I’m still upset about this newfangled “designated hitter” innovation. Drysdale could hit; Newcombe could hit. Ohtani certainly can hit.
Let’s make pitchers play baseball, not throwball.
If every reliever who entered the game was also obliged to enter the batting order, it might slightly or significantly reduce the number of pitchers used.
I agree but having a lefthanded second-baseman is as likely as ending the Designated Hitter rule. The DH is here to stay. A rule I especially despise is the designated runner on second in extra innings. It is a perversion of the game. It's so Little League.
Solid pitching and strong defense still gets teams into the playoffs. Tampa rarely has star batters and when a Tampa player becomes too expensive, they usually trade him. Tampa tends to have great pitching depth and decent defensive players. Kevin Kiermaier and Ben Zobrist are typical Tampa type players. Of course, Tampa has never won a World Series despite all their playoff appearances. And they probably won't win a World Series unless they re-locate from Tampa to some city like Indianapolis, Nashville or Charlotte so that they can spend the money to pay star players their market worth.
A team of old that used the Tampa formula in ways were the New York Mets of 1969-73. Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and reliever Tug McGraw anchored what was a pitching and defensive team with a galaxy of spray hitters like Bud Harrelson, Jerry Grote, Ken Boswell, Felix Millan and little Al Weis. Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones were the closest the Mets had to power bats. One has to wonder how long those Mets might have made a run had they not been foolish enough to trade Nolan Ryan.
The Atlanta Braves of the 90s had aces Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz to anchor their team and the Braves dominated the National League East for over a decade. They were always in the thick of a pennant race. However, they won only one World Series.
It would seem that a mix of stars and solid pitching is the best path to the playoffs and the World Series. The Dodgers and Yankees were exemplars of the mix of stars and solid pitching last year and both are favorites to be in the World Series this year. But that mix has always been important when you think of the big winners since I began to follow baseball in 1968. The Tigers and Mickey Lolich defeated the Cardinals and Bob Gibson that year. The A's, Orioles, Pirates, Reds, Yankees and Dodgers dominated the 70s. Each team had stars and solid pitching. The 80s results were more mixed and no team was truly dominant long term. Only the Dodgers in 81 and 88 won more than one World Series and that was with widely different teams. It could be argued that the Cards would have won two World Series if not for an incompetent umpire. They were an odd team of speed, defense and pitching that used astro-turf to its advantage. The Yankees of the 90s were dominant with solid pitching, a perennial All-Star shortstop in Derek Jeter, very good but not great hitting and the greatest relief pitcher of all time, Mariano Rivera. Since those Yankees broke up, there have been fewer dominant teams but there hasn't been a replication of the old Mets or the modern Rays.
Indeed. Fans want their home team to win. You need to brush up the rules to make it so teams can win playing the kind of baseball fans of other teams like. For example, I was a Dodger fan in the 1980s, but the kind of artificial turf optimized baseball played by Kansas City and St. Louis was exciting.
Notice how St. Louis changed their style of baseball when they went back to grass. Just a little point. Had Ozzie Smith stayed in San Diego with its grass field, he would never had made the Hall of Fame.
Having played baseball at a highly competitive level in the 1980s, I am amazed at the fact that no one seems to consider the astroturf era as much a perversion of the sport as the steroid era.
The “five-tool” concept was grossly distorted towards speed back then. Even at the professional levels, the concept of evaluating outfield talent skewed towards drafting athletes rather than baseball players and then trying teach them to slap the ball in play enough to get on base.
Fifty percent of the outfielders in Organized Ball back then wouldn’t even get signed today.
I saw Pedro Martinez at Fenway 8 or 9 times. Every start was an event. Pedro wanted to beat as many hitters as he could every game. Many of those games were nail-biters, too, because the Sox never seemed to score a ton of runs for him.
I don’t pay much attention these days, but the lack of true pitching duels seems bad for the game and maintaining rivalries. The 2000 face off between Pedro and Roger Clemens in Yankee stadium was electrifying. Both went 9 innings - the Sox went ahead on a 2 run homer in the top of the ninth, and Pedro had to bear down to get through the bottom of the inning.
