Baseball’s Plan To Save Itself From Boredom: An Update

Hi, this is Sydney Harper, and I help make the daily. One night, it's 10 p.m. My colleagues working on the next day's episode are looking for a speech, this piece of tape that they really need to make the episode sing. They've tracked it down to a university library, and that library happens to be close to my house. So I hop into a car, I head across town, I get to the library, they're about to close, I'm copying the tape, uploading it into my computer, sending it off to my colleagues working on the episode, it makes it into the show the next day, it really helps make it shine.

Hey, it's Michael.

This week, the Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year, listening back and hearing what's happened in the time since they first ran. Today, we return to a historic plan that Major League Baseball rolled out this past spring, to try and save the sport from the tyranny of the home run, and then explore whether the plan has actually worked. It's Friday, December 29th.

So, Mike, the last time that we had you on to talk about baseball, you came on to talk about how the sport was weathering, or not weathering, the pandemic. And the reason we've asked you to come back is because baseball is now experiencing another major change. So tell us about that change.

This season, baseball will operate under new rules. that are the biggest changes in on the field play, certainly in my lifetime, if not the history of the game. Wow.

Just give me a couple tastes of this change.

There's three big rule changes coming this season. The pitch clock.

Kind of like a shot clock.

Sort of, yeah, a shot clock.

That is a big change. What else?

The bases are bigger. You won't be able to notice it with your eye.

But they are bigger.

Correct. And then you have Major League Baseball creating these rules about where defenders, fielders in the field, can stand.

What is driving these changes, Mike?

Baseball is facing a semi-existential threat in terms of its appeal to fans. The game has become not only too long, but too boring. The non-baseball fan or baseball hater will sort of be laughing at that, because they'll say... It was always boring. But it has tipped over the edge.

That is a provocative thesis.

Yeah. Look, the game has become addicted to the home run. And because of that addiction to the most exciting play in the game, the whole game has become boring.

So explain how it is that the home run has made baseball boring, how we got to this point where we need these reforms.

So, to understand that, we need to go back to the early days of Major League Baseball, where the home run was this engine that powered the growth of the sport. Way back in the early 1900s, home runs were not the key driving force of the game. But then came the 1920s. A hard-hitting lefty named Babe Ruth comes along and captures the country's attention through his slugging. That ball blazed like a bullet when he connected.

This is the sight the fans came to see.

And helped the sport's popularity grow and set it on a trajectory that it follows in the decades that come.

The Bobby Thompson shot heard round the world.

Figures like Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron.

And the home run has never been more central.

Correct. But what happens is that in the years that follow, we find out that that chase that felt so good was built in part on a lie. That the players were using banned drugs.

Steroids.

Correct. And it leads to a reckoning in the sense that the sport needs to police itself from performance enhancing drugs. But by no means does anyone turn away from the home run.

Why not?

Because a new phenomena further fuels the drive for the home run. And that's the moneyballification of baseball.

Alright, just explain that for the 25 listeners who didn't read the book or watch the movie.

Teams become very focused on statistics and the greatest chances, mathematically, of scoring and preventing runs. Let me give you an example of what this looks like. Teams have so much data about where players are hitting the ball that they begin to rearrange their defenses. And as the sport is grappling with all of these changes on the field, the home run emerges as far and away the most appealing way to score.

Right, because it's the only way to literally transcend and cut through all these data-driven defenses that you just described.

Unless you're going to put your players on each other's shoulders in the outfield to try and stop the ball from going over the fence, there's nothing your fielders can do.

So, in the wake of a steroid scandal that was in part inspired by perhaps an overemphasis on home runs, we get a data-driven system that still overemphasizes, arguably, home runs. All roads keep leading back in baseball to the home run.

And it becomes so extreme that it leads to the problem of boredom that the sport is now confronting.

We'll be right back.

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So, like, how exactly do home runs become boring?

Home runs themselves are not boring. But everything else that comes with everyone in the game concentrating on them is. Because, instead of trying to learn how to spray the ball around the field, hitters start to concentrate on doing everything they can to just try and hit a home run. They change their swing to have more of an uppercut to try and hit it out of the park. But because you're swinging up, you're also more likely to miss.

Right. You don't have good old fashioned baseball anymore. You just kind of have an endless home run, derby.

At the same time, teams that are pitching are trying to do everything to prevent that home run. So they're bringing in different pitchers. They're encouraging pitchers to try and make sure that they get that strikeout, so there's no contact to the bat.

And all of these things are slowing the game down.

