DrungoHazewood

Shorten commercial breaks, charge more for each commercial. Aggressively enforce no stepping out of the box. Limiting in-inning pitching changes. My preference would be none, unless the pitcher has been charged with 3+ runs. Each throw by a pitcher to a base that doesn't pick off the runner counts as a ball to the batter. No mound visits... or you get 2-3 30 second timeouts per game for all of your arguing, mound visits, umpire rule clarifications, whatever. Penalty for violation of the 30 seconds is a) if your team is at bat the batter is out. b) if you're in the field the opponent's batter gets first base via automatic walk. All reviews are done in the pressbox in near realtime. No challenges. If the ump in the box sees something on replay that needs fixing before the next batter steps in, he calls down and fixes it. If the replay result is not clear within the timing of natural flow of the game the call on the field stands. If in-inning pitching changes are still allowed, the pitcher has one minute from the time the manager signals for the change to be ready to pitch. The umpire actually, really calls a ball if the pitcher violates the (already existing) rule 5.07(c) to throw a pitch within 12 seconds. Umpires are instructed to not grant timeout to the batter unless he clearly has an injury. If Nomar comes back and plays with his batting gloves 23 times between each pitch he's banned from all MLB parks for life.

Here's a list of average game times over time. In 1990 games were about 15 minutes shorter. In 1970 they were 35 minutes shorter. From 1950-80 2:30 was standard. Prior to WWII the average was under 2:00.

If you implement a number of five minute fixes you can get to 2:30 games. If you throw up your hands and accept 3+ hour games you get nowhere, and the times will continue to increase. Nobody cries about the NFL because the NFL plays once a week, usually in the afternoon. You can devote as much time to the Orioles in the first two and a half weeks of April as you do to the Ravens all season. Baseball used to be less boring. The action to standing around ratio was larger. Two, two-and-a-half hour games were standard. There were no fixed commercial break times, there were few pitching changes, and there were three or four strikeouts per team per game. The game moved along because there were no lights and most games couldn't be completed if you let it go on 3-4 hours. It's not like this is some made-up world, this was how baseball was played for 100 years. Today there are many incentives for drawing out games. Pitchers slow down as a strategy, to throw off batters and baserunners. Batters step out to disrupt pitchers. More pitchers in short stints are more effective. Mound visits have advantages for the pitching team. But there are few/no incentives to speed up. So, like the ever increasing strikeouts, there is no natural bound on game time, there are asymmetrical pressures. I think we will eventually see 3:30 games, maybe 4:00, because there is no pressure to not do that, and plenty of advantages. In 1990 I would have never thought we'd be over a strikeout a team an inning without major rules changes, but with asymmetrical pressures and no natural bounds, here we are. The only thing that will stop any of this is someone stepping in and trying to change things for the better.

Soccer does have a problem with faking injuries. It's hard to deal with because it's difficult to tell what's real and what's fake, especially in real time, and there are incentives for successfully faking (free kicks leading to scoring opportunities). You do see the occasional caution for faking. In baseball it's relatively easy to deal with pitchers faking injuries to get around the three batter rule. You make a rule that says if you come out due to injury prior to three batters you can't pitch for five days.

It exacerbates the issue of lack of balls in play. You basically turn any at bat with X foul balls into a strikeout.

No, but giving up and setting no limits or even goals for pace and duration of game leaves us where we are today with 3+ hour average games and no endpoint in sight. Then we look up, it's 2030, those darned millenials are the core of the population base, and nobody watches four hour baseball games any more. I'd rather baseball fight for more fans rather than fade away, clinging to the idea that baseball takes as long as baseball takes .

I thought about this, but the foul balls aren't intentional. Nobody today wants to hit a foul ball. Instead of punishing batters for not being able to square up on a 93mph pitch with movement, maybe you move the mound back and mandate thicker bats. Or you just make any pitch over 94 mph a ball. I'm sure that would be popular...