That game had it all. Yanks/Sox, the traitor Clemens, ninth inning heroics. The platonic ideal of the pitching duel. I assume that’s impossible now, but I don’t pay attention these days.
Pitch counts are important, though. Unlike Clemens, Pedro wasn’t a big guy, and it was well known that he could go from untouchable to hittable around 100 pitches. Probably true for most guys, I guess, but it seemed pretty stark with him. Grady Little torched his managing career by not giving an obviously exhausted Martinez the hook in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.
Right, my friend's pitcher brother was 6'5" but my friend would point out that he was about 40 pounds lighter than Clemens so that he was unlikely to have as long, dominant career as Clements. So he had about 5 or 6 years as a #1 starter vs. about 20 for Clemens.
A typical modern-age game was played on Opening Day in Washington between the Phillies and Nats. The Nat' starting pitcher, MacKenzie Gore, pitched a gem. Six innings, one hit, 13 strike-outs, no walks and no runs. Naturally Gore was taken out of the game to conserve his arm with the Nats leading 1-0. Until fairly recent times, Gore would have remained in the game until the Phillies began to hit him harder or his turn came up in the batting line-up. But that is thinking from a distant age. So the Nats suspect bullpen was trusted to close out the game. And the bullpen blew it. The Phillies scored two in the seventh, one in the eighth and four in the tenth. The power bats of the Phillies clobbered the Nats' relievers- Harper, Schwarber, Boehm and Realmuto came through and the Phillies won 7-3.
I'm not a mathematician, but doesn't that mean it's 65% pitching? "I looked up the top 500 players in MLB history back into the 19th century on Baseball Reference and 35% were position players. So baseball stardom appears to be about 35% pitching."
IMO, John Schuerhoz would have been one of the best commissioners of baseball in the history of the game--but by the time he was ready for it, the owners had become DEI\ESG aficionados. Hence the designated "runner" in extra innings. Infantile ownership. If the owners had genuine respect for game of baseball and its place in U.S. American history, none of this childish alteration of the game would be happening. Communists hate baseball. I saw my very first Major League game at Dodger Stadium when the Braves were making their run from worst to first. My immediate first impression: "This is like being in church without a preacher." Too bad for everybody the owners of baseball are childish louts.
It is a sad state of affairs. Analytics have shown that pitchers need to throw at maximum effort/velocity to be effective. But they do not seem able to figure out how to reduce pitching arm injuries. Does it help to limit starters to 100 pitches per game? Dunno. Does it help to give starters - or even relievers - an extra day's rest? Not enough data, apparently. What about avoiding certain kinds of pitches or motions? Who knows?
Coaches, analysts and pitchers are left guessing as to how to really protect arms, and guys like Jacob deGrom keep disappearing during what should be the peak of their greatness.
Right. Not long ago, we had two guys, Maddux and Clemens, win 709 games between them. Today, it's unclear if the 7 best active pitchers under age 30 will win 709 games among them.
Soccer fans no doubt consider that deplorable, but, then again, few care that Lionel Messi makes little defensive effort, saving himself to put goals on the scoreboard
I wonder how much better soccer might be if you had unlimited substitutions like hockey. I’m guessing the original rule was setup to create a more equitable playing field so the better franchises/teams with more depth couldn’t overwhelm smaller less talented teams.
I don't know how strictly the rules were ever enforced at a youth or school level in the 1950s or earlier. Certainly any sort of low-level youth soccer, in the US at least, allows unlimited substitutions, in contrast to the current professional laws of the game (max of five substitutions, and no re-entry).
On the other hand, do we really want pitchers to strike out 1.5 batters per inning? Isn’t it more fun when the ball is put into play?
Like you said, depends on whether I’m watching at home or in the right field bleachers. Most fun part of baseball to me is a nasty breaking ball or high seam fastball for strike three.
A few times I've gotten players' tix for right behind home plate although that tends to be distracting listening to Frank Thomas's fiancee show off her 10 carat diamond ring to the other Wives and Girl Friends
This is also part of larger trend across all sports to reduce the risk of injury and fatigue. Nobody in the NBA averages even close to 40 minutes a game anymore, and fans have been complaining about "load management" for years. We may never see another NHL goalie play 70 games in a season. The NFL is on its way to full-time flag football. Sports franchises are now worth billions of dollars, and even middling baseball and basketball players have eight-figure salaries, so there's a bigger investment to protect.
