DrungoHazewood

It's a decent, reasonable start to getting their hands around pace and length of game. Not too extreme. So the inevitable reaction is that it doesn't do enough, so they should scrap it. But if it was a more intrusive change we'd get that it's going waaaay to far and they shouldn't do it.

It's just like the timeouts in basketball. The game is moving along with a good rhythm, and then just when it get really tense near the end they introduce six extra commercial breaks. There's two issues - length and pace. I'd like them to improve both.

I don't have a huge problem with it. I just go to bed in the 6th or 7th inning.

I suggested this year(s) ago. Change pitchers as often as you'd like, but if it's in the middle of the inning he doesn't get any warmups and he has to be ready to go, already in the dugout. It takes no more time to switch pitchers than to pinch hit. I have no problem with that. But I was told in no uncertain terms that the difference between bullpen mound and regular mound is so extreme that we'd have all MLB pitchers on the injured list inside of a month. And it would only shave 8-10 minutes off the game, so as is the case with all changes, it's completely and totally insane and only people who hate baseball would even consider it.

Or maybe you could just use one pretty good pitcher for an entire inning (or God forbid, two) once in a while where they get three fairly routine outs. Instead of watching the manager trot out to the mound six times in the middle of an inning in every close/late game. Alternately we could go back to the normal MLB solution, which in this case is to say any sport that lasts less than 3-4 hours isn't a sport at all, absolving the need to try to come up with any solution at all.

It's game-altering on purpose. Which is different from the game-altering that they choose to not do anything about, which happens constantly, all the time. This must be why people are up in arms about this: it's baseball proactively trying to fix something instead of just rebranding problems as features. Yes, it's a game-altering precedent unlike anything we've seen in recent memory because baseball refuses to ever change any rules for any reason, even if there is a clear and obvious problem that needs fixing. The closest we get is weaselly clarifications, like "when we said the shoulders were the top of the zone, we really meant the numbers, and we're going to tell the umps to just call it the belt. Everyone knew that, right?"

I don't understand why you couldn't have one minute of commercials that cost $5000 instead of two minutes of commercials that cost $5000. Supply goes down, more advertisers are competing for limited spots, price goes up. Overall revenues are the same. But I'm just an engineer, not a business major, so I could be wrong.

There's no problem with pinch hitting. It doesn't delay the game unnecessarily. It doesn't lead to wildly different usage patterns. It doesn't cause injuries. It doesn't directly result in nine strikeouts per team per game. Having 13 pitchers used in ever-shorter outings does all of that. And it's not as extreme as rules banning openers or forcing a starter to go five. If you don't like this rule do you have other suggestions on how to change course, and pull back from more and more pitchers throwing harder and harder leading to less and less action and more and more strikeouts? Or do you just like the all Ks and homers version of baseball? If you do that's fine, I just have a preference for more action in the field and on the bases.

I don't care how many teams are in the playoffs, just give a trophy to the team with the best record in the regular season. The pennant should still be a thing.

But if one simple thing won't immediately result in two hour games why are we messing with the eternal sanctity of baseball?!?!?!?!?!

Absolutely managers will complain. People complain about every change. Managers have been LOOGYing up the late innings for 30 years, so they're taking one of their toys away. Now they actually have to think through the late innings instead of automatically bringing in Mark Hendrickson to face just David Ortiz any time he comes up in the 6th-8th. They're really going to do away with the rule because it only contributes a small part to a much larger problem, and we knew this all along? Why wouldn't this be step one in a larger strategy to attempt to control the pace and length of games?

Because it's better to try out solutions to problems than just let the game wander around wherever it happens to go. They steadfastly refused to try anything for more than a century and we saw both homers and strikeouts go up dramatically, action in the field go down in a similar fashion, and game times increase from two hours to over three. We went from a game that was constant movement all over the field for two hours to standing around and waiting for a homer for three hours.

Why not do both? Calling automatic balls for delaying, strikes for not staying in the box and the three-batter rule and you could probably shave 15 minutes off a game. But more importantly the pace of play would be far better.

There are already all kinds of rules about how you can use the roster. You can't put a pitcher in the field and keep the DH. You can't move a player from the mound to a position and back more than once in an inning. You can't remove a player from the game and put him back in. If you put a pitcher in the game he has to face at least one batter to the completion of a plate appearance (now the rule is slightly modified to three instead of one). If you bring in a pinch hitter and remove him after he's announced but before he bats you can't use him any more in that game. Starting in '20 you can't put a position player on the mound in certain circumstances.

