DrungoHazewood

Fine, give them three warmups, but still give them 45 seconds from call of "new pitcher" until the batter steps in. Even better, give them as many warmups as they can get in, in 45 seconds.

Large corporations rarely reorient themselves adapt to changing customer preferences. You might have thought Sears was perfectly placed to become an online shopping giant, just transitioning from being one of the companies that perfected the catalog mail-order business. But they never saw it coming, or if they did they were waaaay too little too late. Baseball is pretty fat, dumb and happy with their older, fairly well-off fanbase pouring record revenues into their coffers. They don't want to do anything to upset that. But what happens when it's 2030 and the fanbase is 74 and 30% smaller and the kids only know Mike Trout as that old guy on the copy of MLB 2K29 grandpa gave them for Christmas?

Trout/Harper/Machado should be baseball's answer to Brady, Ovechkin, LeBron, Messi, Ronaldo. I don't think they're remotely close in recognition, popularity, or brand value. Maybe it's demographics. Your average baseball fan is 63 and doens't understand what those darned kids are up to. Why can't Manny just smile and nod and endorse Esskay hotdogs like Brooks? If your own fans don't like the players what chance do you have of making them into global ambassadors?

On some levels, like in-game analytics, I think baseball is pretty cutting edge. On business ops and long-term strategic planning... I don't know. For example, I'd expect a lot of things to be going on with dynamic pricing of both tickets and concessions, but I don't know if the Orioles' ticket prices are very much different from 10 or 15 years ago, with maybe a little inflation tacked on. If they're doing advanced biomarker reasearch... where is that reflected in the game? I kind of doubt that people's prefrontal cortex lights up when they hear the jingle for the Pohanka Honda-Toyota-Edsel dealer for the 11th time during the 6th pitching change.

Sure, it's an open question. I've never been given a survey asking if I'd rather see .400 hitters or 50 homer hitters. If I'd rather see 18 strikeouts a game or 6. I don't know that MLB has ever done that. Perhaps because they've never had any intention of trying to push the game in any particular direction. But also questions like that very hard to definitively answer. People tend to answer surveys based on what they know and what they've experienced. Many people would just answer "I want what it was like when I was 15, whatever that was." Or "I want to see lots of runs." Most people in the stands have no real concept of the historical norms and ebbs and flows of the game. If you asked 1000 casual fans what kind of baseball they'd prefer we might end up with a 4-inning game featuring 25 runs.

I did grow up in the 70s and 80s. And although I like the diversity of strategies in that era, I'll readily admit there were downsides. In the 80s you often had league-leading home run hitters with 33 or 35, nobody really hit for high averages after Brett in '80. The pitching was decidedly mediocre in the first half of the 80s. Pete Vukovich with a Cy Young, seriously? What I'm really looking for is competing strategies and players challenging big records on occasion. It's exciting when one team has 200 steals and their opponent never steals but has 200 homers. That happened in the 70s-80s, doesn't today. It's cool when someone makes a run at .400 or 61 homers. It would be cool if somebody got close to 30 wins or 400 strikeouts or 130 steals. I like the shift, because it's new, and interesting and innovative. I liked Earl's style of managing because the Orioles were good, but also because it was doing something, not sitting back and waiting and using the whole roster to feed six relievers serially into every game. When I discovered the Baseball Encyclopedia as a kid I really took to the 1890s Orioles because they had players who hit .432 and scored 165 runs in a season. That's astounding stuff in a world where Ken Singleton hitting .328 was as high as an Oriole would ever see. Who doesn't like astounding stuff?

Of course there are some more-or-less insurmountable impediments to expansion of that magnitude. I can come up with some very reasonable alternate-reality scenarios with 90 MLB teams, but getting there in our universe is exceptionally unlikely.

- I think that people in general prefer action over inaction. In sports they prefer to watch exciting athletic performances over a bunch of guys standing around waiting for something to happen. How exciting do Americans find cricket? In the US around the time of the Civil War cricket and baseball were vying for dominance, and baseball won out in large part because more things happened in a more concentrated period of time. You can find writings attesting to baseballs vigorous and manly athleticism being perfect for the rugged 19th century American. - I think that if you remove the names from the time periods few people would pick the 1950s as a model to emulate. It was a period of few steals, lots of big, slow sluggers, and historic highs in walks. If I had to pick an era I'd go for either the 1920s or 1970s-80s. Transitional periods with competing styles, a fair number of homers and triples, higher batting averages, big parks, and in the latter period lots of baserunning. - I don't know how you'd mandate more base stealing. What you could do is make base stealing more of a positive offensive event and incentivize its use. Teams don't steal much now because 45 steals and 10 caught have about the same impact as three or four homers. Yes, you could eliminate or limit pickoff throws or change the balk rule, or maybe say the first baseman can't play on the bag to hold the runner, for example.

I've sometimes said that the game could be more exciting with a wider spread in talent, so that the stars could stand out more. With today's high level of talent it's basically impossible for someone to pull off Ruthian feats like hitting more homers than any other team, or hitting .400, or throwing 350 innings. Expansion to 60 or 80 teams in a short period of time would accomplish that kind of thinning of talent.

I'm sure the combination of no warmup pitches and a dasterdly 2 degree difference in the slope of the mound will have catastropic effects that the game will never recover from. What did you like better about the 50s and 60s? There are about twice as many batters hit by pitches today as there were in the 50s and 60s. 0.4 per game in 2018, and a range of 0.18 to 0.24 from 1950-69.

