How to Solve Baseball's Position-Player Pitching Epidemic and Up the Intensity of Games

[Matthew Trueblood]

What if every run counted, for a change?

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-Imagn Images

As another season winds down under new rules that have traded in Game 163s for tiebreakers that can determine division championships and playoff spots, there's a small but real risk that all-important postseason entries could come down to some silly things. The first tiebreaker between any two teams at season's end is the head-to-head record between the two clubs, but after that comes intradivisional record. That's a profoundly strange way to determine playoff seeding or qualification, given that many of the spots up for grabs are Wild Card spots, designed to degrade the importance of divisions. Since many teams fighting for Wild Card berths play six games against each other each year, going forward, we might often see that tiebreaker coming into play.

That's one problem the game is facing these days. Here's another: everyone is tired of position players pitching. What was once a fun bit of novelty to break the tension in blowout games has now become much too common, and it's started to make a mockery of the sport. And here's a third problem: almost everyone seems to hate the automatic runner rule in extra innings. Personally, I don't find it as odious as others, but public opinion has been very unfriendly to the rule. People don't like to see the hard work of scoring runs cheapened, be it at the end of a game long decided or precisely when the drama is highest in one that nine innings couldn't settle.

I rise to offer a solution all three problems at once: Eliminate extra innings. If two teams finish nine innings tied, call the game a draw, and establish a points-based standings system akin to that of the NHL or any soccer league. A win is worth three points. A tie is worth one. A loss is worth zero. And here's the kicker, also drawn from soccer: Should two teams finish the season equal on standings points, let the first tiebreaker be run differential.

Game 163 was a fun way to settle season-long ties. Those games were rare, beautiful, utterly exhilarating spectacles, and I would love to have them back. Realistically, though, given the playoff expansion they've already done and the further steps in that direction to which they aspire, the league is never going to reestablish those games. Given that fact, we should switch to a system that makes such ties more remote possibilities. In a standings points system, two teams who finish 88-74 under the current way of doing things probably wouldn't end up tied. One would go 82-68, with 12 ties, amounting to 258 points. Another would go 84-70 with just eight ties, good for 260 points. A points total that can easily range from roughly 150 to 300 isn't likely to include many ties between any two teams of 30, in a given season.

When it does happen, though, just use run differential as the tiebreaker. That way, every run scored or allowed in a game is of real importance. Teams would have to build better depth to avoid letting ugly run differentials happen, or understand that they were risking embarrassment and costly loss by letting the other team run up a score. We'd see more tautly contested games.

Changes like these would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, but MLB has a pitch timer now. The extra-inning runner exists. Infielders don't have the freedom to wander to the other side of second base or set up in the outfield grass. Winning the division has become functionally meaningless, to all but those of us who hold the division title in sacred memory from an earlier form of the game, and it's only going to get less relevant in the next decade. A lot of the things we thought were beyond discussion have come to pass in the game recently. Maybe one more big shift is in order.

Eventually, shortening the season should be part of the plan, too. Given the way the league has neutered the regular season, it doesn't make sense for it to stretch 162 games anymore. Again, I take the side of George F. Will, who wrote when the league first introduced the Wild Card in the early 1990s that baseball should be above such things--that the season should be "a long gathering of summer heat, culminating in a single clap of October thunder; the World Series" and that second place should remain not-quite-good-enough. Will and his cohort got drubbed in that debate, though. Progress happened, and then backed up like a truck over a not-quite-dead bit of roadkill and happened again and again. There are three Wild Cards in each league now, and we'll never get rid of them. Playing 162 baseball games to decide who gets them is a ludicrously wasteful self-indulgence. The league should explore starting in mid-April and playing just 144 games, but they absolutely have to collapse it back down to 154, at least, to make the whole season more manageable for all parties.

A shorter season in which there are no extra innings played until the playoffs come would be a better labor environment for players, and a better fan experience than the current formula. Small incentives at the margins to make everyone care more about keeping a one- or two-run game close, whether to go for the tie or just to manage run differential, would make individual games spark with more friction and energy. To make the best of the game in the future, we have to let go of some things that belong to its past, even if the goal in doing so is to bring some of the overheated and/or undirected progress happening under control and slow it down a bit.

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