ESPN's plan to "fix" Major League Baseball - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

GentlemanJim · 08-17-2021, 06:35 PM

That's what we presented to ESPN MLB experts Bradford Doolittle, Alden Gonzalez, Tim Keown, Joon Lee, Kiley McDaniel, Jeff Passan, Jesse Rogers and David Schoenfield -- and we got a range of ideas, from the subtle to the radical.

Here are their eight proposals.

Shorten the season
The MLB regular season should be shortened by a month.

Baseball hums along just fine as America's summer sport. The July 31 trade deadline provides energy and momentum at a time when it's needed, but not long after teams welcome their new players, the dog days of August are upon us.
By the time the pennant races begin to heat up in September, the country has mostly moved on to football and even the start of other sports' seasons. October arrives more with a whimper these days.

And that's not even mentioning the teams out of the race: One month of meaningless baseball to rate prospects is just fine. Two months is too long. It always has been.

Picture this: The excitement of the trade deadline leads right into the pennant races. As football inches its way to the starting gate, baseball ends its season with a bang. September playoffs won't feel secondary to the pigskin sport; they'll be right next to it in the headlines.

The secondary impacts of a shorter season only bring positives. Careers of star players, especially pitchers, could last longer, making up for the loss of revenue for them because of fewer games. Within a season, there would be less reason for star players to take games off. Stands would be filled even more with fewer games to choose from. Playoff weather would no longer be an issue.

As for the crusty, old-school fan who cherishes baseball's numbers over 162 games, those days are long gone. Counting stats are out and percentages are in. An OPS based on 132 games will still have the same meaning as it did based on 162. -- Jesse Rogers

Expand and realign the leagues by geography

I'd like to see baseball expand to 32 teams sooner rather than later. When that happens, baseball will have an opportunity to leverage the regional appeal of the sport with a revised structure. As a traditionalist, this would offend my history-loving sensibilities. But since it's probably inevitable anyway, once MLB grows it'll be time to rip off the Band-Aid and go heavy on geography-based realignment.

That means the timeworn American and National League designations go away. If you start shifting teams that have been around for 120 years, I don't see how you keep the league labels as they are. You'd go to an Eastern League and a Western League, each with two eight-team divisions, and within each division, you'd have two four-team pods. The playoffs would include six teams per league, with the four division champions earning a first-round bye.

The geographic pods within each division are important for scheduling reasons: These will be the most frequent matchups on the schedule. The winner of each "pod" will get a playoff spot, unless that team is the overall division winner, in which case the next-best team in the pod gets to go.

Finally, I'd arrange broadcast distribution like this: You'd have different levels of subscription access, and blackout rules will no longer apply. You can get an MLB-level subscription, a division subscription, a pod subscription or a subscription for an individual team. These would be stand-alone subscriptions for non-national broadcasts, so that Fox, ESPN, etc., would still broadcast games to which all fans would have access. These would be showcase games.

The driving force behind all this is regionalization. Build those rivalries, starting in the minors, which have already become more geographically aligned and presumably will only become more so over time. You don't ignore the national aspect, but baseball is already local to a significant degree. The structure of the sport ought to reflect that. -- Bradford Doolittle

Add a pitch clock

Hall of Fame owner Bill Veeck, in his autobiography published in 1962, wrote, "The game has become too slow. There would be nothing wrong with the now standard three-hour game if we were presenting two and a half hours of action."

If that sounds familiar, Theo Epstein said this earlier this year: "We need to find a way to get more action into the game, get the ball in play more often, allow players to show their athleticism some more, and give fans more of what they want."

Baseball, of course, used to have a clock that forced a faster-played game: the sun. Barring a return to day games and tearing down stadium lights, we need a different solution to create fewer strikeouts, more action and a more rapid pace.

The solution: a pitch clock. It's used in the minor leagues. The Olympics deployed one without runners on base. It works. We need it in the majors.

1. Time between pitches is the biggest reason games are longer than ever -- 23 minutes longer than 2005 for a nine-inning game, 34 minutes longer than 1984 (and 35 minutes longer than 1962). A few years ago, Grant Bisbee studied two nearly identical games in terms of score, pitches thrown and baserunners -- one from 1984 and one from 2014 -- and found nearly 33 additional minutes elapsed in the 2014 game in dead time between pitches.

2. Rob Arthur's study at FiveThirtyEight in 2017 showed that velocity increases when pitchers take more time between pitches. With pitchers maxing out more than ever on every pitch -- especially relievers, who are throwing a higher percentage of innings than in 1962 or 1984 -- that walk around the mound and wipe of the brow adds up over 290 pitches.

