A Modest Proposal: 2020 XBall

[spiritof66]

Let’s say the owners and players don’t reach agreement on a partial 2020 season. What’s next for MLB this year? It appears, so far, that the answer is nothing. Going forward with replacement players would be pointless and, in all likelihood, self-destructive with CBA negotiations not too far away. So it will be a lost year, with each team losing an amount of money it can specify and taking an indeterminate hit to the value of its franchise.

One of the lessons I’ve learned in life is this. Sometimes, even when you’ve done your best, you’re going to be unable to accomplish something you’ve planned for and worked toward. That failure may disappoint people who were relying on you, and it might mean that time and resources you have committed to the aborted project are wasted. That may occur because of circumstances beyond your control, including having someone whose contribution you were relying on not come through. In these instances, you have a few choices in how you react to the disappointment. You can try to work around the missing contribution, but sometimes that will be impossible or impractical. You can piss and moan about your bad fortune. You can tell anyone who will listen that you did your best and it’s the other guy’s fault. Or you can try to find a way to change direction and do something useful with the time and resources that have become available to you. Or some combination of the above.

If there’s no championship season in 2020, here’s what I would do if I were MLB to turn the lost season into an opportunity – not the greatest opportunity one can imagine, but something more useful than going into hibernation for six months while fans seethe in anger and move on to other interests.

Shut up about the players and the union. If you feel a need to talk about or justify the loss of the season, blame it on the pandemic: for better or worse, baseball is a big business, and the loss of games and crowds undermined the economics of that business. And acknowledge that, no matter how careful they were, playing even a reduced schedule would have caused uncertain and unavoidable health risks to the players, their families and others, that everyone was at least a little worried about. 

Tell the world that, despite its disappointment at the loss of the season, MLB is not just going to take the summer off. Instead, it’s going to use this unprecedented misfortune as an opportunity to invest in an unprecedented way in the future of the game. While that future is very bright, it could be even brighter, and MLB is committed to seeing whether the game can be improved. MLB is not attracting as many fans (especially young fans) as it should, and there are lots of criticisms of the game as it’s played today. Some fans think the games move too slowly and take too long. Too many pitching changes. Too many strikeouts. Inconsistent ball-and-strike calls. While we don’t necessarily agree with those criticisms, we’re not ignoring them, either. This summer, we’re going to do more about those kinds of criticisms than any sport has ever done. We can’t have major league baseball, but we’re gonna have us some XBall.

Make a list of possible changes to the game that meet some of these criticisms. (Drungo's recent list is a good start.) Four foul balls are an out. Only one pickoff attempt per runner. The second unsuccessful pickup attempt is a ball. Limits on infield shifting. Thicker bat handles. Deadened ball. A 12-second pitch clock. A double-wide first base, half in foul territory. Move the pitching rubber back. New ways to break ties in extra-innings. Electronic home-plate umpiring. Then ask the fans in an on-line poll which ones they would like to see tried.  Devote a weekend, or a week, to discussion on MLB, with call-ins, and have each of the MLB experts make a list of the half dozen changes he or she would like to see implemented. Appoint a Commission of 3 or 5 persons -- a sabermetrician, a union representative if the union wants to participate, a baseball traditionalist, a baseball writer/historian, and a respected ex-player who’s not employed by MLB or a team -- to pick a workable number of these, maybe six or eight or ten, that interest fans and commentators alike.

Sign four to eight teams’ worth of the best players available to play a six-week, 40-game season of experimental baseball – XBall. Since this is for the good of the game, not to make money, ask the players union to give its members, especially those at the bottom of the salary structure, who are interested in the opportunity to play XBall, at a salary of, say, 1.5 times the MLB minimum, prorated (so somewhere around $175,000) plus food and housing. If that doesn’t work, go to minor leaguers who are missing their 2020 season, then former college/high school stars recently cut from the minor leagues who will have a chance to make some money and one final shot to impress scouts. Go through the same exercise with umpires and coaches.