It seems crazy that the Dodgers let Ohtani steal 50 bases last year. They got away with it until he got hurt trying to steal against the Mets in the NL pennant series. Could easily have cost them the World Series win, but they got lucky.
This paints an interesting contrast with european/international soccer, which is fast approaching a full-blown crisis due to the strain on players from bloated game schedules and the injuries that naturally follow. Seems the difference is that, unlike in American sports, the top teams and players all compete in disparate leagues/competitions with little to no shared oversight or management (domestic leagues, domestic cup competitions, international cups like the Champions League, and various national team competitions). Each of these different competitions tries to squeeze as much TV money out of the players as possible, and the players have little power to stop it. A side effect is that the most successful teams are the ones wealthy enough to pay multiple superstar players to sit on the bench as stand-ins for the many inevitable injuries (which gets a bit tedious). Whereas in America it’s much more about the best-constructed roster of starting players. Another win for the American sporting model in my opinion
I’m still upset about this newfangled “designated hitter” innovation. Drysdale could hit; Newcombe could hit. Ohtani certainly can hit.
Let’s make pitchers play baseball, not throwball.
If every reliever who entered the game was also obliged to enter the batting order, it might slightly or significantly reduce the number of pitchers used.
I agree but having a lefthanded second-baseman is as likely as ending the Designated Hitter rule. The DH is here to stay. A rule I especially despise is the designated runner on second in extra innings. It is a perversion of the game. It's so Little League.
Little League. Exactly!
They should require the designated runner to be a reliever from the bullpen. Or maybe the batboy.
Next they'll allow players to eat snow-cones in the field.
When did that happen? Have I been living under a rock?
I never liked the DH, but ending it would not fix pitching.
Solid pitching and strong defense still gets teams into the playoffs. Tampa rarely has star batters and when a Tampa player becomes too expensive, they usually trade him. Tampa tends to have great pitching depth and decent defensive players. Kevin Kiermaier and Ben Zobrist are typical Tampa type players. Of course, Tampa has never won a World Series despite all their playoff appearances. And they probably won't win a World Series unless they re-locate from Tampa to some city like Indianapolis, Nashville or Charlotte so that they can spend the money to pay star players their market worth.
A team of old that used the Tampa formula in ways were the New York Mets of 1969-73. Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and reliever Tug McGraw anchored what was a pitching and defensive team with a galaxy of spray hitters like Bud Harrelson, Jerry Grote, Ken Boswell, Felix Millan and little Al Weis. Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones were the closest the Mets had to power bats. One has to wonder how long those Mets might have made a run had they not been foolish enough to trade Nolan Ryan.
The Atlanta Braves of the 90s had aces Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz to anchor their team and the Braves dominated the National League East for over a decade. They were always in the thick of a pennant race. However, they won only one World Series.
It would seem that a mix of stars and solid pitching is the best path to the playoffs and the World Series. The Dodgers and Yankees were exemplars of the mix of stars and solid pitching last year and both are favorites to be in the World Series this year. But that mix has always been important when you think of the big winners since I began to follow baseball in 1968. The Tigers and Mickey Lolich defeated the Cardinals and Bob Gibson that year. The A's, Orioles, Pirates, Reds, Yankees and Dodgers dominated the 70s. Each team had stars and solid pitching. The 80s results were more mixed and no team was truly dominant long term. Only the Dodgers in 81 and 88 won more than one World Series and that was with widely different teams. It could be argued that the Cards would have won two World Series if not for an incompetent umpire. They were an odd team of speed, defense and pitching that used astro-turf to its advantage. The Yankees of the 90s were dominant with solid pitching, a perennial All-Star shortstop in Derek Jeter, very good but not great hitting and the greatest relief pitcher of all time, Mariano Rivera. Since those Yankees broke up, there have been fewer dominant teams but there hasn't been a replication of the old Mets or the modern Rays.
Might this situation offer an economic opportunity? Could a team win fans' affection by letting starters stay in as long as they used to?
No. Not unless the team also wins.