So institute a pitch clock and force batters to remain in the box. Both sides lose a little something, but pitchers will be forced to work faster and they probably won't throw quite as hard. Command pitchers who work fast (think Mark Buehrle) will be more in demand, batters will make more contact and fielders will get more opportunities to display their athleticism. -- David Schoenfield

Bring in the robo umps

The concept of the strike zone is simple. The stewards of the game identify a vertical space over the irregular pentagon that is home plate. If a pitcher throws a baseball in that space over the plate, it is a strike. Anything else is a ball. This sounds easy.

It is not. It is not easy because the human eye is fallible and the human brain susceptible to bias. It is not easy because catchers have been taught to exploit these fallibilities and biases. It is not easy because umpires who get 95% of ball-strike calls correct are considered the best of the best, and umpires who get 85% right remain employed, and every single day there are manifold examples of balls that are called strikes and strikes that are called balls.

It is time to end this charade and transition to the era of the robot umpire. MLB has christened this system ABS -- automated balls and strikes -- because robot umpires sound like something Boston Dynamics would make. I don't care if it's a creepy Chuck E. Cheese animatronic behind home plate. If it calls balls and strikes accurately and consistently, it will be a massive upgrade.

Yes, the technology remains a work in progress. Breaking balls are a challenge. So is defining a hitter's proper strike zone. And the league-wide zone may adapt over time, as it often does. But at least it won't by dozens of different interpretations of the zone by individual umps. The underpinnings of the system are sound. The iterations being made after use in the Low-A Southeast League are instructive.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. -- Jeff Passan

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/...-designing-now

GentlemanJim · 08-17-2021, 06:42 PM

Personally I think it would be a big mistake to shorten the regular season, just to add additional rounds to the playoffs, and then slice and dice the divisional alignments to create faux rivalries.

Doing so only devalues the competitive worth of the regular season and turns the playoffs into an 'NBA like " pageant.

SarahBellum · 08-18-2021, 10:33 AM

I would be OK with a shorter season, somewhere between 130-140 games. The regular season can start in mid-April and end in mid-September. It would provide more open dates during the season thus allowing more flexibility in rescheduling games that are postponed due to weather. I don't see a need to expand the playoffs. I'd hate to see MLB go the way of the NBA where half of the teams make the playoffs. Geographical re-alignment makes sense. I'm in Cleveland and it would be nice if the Indians were in the same division with Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

GentlemanJim · 08-18-2021, 11:11 AM

Well, at least we agree about the play offs...

I don't believe, (for example) that having both New York teams, both Chicago teams, and both LA teams...in the same league, is a good idea at all

And I personally don't think that shortening the season and expanding the playoffs are separate issues.
I think they are hand-in-hand. one facilitates the other. By creating more playoff slots, they will keep the fans of mediocre teams buying tickets later into the season* hoping for a cinderella wild-card run

They are right about one thing. The way it is now, half the teams are out of it by the middle of the season, and their fans give up. That's the way it should be, greatness succeeds, and failure fails. That is the incentive for team owners to spend to build better teams, to draw more fans.

* If you get to the point where you have to bring over half the teams into the post season just to keep fans interested, it's like handing out "honorable mention" ribbons at the elementary school plant shows....give aways

GentlemanJim · 08-18-2021, 01:17 PM

I guess from an owners perspective, they would prefer to keep all the divisional races tight right up to the last week of the season.....sell more tickets...maybe even eliminate the revenue sharing agreement altogether.

But as a fan, I find it absolutely thrilling when my team is having a dominant season, and if they have a 10 game lead by the all star break, and walking away with the crown, that just makes the rest of the season more enjoyable.

Babalu · 08-18-2021, 07:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GentlemanJim

1. Time between pitches is the biggest reason games are longer than ever -- 23 minutes longer than 2005 for a nine-inning game, 34 minutes longer than 1984 (and 35 minutes longer than 1962). A few years ago, Grant Bisbee studied two nearly identical games in terms of score, pitches thrown and baserunners -- one from 1984 and one from 2014 -- and found nearly 33 additional minutes elapsed in the 2014 game in dead time between pitches.

No, that's what they want you to believe.

The NFL said the same thing. "There's too much passing. That's why the games are too long. Keep the clock running when a player goes out of bounds."

Every sport has it's excuses and every sport runs longer than years ago.

It's the same reason for all of them: More commercials. Every game is on TV and there are infinitely more commercials than in the past. That's the real reason.

swany13 · 08-19-2021, 12:54 PM

another thing to fix mlb and milb is to get rid of that stupid runner on 2nd base to start extra innings rule.you could have ties after 13 innings during the season.and don't have 7innings games in douuble headers.