I think the risk could work out for generic relievers, but then you lose the reliever for the day unless you plan on pitching him in the 2nd inning. No decent starter is ever going to play RF so that he can be designated a two-way player and essentially be a 14th pitcher. We're talking tiny fractions of wins here. An average pitcher is probably a -30 LFer, or worse. The starter is going to lose it the first time Darren O'Day spins around three times, falls down, and turns a routine fly ball into a triple. There may be odd cases where you have a really athletic pitcher and Maddon is the manager... but this is going to be like the part of the balk rule about not facing the batter when he pitches. It'll be on the books and essentially forgotten for decades.

I'm guessing someone remembers the Earl Weaver rule for DHs. Steve Stone started 12 games at DH the year he won 25, but had zero PAs. Earl would just pinch hit whomever he thought would be the best DH when that spot came up in the order. That way he could be 100% sure he had the platoon advantage. I like the idea, but no amount of modern analysis could tease out the tiny fraction of a win that bought the Orioles. And baseball being baseball that was too weird so they changed the rules so your starting DH had to bat at least once. Agreed. They should just ban mid-inning pitching changes or limit the roster to nine pitchers.

I'd like this to be a wedge, or a starting point. 13 max pitchers in 2020. 12 in 2021. 11 in 2022. 10 in 2023. Ohtani will be the only one. Brooks Kieschnick never started more than seven games in the field or DH in a season once he returned to pitching. Ruth would have only qualified in '18 and '19. Rick Ankiel never pitched and played another position in the same season. Smoky Joe Wood only pitched two games after converting to the field. Bob Smith would have qualified in 1925, with 93 innings on the mound and 36 games at 2B/SS. Bucky Walters played a few games in the field from '35-37 but never enough to qualify under this rule. Nixie Callahan was in in 1897 and '02. It's really Otani and nobody else in over 90 years.

There already is one, at $555k x 25 or $13.875M. I think the owners would be okay with a higher one in exchange for something else.

I think the MLBPA will propose a cap in conjunction with a fixed percentage of revenues somewhere north of where it is today. Something like 45% of revenues go to player salaries in exchange for a $200M cap. Both mild enough to be acceptable.

In the 1890-1905 era foul balls became a big problem. In the beginning none of them were strikes. Then in 1894 they made foul bunts strikes, because there were a lot of hitters who would just bunt foul any strike they didn't want to swing at. But there were still guys like Keeler and Roy Thomas (mentioned in the article - look at his bb-ref page, there's nobody remotely like that anymore) who'd swing and foul off pitches forever. So in 1903 (AL) and 1904 (NL) they made all foul balls (except with two strikes) a strike (there are varying online dates for the year the foul strike rule was implemented in each league, but '03 and '04 are when you clearly see spikes in the strikeout rates). Anyway... they saw a problem, and they implemented a fix. I have less faith that the powers-that-be will do that today. Although today it's not quite so simple because the foul balls aren't mostly on purpose like 120 years ago. You can't mandate bigger foul territory. I think moving the mound back would help somewhat. I guess we'll see what happens in the Atlantic League this year - if their record-keeping is good enough to give us foul ball data.

I like the end of (most) September call-ups and the unified July 31st trading deadline. It's comical that you can have one team for 4-5 months, then change a bunch of things and play with added stars and a bunch of extra pinch hitters/runners/defensive replacements the last month or two. While the bad teams are fielding lineups with six guys who spent the year in Walla Walla and Kalamazoo. I don't know of any other sport that allows radical roster reconstruction in the most important parts of the season.

That's pretty radical. We might see a handful of games, at least before September, with as few as five or six pitchers.

For years my simple contract evaluator did just fine despite not having an input for age. A guy coming off a 1-win season at 34 following several 3-win years was judged to be worth exactly the same as a 27-year-old with that resume. And it worked pretty well, despite the fact that made no logical sense. Not any more. I've had to come up with a more complicated v2.0 that sees players in their 30s fall off rapidly and their expected contracts do the same. I think if 2015 Nelson Cruz were a free agent today he'd get 2/20.