Indeed. Fans want their home team to win. You need to brush up the rules to make it so teams can win playing the kind of baseball fans of other teams like. For example, I was a Dodger fan in the 1980s, but the kind of artificial turf optimized baseball played by Kansas City and St. Louis was exciting.
Notice how St. Louis changed their style of baseball when they went back to grass. Just a little point. Had Ozzie Smith stayed in San Diego with its grass field, he would never had made the Hall of Fame.
Having played baseball at a highly competitive level in the 1980s, I am amazed at the fact that no one seems to consider the astroturf era as much a perversion of the sport as the steroid era.
The “five-tool” concept was grossly distorted towards speed back then. Even at the professional levels, the concept of evaluating outfield talent skewed towards drafting athletes rather than baseball players and then trying teach them to slap the ball in play enough to get on base.
Fifty percent of the outfielders in Organized Ball back then wouldn’t even get signed today.
I saw Pedro Martinez at Fenway 8 or 9 times. Every start was an event. Pedro wanted to beat as many hitters as he could every game. Many of those games were nail-biters, too, because the Sox never seemed to score a ton of runs for him.
I don’t pay much attention these days, but the lack of true pitching duels seems bad for the game and maintaining rivalries. The 2000 face off between Pedro and Roger Clemens in Yankee stadium was electrifying. Both went 9 innings - the Sox went ahead on a 2 run homer in the top of the ninth, and Pedro had to bear down to get through the bottom of the inning.
That game had it all. Yanks/Sox, the traitor Clemens, ninth inning heroics. The platonic ideal of the pitching duel. I assume that’s impossible now, but I don’t pay attention these days.
Pitch counts are important, though. Unlike Clemens, Pedro wasn’t a big guy, and it was well known that he could go from untouchable to hittable around 100 pitches. Probably true for most guys, I guess, but it seemed pretty stark with him. Grady Little torched his managing career by not giving an obviously exhausted Martinez the hook in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.
Right, my friend's pitcher brother was 6'5" but my friend would point out that he was about 40 pounds lighter than Clemens so that he was unlikely to have as long, dominant career as Clements. So he had about 5 or 6 years as a #1 starter vs. about 20 for Clemens.
A typical modern-age game was played on Opening Day in Washington between the Phillies and Nats. The Nat' starting pitcher, MacKenzie Gore, pitched a gem. Six innings, one hit, 13 strike-outs, no walks and no runs. Naturally Gore was taken out of the game to conserve his arm with the Nats leading 1-0. Until fairly recent times, Gore would have remained in the game until the Phillies began to hit him harder or his turn came up in the batting line-up. But that is thinking from a distant age. So the Nats suspect bullpen was trusted to close out the game. And the bullpen blew it. The Phillies scored two in the seventh, one in the eighth and four in the tenth. The power bats of the Phillies clobbered the Nats' relievers- Harper, Schwarber, Boehm and Realmuto came through and the Phillies won 7-3.
Maybe when you give Chris Sale a $38MM contract (guaranteed) for 2 years, you want to make sure he's around for a while.
The Braves got a Cy Young out of seemingly washed up 35-year-old Chris Sale in 2023 by having him pitch 177 innings.
I'm not a mathematician, but doesn't that mean it's 65% pitching? "I looked up the top 500 players in MLB history back into the 19th century on Baseball Reference and 35% were position players. So baseball stardom appears to be about 35% pitching."
Thanks.
Sorry, it was 65% of the top 500 in WAR were position players, 35% pitchers.
IMO, John Schuerhoz would have been one of the best commissioners of baseball in the history of the game--but by the time he was ready for it, the owners had become DEI\ESG aficionados. Hence the designated "runner" in extra innings. Infantile ownership. If the owners had genuine respect for game of baseball and its place in U.S. American history, none of this childish alteration of the game would be happening. Communists hate baseball. I saw my very first Major League game at Dodger Stadium when the Braves were making their run from worst to first. My immediate first impression: "This is like being in church without a preacher." Too bad for everybody the owners of baseball are childish louts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schuerholz
It is a sad state of affairs. Analytics have shown that pitchers need to throw at maximum effort/velocity to be effective. But they do not seem able to figure out how to reduce pitching arm injuries. Does it help to limit starters to 100 pitches per game? Dunno. Does it help to give starters - or even relievers - an extra day's rest? Not enough data, apparently. What about avoiding certain kinds of pitches or motions? Who knows?
