Would You Care About the World Series if...

My Thoughts on How to Fix Baseball

My previous post talked about everything I didn’t like about baseball.  I had to reach deep down in my mind to find the true reasons why I don’t like baseball, but in all fairness, now I’m going to talk about what baseball could do to fix the situation and make a casual (barely) fan like myself more interested in baseball and keep my attention all summer long.  This is a tall order, but if I was commissioner of baseball this is what I would do to get a fan like me to get more and more into baseball.

First of all, let’s talk about the standard size of the field.  We don’t need to go into why this bugs me, I talked about it ad nauseum in my last post, but it’s seriously ridiculous.  Let’s get one thing straight, the intensity of baseball comes from a couple scenarios:  late in a close game with a stud pitcher against a stud hitter, a close game in which there is a hit deep into the outfield and there is a throw for a play at the plate, a close game in which a stud hitter hits a high jack and it’s the “will it go!?!?” scenario.  These are all affected by the size of the field.  If you standardize the size, and make it a little bit further out, these types of exciting plays happen because homeruns are harder to come by and it becomes easier to play defense when you practice on the same field with the same dimensions every day.  Also, hated phrases such as “hitter’s park” will be completely abolished if there are no differences in field size.

Next, and this is probably actually the biggest change but the best change that can be made:  shorten the season from 162 games to 120 games.  Baseball purists are already drafting this 375 page SABRmetric report about why 162 games is the perfect amount, but fact of the matter is, it’s too many games.  Purists say that 162 games are played because over that long of a season the true best team reveals itself and a players’ skill is more truly established over 162 outings.  While this may be the argument, I would not quite look at it that way.  I would say that over that long of a season people don’t show themselves as how “great” they actually tend to drift more towards the mean and everybody is closer to the average player through the course of a season.

Now, baseball lovers always talk about how much their records mean, and records do carry a stronger weight in baseball because the fundamental aspects of the game have never changed, so records are much more relative over the life of baseball than football.  However, who really cares?  Draw a line in the record books and start new records.  As a baseball fan would you rather have an irrelevant sport or keep your records?  I would vote for having a relevant sport again (if I was a baseball fan).  This would also heighten the value of each game, add just a little bit more urgency and tension to each game, and make all of them more exciting.  This just makes sense and would make baseball infinitely more watchable.

Piggy backing on that, let’s expand and extend the playoffs now that the regular season is shorter.  The best part about baseball is the intensity of the playoffs.  The problem right now is this, the season is so long, if you are out of the race by May (like the Royals) then you are disinterested.  Now that that problem is alleviated by a shorter regular season, and people are still interested in the playoffs, baseball needs to cash in and get more out of the playoffs.  First, they should add two more teams in each league giving the top two teams byes.  Then they need to take the series’ format of 5 games, 7 games, 7 games and make each series longer, 7 games, 7 games, and 9 games for the World Series.  The intensity of a game 7 is epic but imagine a game 9 in which it’s 4-4 and it comes down to the ninth inning.  You run the risk of losing interest over a nine game series, but I really think the payoff could be huge.

The next is something that people are probably split on.  The pitchers mound currently resides at 10 inches above the ground.  The mound was shorted to that height from 15 inches in 1969 in order to give the hitters a more fair shot.  Well I think the pendulum has swung towards the hitters in the last 40 years and the playing ground is even, now.  I suggest that you increase the height of the pitchers mound, not back to 15 inches, but up to about 13 inches.  This would give pitchers a slightly higher advantage, but wouldn’t allow them to dominate as they did back in the day.   Baseball is the only sport where defense is more exciting than offense.  In a tense game, every pitch can have the crowd on the edge of their seat and baseball needs to take advantage of this.  Making the mound higher means lower scoring, closer games, and many, many more tense moments. 

I would also want to add replay to more plays than just homeruns.  The fact that a completely objective call like calling somebody out at first to save a perfect game can’t be reviewed is ridiculous. Baseball needs to catch up to the times and get those calls right.

Fact of the matter is, baseball is no longer the most popular sport in America, it’s not America’s pass time, and it is fighting to be even the second most popular sport in America right now.  Baseball is archaic and needs to change somehow, but baseball and Bud Selig are too shortsighted to make any of the excellent changes I mentioned above.  Baseball will have to just accept and enjoy their irrelevance going forward.