How to Fix Baseball

Baseball is a good but not great spectator sport, especially compared to American football, so it can't rest on its laurels.

As I warned, October is the peak of the spectator sports calendar in America, so I’m going to write about the baseball World Series and suggest some rule changes.

I’m a baseball fan because I’m a 66 year old American who has memories of baseball games going back to Sandy Koufax’s heroics in the 1965 World Series. (By the way, 89 year old Koufax sat through the entire 18 inning game on Monday and then went into Dodger locker room to congratulate obscure reliever Will Klein for saving the day by throwing four scoreless innings as the Dodgers’ last pitcher).

But I don’t kid myself that baseball is a better TV sport than American football. So I look for minor rule changes that can make it a better game. Baseball can’t rest on its traditions when its competing for attention with the football juggernaut. I’m especially against letting strategists come up with brilliantly rational innovations that take the action out of the game, like walking Toronto walking Shohei Ohtani five times in a row in Game 3 after he started the night with two homers and two doubles.

The Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays are tied at 2 wins apiece, with Toronto up 3-1 in Game 5 as I proofread.

The Dodgers managed to win the epic 3rd game 6-5 in 18 innings over 6 hours and 39 minutes. It was like one entertaining 5-5 nine inning game followed by a nervous 1-0 pitcher’s duel bullpen game, except with ten straight sudden death innings.

That gave me time to think about a few rule change suggestions.

First, baseball doesn’t like ties, but it also doesn’t like endless extra inning games like this one. During the World Series, a crazy game like this is memorable, but you wouldn’t want regular season games like this.

World Series games this year start at 8 pm East Coast time, so Monday night’s game ran from 5:00 pm to 11:39 pm Pacific Time, which was about the timespan least inconveniencing for fans imaginable for such a long game. But regular season games can’t normally start at 5 PM because some people have to, you know, work. So, Dodger weeknight games usually start at 7:10 PM and are over on average around 9:55 pm, with a lot of variation in the length of the game.

If Monday’s 18 inning game had started at 7:10 pm, it would have finished at 1:49 am locally and 4:49 am in Toronto. Los Angeles is a surprisingly early-rising city, so most fans who have to leave for work on Tuesday between 6:30 am and 8:30 am would have vamoosed long before Freddie Freeman’s walk-off home run.

World Series games are still played under the traditional rules in which no special accommodations are made for extra innings. Since 2020, however, regular season games have been played under a goofy rule borrowed from softball in which each extra-inning at bat starts with a free runner at second base in order to increase the chance of scoring. (This is often called the “ghost runner” rule, but the runner is not invisible. He’s just the guy who made the last out in the previous inning standing out at second base to start the new inning.)

One downside of this is that if the visiting team fails to score in the top half of the inning and thus the home team needs to score only one run in the bottom half of the inning to win, then the visiting team automatically issues an intentional base on balls to the home team’s first batter to set up a double play by creating a force play at third base or second base.

And intentional walks are boring.

I’ve got a better system.

First, rule changes since 2022, such as a pitch clock and a limit on pitchers’ throws to first base, have sped up baseball games. Dodger games, for instance, fell from an average of 3 hours and 8 minutes in 2022 to 2 hours and 44 minutes in 2025, a shortening of 24 minutes or 13%. That means it’s not as essential to get extra inning games over in the 10th inning, but fans still don’t want them to go past, say, 13 innings.

So, instead of putting a free runner on second base in every extra inning, let’s have a system that progresses from serious to silly as everybody gets more punch-drunk to prevent ridiculously long games:

10th inning: traditional rules with no free runners.

11th inning: free runner starts the inning on first base.

12th inning: free runners on first and second base.

13th inning and beyond: bases loaded with free runners.

You’ll notice that under this system there’s little incentive for intentional walks because any walk, whether in the top or the bottom of the inning, would force baserunner(s) closer to scoring.

Speaking of intentional walks, on Monday night, Dodger superstar Shohei Ohtani started off the game with two homers and two doubles, the first time any batter has had four extra-base hits in a World Series game since Frank Isbell’s four doubles for the Chicago White Sox “Hitless Wonders” in 1906. But in Ohtani’s last five at bats from the 9th inning on, the Blue Jays walked him five straight times, four of them official intentional bases on balls and the fifth time an unofficial one of throwing him four straight pitches out of the strike zone in the hope that Ohtani, who likes action, might swing in frustration.

The Toronto strategy worked. Even though Ohtani got on base all nine of his plate appearances — three more than the previous World Series record of six, last reached by Kenny Lofton in 1995, and tying the regular season record of nine, last accomplished in 1942 by Stan Hack — he did not have another run scored or batted in.

Intentional bases on balls granted to scary sluggers are fairly rare before the 9th inning because they increase the chance of a big inning with lots of runs scored. Ohtani led the National League with 20 IBB and Aaron Judge, who is an even better hitter than Ohtani, had 36 to lead the American League. The all time record is Barry Bonds’ crazy 120 in 2004. The most for any other hitter is Willie McCovey’s 45 in 1969.

But when you are trying to keep the other team from scoring just one run in the late or extra innings, it makes sense to take the bat out of the hands of the best hitter on the other team.

On the other hand, much of the point of being a baseball spectator is to watch stars like Ohtani or Toronto’s $500 million slugger Vladimir Guerrero (who was intentionally walked by the Dodgers on Tuesday) take their rips. How many people who are sort of interested in baseball tuned in part way through on Monday because they heard Ohtani was making history with his slugging, only to then see him get walked five times in a row and decided to give up on baseball again?

Say we penalized pitching around sluggers like this:

If a hitter gets walked twice in a row on 4 pitches (without a strike), the next batter starts with one ball.

Walked three times per row on 4 pitches, 2 balls.

Four times in a row, 3 balls.

Five times: the next batter walks.

Six times: the next two batters walk.

You may be asking: what about inadvertent four pitch walks? You’d be penalizing guys who throw 100 just because they are less accurate in general.

Okay, then maybe they’d throw 97 mph instead of 100, have fewer strikeouts, give up more singles, and endure fewer Tommy John surgeries.

Is that so bad?