You can't really change the length of a game if a team is hitting a hot bat and has huge innings. It's the pacing.
Volatile is a perfect word to describe our rotation. Keuchel, McCullers, Musgrove, Martes all have realistic chances of being front end difference makers come playoff time. They also all have the potential to be mediocre/injured and not helping us at all come playoff time. Morton is another guy that could be a steal of a pickup, but he is also extremely injury prone. Ultimately, I think our regular season rotation will be fine over the course of 162. Our downside is well protected, we shouldn't run many outright bad pitchers out there, but the front end strength is the big question mark when rotations shrink. I think the volatility is why Luhnow is playing hardball with Quintana. He's holding off until the rotation's status comes into focus
Maybe not glaring as in expected to be bad or terrible, but certainly a weakness. Its also an area that hasn't gotten significant upgrades, unlike the offense. Never say things couldn't have been worse. There is a cost to doing nothing as well.
I don't think they want a runner on 2nd to start extra innings either, but they are going to have to pick and choose if they want to cut down time. The mistake they are making if they are trying to bring back viewers is that cutting time isn't not the key - it's cutting *dead* time. Football (college and pros) has been through this in the past where they do things like speed the pace of the game with running clocks and such. They make the same mistake - they are cutting the amount of actual in-game action time while leaving all the dead time. That doesn't help the consumer much at all.
I wouldn't even call it a weakness. As a whole, the pitching staff is a strength. The rotation has the potential to be a strength, it just might not be depending mostly on health. Certainly LMJ, Musgrove, and Morton can't be expected to make 30 starts, between injury history and innings limitations. If 2 of those guys stay relatively healthy, I feel really good about our rotation. If we lose 2 at the same time for an extended period, then I think we will have a weakness. I didn't say it couldn't be worse. They want the games to be shorter too. Dead time is the most important, but they want to fit perfectly into TV slots, which is part of why they care about total time.
Sorry - to clarify, yes, they want the games to be shorter. But they want that to enhance overall interest. Killing game time while leaving all the deadtime is not an effective way to do that. They've IDed the problem but was missing the mark on the solutions.
Wow. Based on projections (which doesnt include any improvements we may make during the ASB), this seems like an easy over on the Astros.
Seems appropriate to me. They're not so good that they can overcome 1-2 big underperformances (like the 2016 team couldn't)
We probably can do 1, but it would be tough for any team to deal with 2 major busts without getting lucky. Last year we had Giles, Keuchel, LMJ, and Gomez be busts.
Doubt they would ever consider finite pitching changes, but they should consider that a reliever has to face 2 or more hitters or finish an inning. Apparently they will be making the intentional walk change, but considering there was one intentional walk every 2.6 games, the time savings is minimal. If they were to go to the 'runner on 2nd' idea, they shouldn't do it until the 12th or 13th inning.
I think a pitch clock, and keeping batters in the box would go a long way to speeding up the pace of the game. There would be a ton of pushback from the "purists" and a lot of the pitchers, but if they stuck to , and enforced it, players would adjust. It would really be a seismic type of rule change, baseball simply doesn't do "clocks", but I think the waning interest in baseball is a much bigger problem than many realize. I'm 30, and I've loved baseball since I was 7, but there are very few people in my circle that care about baseball. No black people I know care at all (literally not a single one), and few younger people of any race. Football is crazy popular, and basketball is easy to find discussions about, but I feel like I'm a fan of a niche sport when it comes to baseball.
Baseball is a slow game. That isn't going to change short of major changes that would threaten the game (as we know it) itself. Do we really want the pitchers and the batters to feel hurried? Would it save more than 10 minutes per game even if we did? Ironically, the recent replay rules have lengthened the game more than some proposed solutions would shorten it. Culture has changed. Personally, I identify Baseball to a time when life itself moved slower (before the 60's). Short of team brawls every game, pitchers taking out batters routinely and/or major collisions on the base paths, Baseball just cant compete with most other major sports in terms of action or violence. Whats the viewership numbers for Golf in the under 30 crowd these days? Anyway, I just think the whole subject (making Baseball faster) is a doomed strategy that will more likely hurt the game more than it could ever help it.
Baseball was a 2 hr 30 min to 2 hr 40 min game through the 1960s on average. The game moved much faster then. Baseball players may not like the changes that are likely to come, but the game got long due to them..even before replays.
Part of what makes baseball so great is that it doesn't require 100% attention. I mean, I generally watch every pitch. But not everyone is wired like that. People like to tune in and out. That's one appeal of baseball. MLB, by its very nature, is casual. Even for the players. They're in the dugout half the game. Baseball is a fantastic date atmosphere. It's completely different than the NFL, and even NBA. Stop trying to make baseball something that it isn't. I'm cool with trying to tinker around with game-time...but fundamentally changing this type of rule is atrocious. It changes the game, and not for the better. I feel like the MLB is getting Trumped with this rule change. I hope they'll see the whiplash and not implement it at the MLB level. At least let me have baseball, damnit!
I like the breaks in action, but I think the time between innings is plenty (16 in a game, that's about one every 10 minutes). The time between pitches, pitcher changes, and batter changes is what makes the game feel slow. The ideal 9 inning game would last 2-2.5 hrs, with extra inning games ideally only adding another hour max (sudden death extra innings would achieve that).
How about instead of no mound meetings, each team is allotted a certain number of timeouts? Otherwise, mound meetings should be subject to the pitch clock. And how about instead of finite pitching changes, its finite substitutions? Meaning a team only has 6 substitutions, and they can use them for pitchers or position players. I'd be fine with leaving intentional walks how they are now. They probably aren't frequent enough to have a meaningful impact on average game length.
Wouldn't you agree that at least two minutes has been added to each inning due to the increased television coverage over the past 40+ years?