I don't know how they handle the exemption process. Do minor leaguers have access to it? Do you put in for an exemption when you're called up the first time, or in spring training?

I think that's reasonable. But folks who use the "athletes should only perform naturally" justification for PED bans need to be careful. For many people naturally means bad eyesight and a torn UCL.

I won't vouch for the accuracy, but this article says 4-6% of the adult population has ADHD, and MLB granted 110-120 therapeutic use exemptions in 2014 or 2015. 120 out of 750 would be 16%, but if it's more like 1000 total MLB players it would be 12%. Don't know if those numbers have changed in the last 4-5 years.

Yes, I think that's fair. While also questioning many of the often long-ago decisions that led to various drugs being illegal. And questioning the "properly prescribed" exceptions. I'm still trying to figure out the correlation between high athletic performance and ADHD. It seems that MLB players have ADHD, and require therapeutic exemptions for drugs to treat that, at a rate many times that of the general population.

I get that we are where we are because things evolve over time and standards are set for a variety of reasons, some logical, some not so much. Steroids are illegal for a variety of reasons, some health and safety related, some because of cultural stigmas, some because Sosa/McGwire/Bonds used them to break records. Correcting vision is legal because everyone wants to be able to see well. But I don't think it hurts to continually re-assess our (society's) decisions and determine if they still make sense, or ever did. What is "natural" or "neutral"? What you're born with? Average across society? Average for a MLB athlete? My vision is pretty good, something like 20/15 even in middle age. It's my only attribute that even slightly resembles what you'd need to play baseball at a high level. But oddly, it's also one of the few physical attributes that you can correct or even enhance all you want and still play MLB if you weren't born with it. A player born with 20/100 vision can fix that with artificial means all day long. If I had wanted to achieve the stature or strength or speed of an average MLB player, when I was younger, I probably would have had to use steroids or HGH or something along with a lot of hard work. But that would have been illegal; go with what you're born with or go home. I think other sports, notably the Olympics, lean a little closer to what I'm talking about. Athletes in Olympic sports have to be exceptionally careful about cold medicine or any number of other over-the-counter or prescription meds for actual medical conditions because of a very lengthy list of banned substances. But even there I think they can get Lasik. Not sure about Roberts' red contacts...

And the number of players who OPS 1.000 as a full time player at the age of 40 can be rounded off to one.

I want to know why Lasik is okay, but greenies aren't? If your natural eyesight is 20/50 and you get Lasik to make it 20/15 how is that not performance enhancing? Or even glasses. Why are you allowed to correct your vision to such an extent that it turns a non-MLB player into a good MLB player? Or even better, Brian Roberts' red tinted contacts that allowed him to better pick up the rotation of the pitch. Tommy John surgery is most definitely performance enhancing. It takes someone whose body was unable withstand the rigors of Major League Baseball and transforms him, at least in some cases, into a star. The pool of pitchers would be something like 40% smaller without TJ, because an awful lot of pitchers' bodies can't take the strain of pitching naturally. ACL repair... same thing. Pain meds, cortisone, even Sudafed. Players take them so they can perform better than they would otherwise. The lines that are drawn are based as much on emotion and randomness as they are on fair play.

If 2018 is analogous to 1988, then Smith will be needed for 28 games at the end of the 2024 season. In my mind Jerome Walton and Dwight Smith are the same person. They finished 1-2 in the '89 ROY voting, both as Cubs, just under 2000 PAs in the majors, and both spent about a month's worth of games as Orioles.

It's funny. I know a lot of baseball fans, and a lot of soccer fans. The soccer fans will sometimes remark that baseball is the most boring of all the sports, and they don't understand how anyone wants to watch nine guys standing around all night waiting for some big dude to hit a homer or strike out. The baseball fans are often like you, incredulous that billions of people watch so many 2-1 matches. I think we need some kind of fan exchange program, because both sports are pretty awesome most of the time.