Pretty much the only major sport I watch and enjoy is baseball. Post-season baseball is a lot like post-season hockey. You have the best teams, and usually the best pitchers, competing under pressure. There’s plenty of dramatic moments, which is not always the case with regular season games. In July, an elite pitcher on his game will have the other guys swinging freely late in games as they just want to get over with quickly. No one says it, but it happens. The umps will expand the strike zone late in games too.
The problem is the games take too long. Game one of the ALCS took four hours. Game three took almost four hours and it was a 1-0 game. After every pitch the batter wanders off to scratch himself and adjust his gloves. Pitchers stare in for the sign like they are cracking the zodiac code. If a runner gets on we see ten throws to first, a few visits to the mound and, of course, more scratching and adjusting. It get ridiculous. When a half-inning lasts over 20 minutes, the games are taking too long.
There’s no way TV held an audience for the great Sox comeback in game two. I bet ten percent of the starting audience was up to see it. What’s the point of watching a game if you know you will not be up to see the end? If fans like me find it too taxing to watch these games, the causal fans are not watching. At best, they are tuning in and out while watching other shows. That seems like a sure way to lose your audience. Those people tuning in and out eventually just tune out and stop being fans.
The most obvious way to speed up the games is to expand the strike zone. That way you have have pitchers throwing strikes, which means the hitters have to swing. It also makes it more difficult for hitters to bad defensively. the narrow strike zone allows hitters to lay off a lot of pitches and just train to handle the narrow strike zone. Good hitters can work a count and sit on the pitches they can hit. Giving the high strike back to the pitcher would force hitters to swing at tough pitches. That should speed up the game a bit.
That would probably reduce offense initially, but good hitters would adjust in time so it would not result in the death of offense. In fact, it would probably bring back the contact hitter as a weapon. In the old days of huge ball parks, slap hitters would just put the ball in play to get on base. The small parks of today reward the sluggers, so the contact guys has faded from the game. The the most likely result is soemthing like the 1970’s where a lineup has a mix of sluggers and contact hitters.
People can tolerate a 2-0 game if it lasts two hours. Making fans sit and watch for three and half hours, you better have some offense. The trade-off for lower scoring would be shorter games. The other way to do it and something that would fix the playoffs is to keep the hitter in the box. Give the hitter one time out. Otherwise, the ump calls the batter in and the pitcher can throw until the ump calls time out. If the hitter needs to scratch himself, he has to do it in the box in-between pitches.