Assign the XBall players to teams -- the X-Men, the X-Rays, the X-Factors, the Double X's as a nod to baseball history, etc. -- and put them in a bubble for eight weeks (two weeks of training plus the six-week season). That probably means guys with families will not be interested, though the salary might be sufficient to attract some. We’re talking about games in the summer, no later than early September, so it needn’t be, probably shouldn’t be, a hot-weather locale. More important would be the availability of two or three nearby stadiums with MLB-ish dimensions, enough hotels within an hour’s ride to accommodate 300 to 500 (or whatever the number is) players, coaching staffs, umpires, etc., and dry weather. Some bucolic spot like Otsego County in upstate New York, if it has sufficient facilities.

Each X-Ball team will play 40 games (maybe that’s too many or too few) with one to three innovations in the rules for each game. This isn't for the money, but an investment in seeing whether there are ways to improve the Great American Game. Nonetheless, with the huge gaps in sports programming and some advance promotion – “Take the best game ever, and make it it even better” -- MLB should be able to get a TV contract, even if it’s not with a major network and doesn’t bring in much money. I certainly would watch some of these games, especially the ones with innovations that interest me. The four to six teams would compete for the first and only Xtacy Trophy. More important, at the end of the season MLB-TV would devote a week or two to evaluating and discussing whether to experiment further, or even put into the rules, any of the innovations. Others would jump on the bandwagon of discussion. There might well be some strong positive reaction to some of the proposed changes. Some might even be implemented in the next season of three. It is even possible that baseball would attract some new fans, or become a better, more interesting game, or both.

Back to real life. I expect that if there’s no 2020 season, MLB will devote its public posture primarily to moaning about the money the teams have lost – as if the rest of the world cared – and the players’ limitless greed, bad faith, and lack of love and respect for the game. Yeah, that’ll help things a lot.  At best, the fans will ignore it all or forget it by next spring.  At worst, they’ll get more disillusioned and angrier. None of this will do any good for the game or the teams beyond the saving of a hunk of this season’s player salaries – which they may end up paying anyway to resolve a union grievance. But there may be alternatives if anyone bothers to look for them.

 

[joelala]

Absolutely love it!  If only they were like 10% as forward thinking as this...

As for a tv contract, I think they would be able to at least get something comparable to what XFL had earlier this year.

[DrungoHazewood]

Baseball would have to acknowledge that they have some problems that require proactive solutions to fix. Which risks alienating their core fanbase with a 55-year-old median age and memories of how the game was perfect when they were 12, in 1977.  And their father's stories about how it was even better in 1953.

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

I was hoping there would be more talk about cannibalism to fix baseball's problems after treading the thread title. 

[spiritof66]

5 hours ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

I was hoping there would be more talk about cannibalism to fix baseball's problems after treading the thread title. 

That was just to suck you in. Let me re-word that . . . I spoke too Swiftly.

[Aristotelian]

I love it. Let players go by nicknames like He Hate Me. Pipe the walk-up music directly into the broadcast feed so you can hear it. Bring the fences in 30 feet. Cheerleaders. Get it done, MLB.

[spiritof66]

On 6/18/2020 at 10:56 AM, DrungoHazewood said:

Baseball would have to acknowledge that they have some problems that require proactive solutions to fix. Which risks alienating their core fanbase with a 55-year-old median age and memories of how the game was perfect when they were 12, in 1977.  And their father's stories about how it was even better in 1953.

I said, "If there’s no championship season in 2020, here’s what I would do if I were MLB."

I fully expect MLB, if there's no baseball in 2020, to adhere to the dual "strategies" of piss and moan and of blame it on the players. I would be shocked to see the owners use a no-baseball summer to do anything -- I mean anything -- productive to improve the game and enhance the long-term value of their franchises. Money-saving, maybe: fold some more MiLteams. Revenue-enhancing, possibly: 16 teams make the post-season, or 24, or 28. But productive? Nah.