For 40 years or so I have heard doomsayers proclaiming that the end of baseball was near. In 1975, for example, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn warned that the advent of free agency would destroy baseball as we know it. Bowie, wherever you are, know that the game has flourished since you uttered that warning, exceeding $9 billion in revenue.
Since Kuhn, others have predicated doom and gloom for one reason or another. The most recent reason offered is the games are too long and fans will no longer tolerate the time it takes to play nine innings.
Commissioner Rob Manfred and his chief baseball officer, Joe Torre, have heard these complaints and seek to do something about them.
Torre recently issued an edict to managers advising them they are not to argue balls and strikes with umpires. I don’t know if concerns about pace of game motivated his memorandum, which was uncovered by Bernie Wilson of The Associated Press, but it was followed shortly after by bizarre ideas from Manfred about his thinking on pace of game, including limiting the number of relief pitchers a team could use in an inning or a game.
No one has asked my opinion, but I think Major League Baseball has done enough the past year or two to change the game, and I think it’s time these guys locked themselves in their offices, unplugged their televisions and took long naps at their desks. They have done enough damage to the game.
They are purifying the game, making it squeaky clean, turning it into a vanilla version of the game we knew.
Players who learned how to slide when they were growing up now are told how they have to slide into second base and home plate. If they do it wrong, they’ll be called out.
Managers no longer have reason to argue close calls on the bases because they can challenge them and have them reviewed and decided on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. That’s right. Games can be decided not on the field in the parks where they are played but hundreds and thousands of miles away in a television studio.
Now they are further stripping the game of color by telling managers they can’t argue balls and strikes. What would Billy Martin, Earl Weaver and Lou Piniella have done?
“The fans liked seeing us argue,” Piniella said on the telephone Friday. “They enjoyed it. This takes away from the fans.”
Torre, who is in the Hall of Fame as a manager, told managers, general managers and assistant general managers that arguing balls and strikes is “highly inappropriate conduct,” “is detrimental to the game and must stop immediately.”
Under baseball’s review system, umpires’ pitch calls are not reviewable, which is understandable because if they could be challenged, games would extend beyond players’ bedtimes.
In his memo Torre said managers were increasingly violating Replay Regulations by relying on technology that clubs use to monitor umpires’ on-field rulings in case they want to challenge them.
The regulations stipulate that “on-field personnel in the dugout may not discuss any issue with individuals in their video review room using the dugout phone other than whether to challenge a play subject to video replay review.”
Although Torre recognizes that ball-and-strike disputes are natural, he said “the prevalence of manager ejections simply cannot continue. This conduct not only delays the game, but it also has the propensity to undermine the integrity of the umpires on the field.”
I’m obviously missing something here. Torre says by disputing umpires’ pitch calls, managers delay games and undermine umpires’ integrity. Let’s relate. How do those issues differ from what happens now?
Reviews of challenged calls take time, an average –that’s average – of one minute 41 seconds this year through Wednesday, according to Major League Baseball, 1:51 last season. Call those interruptions minor, but delay is delay.
Arguments undermine umpires’ integrity? What to make of 654 overturned calls last season and 435 so far this year? That’s 49 percent in each case, meaning umpires get it wrong once in every two challenged calls. What does that say about umpires’ integrity? I’m not suggesting that a wrong call puts an umpire’s integrity in question, but over the years I’ve seen plenty of arguments over ball/strike calls, and I’ve never wondered about an umpire’s integrity. Maybe his eyesight sometimes but not his integrity.
“Most of the time when I argued with umpires it was to protect my players, to keep them in the game,” said Piniella, who was as fiery as any manager in arguing with umpires. “I respect umpires. They do a good job. But like players and managers they make mistakes sometimes.”
Referring to Torre’s many years of managing, Piniella remarked, “I’m sure Joe Torre argued with an umpire or two.”
As for Torre’s order to managers not to argue balls and strikes, Piniella said, “I wish they had that when I was managing. I would’ve saved a lot of money.”
As a manager, Piniella would not have cared for an idea Manfred offered some support for recently. The commissioner was on ESPN’s “Mike & Mike” show responding to listeners’ suggestions for improving time or pace of game. One suggestion would limit the number of relief pitchers a team could use in an inning or a game. Manfred said:
“I am actually in favor of something like that. We’ve spent a ton of time on this issue in the last few months.
“You know the problem with relief pitchers is that they’re so good. I’ve got nothing against relief pitchers, but they do two things to the game: The pitching changes themselves slow the game down, and our relief pitchers have become so dominant at the back end that they actually rob action out of the end of the game, the last few innings of the game. So relief pitchers is a topic that is under active consideration. We’re talking about that a lot internally.”
