters in order to reduce pitching changes and starting a runner on second base in extra-inning games and none of that has worked because in 2021 games were longer than ever. 

In 1946 an average nine-inning game took one hour and 56 minutes to play and through the miracle of analytics and guys who don’t actually like to watch baseball telling everybody else how to play it, nine inning games now take an average of three hours and 10 minutes.

(BTW: I don’t hate everything about analytics…some of it is interesting and worthwhile…but the style of play analytics advocates is boring and is killing the sport these guys supposedly love.)

Games take too long and there’s not enough action and anytime you can get a baseball fan like me to turn off a postseason game because it’s taking over 28 minutes to play an inning, somebody has screwed things up.

And that’s the problem with baseball.