Coaches, analysts and pitchers are left guessing as to how to really protect arms, and guys like Jacob deGrom keep disappearing during what should be the peak of their greatness.
Right. Not long ago, we had two guys, Maddux and Clemens, win 709 games between them. Today, it's unclear if the 7 best active pitchers under age 30 will win 709 games among them.
“Six times, pitchers were pulled from games after the seventh inning when they had no-hitters underway. .”
That should be a felony!
In the case of Steve Barber it was reasonable.
Did he have like 10 walks?
Soccer fans no doubt consider that deplorable, but, then again, few care that Lionel Messi makes little defensive effort, saving himself to put goals on the scoreboard
I wonder how much better soccer might be if you had unlimited substitutions like hockey. I’m guessing the original rule was setup to create a more equitable playing field so the better franchises/teams with more depth couldn’t overwhelm smaller less talented teams.
For decades soccer had no substitutions whatsoever. It wasn't until 1958 they were officially allowed.
Such a strange rule. How do the dorky kids ever get to play?
I don't know how strictly the rules were ever enforced at a youth or school level in the 1950s or earlier. Certainly any sort of low-level youth soccer, in the US at least, allows unlimited substitutions, in contrast to the current professional laws of the game (max of five substitutions, and no re-entry).
On the other hand, do we really want pitchers to strike out 1.5 batters per inning? Isn’t it more fun when the ball is put into play?
Like you said, depends on whether I’m watching at home or in the right field bleachers. Most fun part of baseball to me is a nasty breaking ball or high seam fastball for strike three.
A few times I've gotten players' tix for right behind home plate although that tends to be distracting listening to Frank Thomas's fiancee show off her 10 carat diamond ring to the other Wives and Girl Friends
The young ladies in the right field bleachers properly dressed for July are also distracting.
Here's a tubby guy warming up before his 300th win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FHafsz-p-k
What do the stats say?
1) Has ERA dropped in the final three innings of games in the last decade?
2) Have arm injuries gone down or up?
I am willing to write that ERAs have gone up in innings 7-9 and that arm injuries have gone up as well.
This is also part of larger trend across all sports to reduce the risk of injury and fatigue. Nobody in the NBA averages even close to 40 minutes a game anymore, and fans have been complaining about "load management" for years. We may never see another NHL goalie play 70 games in a season. The NFL is on its way to full-time flag football. Sports franchises are now worth billions of dollars, and even middling baseball and basketball players have eight-figure salaries, so there's a bigger investment to protect.
Wilt Chamberlain had seasons where he averaged over 48 minutes a game due to the occasional overtime game. You'll never see that again.
Which is why I may have mentioned Shohei Ohtani a few times in 2021-2023 for being both a pitcher and a slugger.
It seems crazy that the Dodgers let Ohtani steal 50 bases last year. They got away with it until he got hurt trying to steal against the Mets in the NL pennant series. Could easily have cost them the World Series win, but they got lucky.
No 50-50-20 (wins) for Shohei this year!
This paints an interesting contrast with european/international soccer, which is fast approaching a full-blown crisis due to the strain on players from bloated game schedules and the injuries that naturally follow. Seems the difference is that, unlike in American sports, the top teams and players all compete in disparate leagues/competitions with little to no shared oversight or management (domestic leagues, domestic cup competitions, international cups like the Champions League, and various national team competitions). Each of these different competitions tries to squeeze as much TV money out of the players as possible, and the players have little power to stop it. A side effect is that the most successful teams are the ones wealthy enough to pay multiple superstar players to sit on the bench as stand-ins for the many inevitable injuries (which gets a bit tedious). Whereas in America it’s much more about the best-constructed roster of starting players. Another win for the American sporting model in my opinion
The prez on baseball:
Nixon:
“I don’t know a lot about politics, but I do know a lot about baseball.”
“I like the job I have now, but if I had my life to live over again, I’d like to have ended up a sports writer.”
Harry Truman:
“Best Of Luck To You On Opening Day And Every Day. Watch Out For That Nixon. Don’t Let Him Throw You A Curve.”