BASEBAWL

               

                Fans of my favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, hoped that the recent season would end with a celebration on the Wrigley Field mound, but that just went to show that you’d better watch what you wish for. It ended with not one but two frolics on the Wrigley greensward, but neither were by the Cubs as they lost the division-title tiebreaker to the Milwaukee Brewers there and, the next day, the wild-card playoff to the Colorado Rockies. Talk about a bad week!

                

                 So Cubs’ fans will spend the offseason doing what we do best-- complaining—but we are not alone in our unhappiness. Baseball had a bad year all around, both on the field and at the box office. The diamond sport is an old one to which change comes grudgingly, but it had better come if some unfortunate trends are to be reversed.

                The most eye-popping stat of the 2018 regular season was that, for the first time since the game began serious record-keeping in 1900, strikeouts exceeded hits, 41,207 to 41,019. The Number Two eye-popper was that the all-MLB batting average dropped below .250, to .248, for the first time since 1972. A .248 hitter used to be considered a weak stick. Today he’s Mr. Average.

                That “the people” were unhappy about those things—or something—was seen in attendance figures, which dipped 4% from the year before to the lowest level since 2003. That wasn’t a cliff dive but it was worrisome, especially because 17 of the 30 Major League teams showed declines.  It’s been widely noted that baseball’s stately pace is out of step with other popular entertainments these days, so the game hardly needs an offensive slowdown to add to its deficits.

                  Even the most casual observer knows what’s behind the problems because it’s been apparent for several seasons that the trend of the game is toward the pitcher and away from the hitter. Pitchers today are bigger, stronger and better coached than they used to be, and they’re being employed in relays, so hitters must cope with a greater variety of looks than previously in any given game.

 I can’t quantify it (maybe someone else can), but either fastball velocities have soared or the speed guns are busted; 95 mph deliveries used to be rare but now any pitcher who can’t reach that figure is mocked.  The pitching models today are the likes of Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, guys who stand 6-foot-4 or 5 and can throw a strawberry through a battleship. Of the 120 pitchers on the opening-day rosters of the six teams now competing in the Arizona Fall League, a finishing school for promising young minor leaguers, exactly eight were less than six feet tall and 20 were 6-5 or taller.

                The hitters have contributed to their own decline by their approaches at the plate; most swing for the fences whatever the ball-strike count or playing-field situation. Few will choke up on their bats even when any sort of contact would help their teams-- how many times have you seen batters whiff mightily with a runner on third and fewer than two outs when even a ground ball to the shortstop would score a run?

Contact problems have been exacerbated by the recent attention to the “launch angle” of swings and the effort to increase fly ball (and home run) production by more-elevated swing planes that reduce the ball-contact area. That may work for such very talented hitters as J.D. Martinez or Kris Bryant, but it’s a liability for most who try it.

Batter bullheadedness is made clearest by the reactions to the infield shifts all the teams have come to employ to take advantage of batter tendencies.  Occasionally slapping the ball to an opposite field would counteract the more radical of such moves, but—noooo!—most hitters hack away as usual, trying to squeeze their shots through ever-smaller holes.

Stupidity has no cure and pitchers aren’t about to get shorter or ease up, but I think the pitcher-hitter imbalance would be redressed at least in part by reducing the height of the pitcher’s mound from the present 10 inches to, maybe, 6 inches. The Major Leagues reduced mound height to 10 inches from 15 in 1969 after a run of pitcher dominance had shrunk the game’s batting average to .237 and the per-team runs-per-game stat to 3.42. The effect was immediate, with the batting average hopping 11 points and the runs average topping 4 that season.  Much the same thing would happen again.

Baseball’s geometry favors tall pitchers and lowering the mound would offset the advantage that has accrued to the position as average heights have grown. Not only would it make gravity less a factor, it also would flatten deliveries, meaning that pitches would stay in the hitting zone longer. Sure, we’re talking about small differences here, but small differences make a big impact on the game.

Prolonged injuries to key players, which strike just about every team every season, reduce fan ardor, and could be addressed by increasing the team roster size to 27 players from 25. With (probably) one more position player and pitcher to work with, managers could better spread around the work and rest, keeping players keen. The players’ union would love this because it would create more jobs. Owners wouldn’t like it for the same reason, but the additions likely would be paid the salary minimum of $535,000 a year. A million bucks ain’t what it used to be, so the sting wouldn’t be severe.

The best thing that baseball could do for itself would be to reduce the length of the regular season from the present, ludicrous 162 games. That length might have been defensible when it was adopted in 1962, when the post-season consisted of a single, best-of-seven World Series. It no longer is at a time when a team could play as many as 20 post-season games.

The 2018 regular season started on March 29, the earliest date ever. That hubris was rewarded by a deluge of weather-related game postponements—25 in the first three weeks alone—starting a crazy quilt of makeups causing scheduling havoc.  Beginning the season before April 15 is silly, as is running the playoffs into November, which could happen this year with a single World Series rainout.

Reducing the schedule violates the first rule of business, which is that you can’t make any money when the store isn’t open, but knocking a dozen or even 20 games off the per-team MLB slate would increase the importance of each contest and make ticket-price increases more palatable.  They’re inevitable anyway and might as well be in a good cause.