There’s no question relievers have become a bigger part of the game. Teams have increased the number of relievers they have in their bullpens, and they bring in relievers earlier than they used to and change them more frequently than before. Managers match up pitchers with hitters more than they used to. The proliferation of statistics has led to that development.
But the game has always evolved. Four-man starting rotations became five-man rotations. Pitchers who pitched 300 innings in a season have disappeared. Two-hundred-inning pitchers aren’t so plentiful.
Starters used to pitch complete games or get close to them. Now they often don’t make it through six innings. The fewer innings starters pitch the more innings relievers are needed. If Manfred wants to eliminate relievers, he better be prepared for the flood of protests he will get about the threat of arm ailments. Tommy John surgery might become Rob Manfred surgery.
It’s one thing for a commissioner to be linking the outcome of the All-Star Game to home field advantage in the World Series; it’s another to be setting up managers’ pitching plans for 162 games.
MLB is obsessed with the length and pace of games. Officials say it is really the pace they care about, but they always cite the average length when they discuss the issue. The only time I cared about how long a game was when I covered the Yankees and wanted the game to end so I could get home for dinner. When I was younger and watching games from the bleachers at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, they could have gone on forever and I would have been ecstatic.
But if Manfred and other officials think games need to be shortened, I can offer some suggestions – at no charge.
Manfred apparently rejects some of the obvious ideas: three balls instead of four for a walk, two strikes instead of three for a strikeout. But what about a two-strike foul counting as a third strike or a pair of two-strike fouls counting as a third strike?
Two outs in an inning instead of three? Or if that change would be too radical, what about a compromise – two outs every other inning or manager’s choice of which inning his team gets or gives two outs with four innings required with two outs?
OK, some more serious ideas:
Move the relievers’ warmup area adjacent to the dugouts so relievers don’t have to run in from the outfield bullpens.
Eliminate relievers’ warmup tosses when they enter the game; they have already warmed up in the bullpen.
Cut manager’s mound visit to one an inning. Limit catcher’s mound visits to one. If the catcher visits the mound, the manager can’t go to the mound that inning.
Have managers make pitching changes by signaling from the dugout, eliminating the chit-chat when managers go to the mound.
Reduce the number of between-innings warmup pitches, allowing even fewer if opponents went down 1-2-3 in the previous inning.
If Manfred genuinely wants to shave a few minutes from time of games, he can shed the replay reviews and let the umpires do their job.
Instead of giving World Series home field advantage to the winner of the All-Star Game, give it to the league that plays the fastest games.
Offer bonuses to the players whose teams play the fastest.
Reduce between-innings time by selling split-screen commercial time at lower rates than full screen costs.
There has been talk of eliminating four pitches for an intentional walks, just signaling the batter to go to first base. But critics have said a pitcher could throw a pitch away and say he should have to throw four balls.
But what about eliminating the home run trot? Nothing would be affected by eliminating the trot, except perhaps the batter’s ego.
As for reducing or eliminating catchers’ visits to the mound, they’re often there just to stall for a reliever to get ready. As Bob Gibson once said to a young Tim McCarver when he dared to come to the mound, “Get back where you belong. The only thing you know about pitching is you can’t hit it.”
STEROIDS HALL OF FAMER IS BACK
Not surprisingly, a Mike Piazza fanatic criticized me for asking Piazza about his suspected use of steroids in a conference call 10 days before his induction into the Hall of Fame. Using the subject line “The Ravings of a bitter self-indulgent blogger,” the reader wrote:
“I hope that you got the attention you crave, your blip in trending on twitter. There is no such thing as bad publicity, right. You are entitled to your opinion but before you accuse someone, how about employing some journalistic integrity and base it on some real evidence not just conjecture. Stick to the facts.”
As all Piazza fans have done, this writer ridiculed my mention of Piazza’s back acne, a telltale sign of steroids use. What he and other critics have ignored and never explained is the fact that Piazza’s back acne disappeared at exactly the same time when baseball began testing for steroids.
The writer whose e-mail I have quoted said he doesn’t plan to read this column again, but maybe he’ll see this e-mail from a reporter who covered Piazza:
“Your line of questioning with Piazza was spot on. These guys are too interested in kissing his ass and being his friend than they are doing their jobs. I was there. I saw the backne and after he tore his groin muscle in SF (a classic steroid injury) he was noticeably thinner/smaller. And you didn’t even mention the moody bullshit. Good job by you and screw all those people who simply want to ask fluff and celebrate.”
Other writers who covered Piazza have told me there was never any question about Piazza’s steroids use. They just never confronted him about it. Maybe, in the view of the first writer, they were practicing journalistic integrity.