I'm for it because it may be the only in-game rule change I'll see the rest of my life. We only get one every 40-80 years. Foul-strike rule in 1903... DH in '73... three batters in '20... we should have another in, what, 2064?

What? How would it eliminate pinch running or pinch hitting? With no more one-out pitchers, and necessarily more multi-out pitchers, you would free up roster space for more offensive specialists. Instead of tying the managers hands in roster construction (hmmm... will I have 13 pitchers on the roster or 14?) he'll actually have choices in how fill it out. Today if a big lefty sluggers comes up with two on in the 8th down a run, you use your LOOGY. There's no strategy at all, it's button pushing. It's automatic. With all pitchers constrained to three or more batters the manager has to use his brain more often. He has to plan ahead, and think not only about the big lefty coming up, but multiple batters downstream, too.

Best does not equal most efficient. Dean Smith figured out the most efficient way to win basketball games was the four corners. Problem was that was also the worst way, so they changed the rules. 11 pitching changes a game wins you more games, but it's about as entertaining as growing mold.

Which is a key reason why offensive strategy in baseball is more interesting than pitching strategy. Maybe I'd be more in favor of endless pitching changes if the new pitcher was already in the dugout and sprinted to the mound and ready to go in the same time it takes the batter to walk up from the on-deck circle.

Don't say that too loud, they'll probably change it back.

When I was a kid the Orioles would often carry nine pitchers, five of whom were nominally relievers but some would start sometimes. That leaves seven bench players who could pinch hit or do other things more interesting than facing a single lefty once or twice a week (complete with commercial breaks!).

Another alternative would be to limit teams to nine or 10 pitchers on the roster. Then we can let the manager come to the conclusion that using five of them for one or two batters is a poor choice. The mid-inning pitching change is baseball's answer to five timeouts and 11 fouls at the end of every basketball game. Stop messing around and just play the game.

Isn't part of the reason for the rule that we're all unbalanced now? Every team uses eight pitchers a game, and there aren't any pinch hitters anymore. Maybe with this rule, and maybe a few more, we can actually get back to a point where all the strategy in the sport isn't centered on matchup pitching. Remember when Earl used to pinch hit five times a game? Now there aren't five guys on your bench to pinch hit with!

It's a great award. Baseball needs to do more awarding for sustained excellence over the whole season, rather than putting everything into who can luck their way through a few short series at the end of the year. It's more impressive to win the most games in your league in 13 years than win a handful of games in October.

Leaving it alone takes us to places no one ever intended, and probably never wanted. 100 years ago most starts ended up with two-hour complete games, there were 2-3 strikeouts per team per game, and an over-the-fence homer maybe once every three or four games. They left the game alone with very few exceptions for a century and we now have a game where teams routinely use six pitchers, there's a strikeout per inning, homers are so commonplace that they've almost become boring, and games often last four hours. We're not asking for change to make this some kind of futuristic spaceball or add six bases or anything over-the-top nuts. Most of the changes are an attempt to get back to a more balanced, competitive, athletic form of baseball instead of an endless drone of K, K, HR, pitching change, K, HR, pitching change, K, K, HR, HR, ad nauseum...

What this is, is baseball drawing a line on specialization. I think all sports, if controls aren't in place, will evolve into contests between ever more specialized athletes and often more anonymous players. Look at football. 70 or 80 years ago they decided to allow two-way, essentially unlimited subs. And rosters about five times the size of the number of players allowed on the field. So now we have players who are on the field for a minute or two a game, who just punt, or kick field goals, or long snap on punts and field goals, or stand at the goal line and watch the kickoff go over their heads into the stands. In college there are kickers who just do kickoffs, their entire job is to wack the ball into the opposite stands three times a game and pray they never kick it out of bounds. Baseball has a problem promoting their stars. One part of that is that Mike Trout gets four at bats a game, and makes four mostly routine plays in the field a game. Relief pitchers often throw to one batter every three games. This new rule is a small step towards correcting this. It's saying, no, we're not going to allow managers this one conceit. No, you can't have the 26th man on your roster throw 38 innings a year. You have to be just a tiny bit more cross-trained in getting a righty or three out once in a while. We're drawing a small line in the sand, we're not going to be football. Maybe if this goes well we'll draw a bigger line later.