GentlemanJim · 08-19-2021, 03:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by swany13

another thing to fix mlb and milb is to get rid of that stupid runner on 2nd base to start extra innings rule.you could have ties after 13 innings during the season.and don't have 7innings games in douuble headers.

I think the League has already committed to ending those after this season.

08-17-2021, 06:35 PM	#1
GentlemanJim Concerns, Support, & Feedback Forum Veteran Join Date: Dec 26, 2019 Location: The back country Posts: 5,443	ESPN's plan to "fix" Major League Baseball That's what we presented to ESPN MLB experts Bradford Doolittle, Alden Gonzalez, Tim Keown, Joon Lee, Kiley McDaniel, Jeff Passan, Jesse Rogers and David Schoenfield -- and we got a range of ideas, from the subtle to the radical. Here are their eight proposals. Shorten the season The MLB regular season should be shortened by a month. Baseball hums along just fine as America's summer sport. The July 31 trade deadline provides energy and momentum at a time when it's needed, but not long after teams welcome their new players, the dog days of August are upon us. By the time the pennant races begin to heat up in September, the country has mostly moved on to football and even the start of other sports' seasons. October arrives more with a whimper these days. And that's not even mentioning the teams out of the race: One month of meaningless baseball to rate prospects is just fine. Two months is too long. It always has been. Picture this: The excitement of the trade deadline leads right into the pennant races. As football inches its way to the starting gate, baseball ends its season with a bang. September playoffs won't feel secondary to the pigskin sport; they'll be right next to it in the headlines. The secondary impacts of a shorter season only bring positives. Careers of star players, especially pitchers, could last longer, making up for the loss of revenue for them because of fewer games. Within a season, there would be less reason for star players to take games off. Stands would be filled even more with fewer games to choose from. Playoff weather would no longer be an issue. As for the crusty, old-school fan who cherishes baseball's numbers over 162 games, those days are long gone. Counting stats are out and percentages are in. An OPS based on 132 games will still have the same meaning as it did based on 162. -- Jesse Rogers Expand and realign the leagues by geography I'd like to see baseball expand to 32 teams sooner rather than later. When that happens, baseball will have an opportunity to leverage the regional appeal of the sport with a revised structure. As a traditionalist, this would offend my history-loving sensibilities. But since it's probably inevitable anyway, once MLB grows it'll be time to rip off the Band-Aid and go heavy on geography-based realignment. That means the timeworn American and National League designations go away. If you start shifting teams that have been around for 120 years, I don't see how you keep the league labels as they are. You'd go to an Eastern League and a Western League, each with two eight-team divisions, and within each division, you'd have two four-team pods. The playoffs would include six teams per league, with the four division champions earning a first-round bye. The geographic pods within each division are important for scheduling reasons: These will be the most frequent matchups on the schedule. The winner of each "pod" will get a playoff spot, unless that team is the overall division winner, in which case the next-best team in the pod gets to go. Finally, I'd arrange broadcast distribution like this: You'd have different levels of subscription access, and blackout rules will no longer apply. You can get an MLB-level subscription, a division subscription, a pod subscription or a subscription for an individual team. These would be stand-alone subscriptions for non-national broadcasts, so that Fox, ESPN, etc., would still broadcast games to which all fans would have access. These would be showcase games. The driving force behind all this is regionalization. Build those rivalries, starting in the minors, which have already become more geographically aligned and presumably will only become more so over time. You don't ignore the national aspect, but baseball is already local to a significant degree. The structure of the sport ought to reflect that. -- Bradford Doolittle Add a pitch clock Hall of Fame owner Bill Veeck, in his autobiography published in 1962, wrote, "The game has become too slow. There would be nothing wrong with the now standard three-hour game if we were presenting two and a half hours of action." If that sounds familiar, Theo Epstein said this earlier this year: "We need to find a way to get more action into the game, get the ball in play more often, allow players to show their athleticism some more, and give fans more of what they want." Baseball, of course, used to have a clock that forced a faster-played game: the sun. Barring a return to day games and tearing down stadium lights, we need a different solution to create fewer strikeouts, more action and a more rapid pace. The solution: a pitch clock. It's used in the minor leagues. The Olympics deployed one without runners on base. It works. We need it in the majors. 1. Time between pitches is the biggest reason games are longer than ever -- 23 minutes longer than 2005 for a nine-inning game, 34 minutes longer than 1984 (and 35 minutes longer than 1962). A few years ago, Grant Bisbee studied two nearly identical games in terms of score, pitches thrown and baserunners -- one from 1984 and one from 2014 -- and found nearly 33 additional minutes elapsed in the 2014 game in dead time between pitches. 2. Rob Arthur's study at FiveThirtyEight in 2017 showed that velocity increases when pitchers take more time between pitches. With pitchers maxing out more than ever on every pitch -- especially relievers, who are throwing a higher percentage of innings than in 1962 or 1984 -- that walk around the mound and wipe of the brow adds up over 290 pitches. So institute a pitch clock and force batters to remain in the box. Both sides lose a little something, but pitchers will be forced to work faster and they probably won't throw quite as hard. Command pitchers who work fast (think Mark Buehrle) will be more in demand, batters will make more contact and fielders will get more opportunities to display their athleticism. -- David Schoenfield Bring in the robo umps The concept of the strike zone is simple. The stewards of the game identify a vertical space over the irregular pentagon that is home plate. If a pitcher throws a baseball in that space over the plate, it is a strike. Anything else is a ball. This sounds easy. It is not. It is not easy because the human eye is fallible and the human brain susceptible to bias. It is not easy because catchers have been taught to exploit these fallibilities and biases. It is not easy because umpires who get 95% of ball-strike calls correct are considered the best of the best, and umpires who get 85% right remain employed, and every single day there are manifold examples of balls that are called strikes and strikes that are called balls. It is time to end this charade and transition to the era of the robot umpire. MLB has christened this system ABS -- automated balls and strikes -- because robot umpires sound like something Boston Dynamics would make. I don't care if it's a creepy Chuck E. Cheese animatronic behind home plate. If it calls balls and strikes accurately and consistently, it will be a massive upgrade. Yes, the technology remains a work in progress. Breaking balls are a challenge. So is defining a hitter's proper strike zone. And the league-wide zone may adapt over time, as it often does. But at least it won't by dozens of different interpretations of the zone by individual umps. The underpinnings of the system are sound. The iterations being made after use in the Low-A Southeast League are instructive. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. -- Jeff Passan https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/...-designing-now
	__________________ On my word as a gentleman!