Correct. Correct. And games become longer. They become 20 to 30 minutes longer on average.

And so at what point does the league say to itself, all right, enough. We have got to do something about this. We've got to make this sport more fun. We've got to make it faster.

So, it being baseball, it took a while. And in this story, there's one person who made that call. So I went directly to him, the commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred.

So what does Manfred tell you?

So he knows there's a problem.

We did fan-based research. And fans wanted a game, brisker pace, more athleticism. They wanted that best form of baseball back.

Was it because baseball was too boring?

I don't think it was too boring. I think that baseball changed.

He doesn't say that baseball has a boring problem. But he confirms that there's a real pace issue.

I had a great consensus. We needed to fix this.

So over many years, he plots this change.

Waiting until you got an agreement so that the players understood it was coming.

Talking to players about them. We refined the rules. Testing at the minor league level what these changes would be.

We played 8,000 games in the minor league, literally, with these rules.

And all that work finally culminates this season.

So tell me more about these rule changes. You started to hint at them at the beginning of our conversation. Let's do it in more depth. And how they're supposed to actually fix baseball's problems.

So again, there's three big changes coming this season. The pitch clock, the bigger bases, and where fielders can stand in the field. So let me start with the fielders. Remember, we talked about those data-driven defenses. Essentially, computers, telling teams where players should be on the field.

Right, which of course encourages people at bat to just hit home runs over the fielders' heads.

You can't do that anymore. You can't stack the defense on one side. And because of that, it opens up much more space for a player to hit a ground ball or a base hit up through the middle or through one of the holes.

Got it. And what about the pitch clock? What does that have to do with the home run?

On the face of it, it doesn't have anything to do with the home run.

That person would never come home. Correct. And you wouldn't get the extra run.

So it was worth it to not steal.

Of course, stealing is exciting.

Stealing is exciting. It's perhaps the most action-packed non-home run event of the game. And those larger bases, it just makes it easier to steal. And it also makes the game a bit safer, because bigger bases gives more space and potentially less collisions. At the same time, there's a new rule that limits the number of times a pitcher can try and pick off a runner.

So, Mike, taken together, this is a campaign to make baseball more exciting by doing a few things. Elevating the other parts of the game that aren't home runs, like the base hit or the stolen base, and making those home run hitters just be less of a drag on the overall pace of the game.

Yeah, I mean, I think the way to look at it is that baseball is not trying to kick the home run. Right. They're trying to kick the problems and things that come with it. That there's other things going on.

Got it. I'm very curious, Mike, how baseball players and fans have been reacting to these new rules.

Surprisingly, it's been embraced. Hmm. And spring training games are more than 20 minutes shorter than they were last year. More balls are being hit in play. More players are trying to steal bases.

Oh, lots of stuff could go wrong.

That's a high risk undertaking.

And in theory, you could imagine moments where teams blame a loss on one of these new rules.

And it'll all come down on Manfred.

Baseball is different. It occupies a place in our culture that is very, very different. And it comes with the burden that when you make a mistake, people care a hell of a lot more about it than if it was in another sport. And if the criticism gets to a certain point, they'll find somebody else to take the job.

And I'm OK with that.

I really am.

Of course, there's a very strong possibility that these rule changes won't make Manfred a lightning rod, but they're going to be embraced. Maybe they're even going to be celebrated. Right.

They're going to make the sport better and maybe even usher in a golden era in the sport.

Golden era? I don't know about that. But a more appealing, faster, efficient product that is not going to take four hours to watch a nine inning game? Good chance.

Well, Mike, as always, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

After the break, Mike Schmidt gives us an update on how the first season went with those new rules in place.

It's now the end of the year and the baseball season and its playoffs are long in the books. So to get a sense of how these rule changes went, I called up Commissioner Rob Manfred to see what he thought. And he was extremely pleased. I mean, you don't need to be the commissioner to look at the numbers and see that this went about as well as baseball could have hoped.

Um, no, not that I know of.

And there was more action. Middleton's first pitch, Seager hits it. There were more hits than last season. Right field base hit. But perhaps the biggest, most dramatic change was that stolen bases went through the roof.

Throw to second base.

He is safe at second. This season, there were more stolen bases across the game than there had been in any year over the past three decades. A mad dash around the bases for Yellop. So what we ended up with was a season in which the number of home runs did not go down. But the other action on the field went up.

Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko and Carlos Prieto with help from Will Reed and Muj Zedi. It was edited by Lexi Diao with help from Michael Benoit. It was fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Dan Powell, Alishaba Etoob and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lanthverk of Winderley.