You sound like Ty Cobb bitterly lamenting the end of scientific baseball at the hands of these gol-darned sluggers and their stupid jackrabbit ball. Whether or not they try to control control the changes the game will change. It's a question of whether or not you care where it goes. MLB has changed tremendously over the last 50 or 60 years with only one or two significant differences in the rules. The rules are 99% the same as they were in 1905.

I don't think that's true at all. Pitchers will throw strikes, but they'd prefer to get a batter to chase a ball out of the zone. If they have to put one over the plate when they don't want to a walk is better than a ball hitting Eutaw St. There many rules changes that would result in more balls in play. Thicker and heavier bats, and thicker bat handles, reducing the effectiveness of the current loft/strikeout strategy while giving the bats more surface area for contact. Changes to pitcher usage, like the three batter rule, or limiting the number of pitchers either on the roster or that you can use in a game. Deeper fences, athough that's s non-starter in many or most stadiums. Reducing the size of gloves, which would mean balls in play have more value; strikeouts used to be avoided like the plague when 10% or more of balls in play were errors. I'm sure we could come up with many others.

Certainly they would try this out in the minors or instructional league before pushing it to the majors. But I wonder if that would show full effect, since the batters and pitchers aren't as skilled at lower levels. It could be that the impacts are non-linear and would be much more pronounced with the very best hitters and pitchers.

You may be right, but I don't think most walks are a result of not being able to hit the strike zone. I think they're a result of MLB hitters being able to crush most balls over the plate, so pitchers are in a constant battle to get them to chase balls off the plate. That won't change as a result of three balls for a walk. I think, but certainly don't know, that the main result will be more walks because that's preferable to putting more hittable pitches in the strike zone.

- You also elmminated most of the 1920-60 era that saw as much or more scoring as today. - I don't think offense is a problem, either I agree with Frobby that the type of offense and lack of action is the major problem. I'd be very happy if we contined at 4.5 run/game baseball but looked more like 1935 or 1977/79 with a lot more balls in play, fewer homers, some players with really high averages, and more stolen bases. - If you went to three balls for a walk that would be a big change. Walks are now right around historic averages at about 3.25/team/game. I'd guess they'd go up to around 4.5/team/game. The all-time high is 4.03 in 1949. Strikeouts would do down a bit, with somewhat fewer long/deep counts. But you're trading a lot of walks for a few strikeouts. This won't do anything for action, my guess is overall balls in play as a percentage of at bats would go down a bit. Scoring would go up roughly 0.5 run/game, back to 2000-ish levels. But don't know how many people would be on board with pushing three true outcomes to higher levels.

If you want to think offenses are historically high in a year that's 85th out of 147 years of MLB history, go for it.

I hope you're right, and that attendance isn't in decline, that the last six years of about 10% decline are just an anomaly. And sure, if you only look at 1900-1990 today's offensive levels are probably a little bit above average, which I suppose you could interpret as "historically high." In the same way that an 85-win season or a .281 batting average is historically high.

It's all about whether you want to try to influence the changes. Baseball has taken the position that they'll just let things happen as they happen for more than a century. I'd prefer they get ahead of the changes and mold the game into something more engaging with faster pace and more action, rather than just accept whatever happens no matter what.

Yes, attendance is historically high if you ignore that it's declined five of the last six years and is below 70 million for the first time in 15 years. And yes, offense is historically high if you ignore 1871-1900, 1920-1941, most of 1947-62, 1977, 1979, 1987, and 1993-2010.

Make the rule max three pitchers per game, with an allowance for an extra pitcher for each two extra innings. I do like home team choice for DH. A team with limited resources or a poor DH could force David Ortiz to play the field or sit the bench.

I don't know of any way to get millions of people to pay for my MLB or MASN streaming service who never watch it. I pay $3 a month for MASN because the 80% of cable subscribers who never watch it also pay $3 a month. They won't if they don't have to. The solution is to charge more to the people who want it, but does the math work out the same? Would you pay several hundred dollars a year for MASN?

Isn't that what we're doing? Trying to assess the negatives in the sport and attempting to figure out solutions to keep the game viable among the next several generations of fans who probably don't have the same preferences and experiences as baseball's core fanbase?

MLB attendance has declined in five of the last six seasons. Revenues are at or near historic highs. Offense is nowhere near historic highs. 2018 was the 85th-highest scoring season of all time, 55th-highest since 1900, 31st-highest since WWII, and 13th-highest since 2000.

I think they'll try to do things to keep revenues increasing. We'll see if they work indefinitely. It's hard to deny some of the realities, like cord cutting, and aging demographics, and splintering of the entertainment landscape. My kids are bigger soccer fans than baseball fans and they don't watch 1/10th as much soccer as I did baseball at their ages. They play Fortnight and Minecraft and watch YouTube. They rarely watch baseball without me prodding or taking them.

Because outfield fences were originally just the boundary of the property. They'd put up 10' walls so you couldn't stand just outside the field and watch without paying. It was 295' to RF at Ebbets Field because there was a road at 300'. To standardize the outfields in 1900 would have meant very small fields because of a lot of parks were like Ebbets, you physically couldn't go farther without getting the city to remove a street or a building, or buying up the property next door.