08-18-2021, 11:11 AM	#4
GentlemanJim Concerns, Support, & Feedback Forum Veteran Join Date: Dec 26, 2019 Location: The back country Posts: 5,443	Well, at least we agree about the play offs... I don't believe, (for example) that having both New York teams, both Chicago teams, and both LA teams...in the same league, is a good idea at all And I personally don't think that shortening the season and expanding the playoffs are separate issues. I think they are hand-in-hand. one facilitates the other. By creating more playoff slots, they will keep the fans of mediocre teams buying tickets later into the season* hoping for a cinderella wild-card run They are right about one thing. The way it is now, half the teams are out of it by the middle of the season, and their fans give up. That's the way it should be, greatness succeeds, and failure fails. That is the incentive for team owners to spend to build better teams, to draw more fans. * If you get to the point where you have to bring over half the teams into the post season just to keep fans interested, it's like handing out "honorable mention" ribbons at the elementary school plant shows....give aways
	Last edited by GentlemanJim; 08-18-2021 at 01:11 PM.

08-17-2021, 06:42 PM	#2
GentlemanJim Concerns, Support, & Feedback Forum Veteran Join Date: Dec 26, 2019 Location: The back country Posts: 5,443	Personally I think it would be a big mistake to shorten the regular season, just to add additional rounds to the playoffs, and then slice and dice the divisional alignments to create faux rivalries. Doing so only devalues the competitive worth of the regular season and turns the playoffs into an 'NBA like " pageant.

08-18-2021, 10:33 AM	#3
SarahBellum Member Forum 3000 Club Member Join Date: Sep 15, 2007 Location: Cleveland, OH Posts: 3,874	I would be OK with a shorter season, somewhere between 130-140 games. The regular season can start in mid-April and end in mid-September. It would provide more open dates during the season thus allowing more flexibility in rescheduling games that are postponed due to weather. I don't see a need to expand the playoffs. I'd hate to see MLB go the way of the NBA where half of the teams make the playoffs. Geographical re-alignment makes sense. I'm in Cleveland and it would be nice if the Indians were in the same division with Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

08-18-2021, 01:17 PM	#5
GentlemanJim Concerns, Support, & Feedback Forum Veteran Join Date: Dec 26, 2019 Location: The back country Posts: 5,443	I guess from an owners perspective, they would prefer to keep all the divisional races tight right up to the last week of the season.....sell more tickets...maybe even eliminate the revenue sharing agreement altogether. But as a fan, I find it absolutely thrilling when my team is having a dominant season, and if they have a 10 game lead by the all star break, and walking away with the crown, that just makes the rest of the season more enjoyable.

08-19-2021, 12:54 PM	#7
swany13 Member Occasional Poster Join Date: Mar 29, 2020 Posts: 19	another thing to fix mlb and milb is to get rid of that stupid runner on 2nd base to start extra innings rule.you could have ties after 13 innings during the season.and don't have 7innings games in douuble headers.