Had you forgotten that this hadn’t already been announced? I’d kinda forgotten that this hadn’t already been announced, until they announced it, and now it’s officially announced:
The experiment, then, was a success. It was a success in that the owners didn’t have to keep their stadiums open longer and could therefore avoid higher costs, and it was a success in that players got to go home sooner. You know, the things that matter!
Was it a success in that it provided a good product? No. Was it a success in that it stayed true to the nature of the game? No. Was it a success in that I like seeing it at all? Absolutely not. But it did allow games to end sooner, which owners and players alike can agree is a good thing.
But do fans agree that that’s a good thing? Well, let’s get this one caveat out of the way: I run in bsaeball nerd circles, and baseball nerds are not representative of everyone who watches baseball. Honestly, I’d say baseball nerds are notoriously unrepresentative of the sport’s broader fanbase.
And yet, it probably means something that baseball nerds almost unanimously hate this rule, right? Like, if you spend long enough alienating your core fans with more and more changes, there has to come a point when they just give up because the thing you’re giving them is too far from the thing they like, and it’s irritating. You hit an uncanny valley, and the fact that it’s 95% of the thing you love is worse than if it was 60%, because the fact that you’re so close actively hurts.
And look, I don’t want to blame Rob Manfred for everything that’s different about baseball today, because some of it is the natural evolution of the game. The way that managers use bullpens today is radically different than it was a decade or two ago, and that’s not the commissioner’s fault. The focus on things like pitch tunneling and launch angle and spin rate has nothing to do with the league office. The increased specialization that you see around the league, and especially from the Giants with all their platoons, is a natural change. The fact that I personally range from indifferent to unhappy with those changes is something I just have to get over.
But I don’t think I have to get over the nature of the game fundamentally changing. This is supposed to be the highest level of the sport, and at the highest level, you play the game until there’s a winner. Now you’re playing a somewhat different game after the 9th is over. It’s the same reason I continue to not like the universal DH: this is not what the game is. A guy who is in the field will be the guy who is at the plate. If there is not a winner after 9 innings, you play until there is one. Simple. Easy.
When you start tweaking those rules, you are saying that the rules don’t matter. You are saying that the entire sport is arbitrary and subject to your whims, and yes, we all know that, but that makes things less fun.
Baseball historically has had a lot of rough edges. Some of them — spiking a rookie at second base for making eye contact with a 7-year veteran — are best left in the past. But others — pitchers hitting — are what gives the sport its flavor. You take enough of these things away, and you have a baseball-like thing that isn’t real baseball.
That’s not me talking. That’s Gregor Blanco, talking to me in 2018:
”For the major leagues, I don’t think [the extra inning rule]’s good because I don’t feel it’s true baseball,” Blanco said.
The rule was adopted in the minors in 2018, and when I interviewed players that year about it, I asked them. All but Ryder Jones said that they didn’t think the majors would ever go for it, with the general consensus being that no one in the minor leagues actually gives a shit about the results of the game, so why not just get them over with?
Well, here we are 5 years later, and everyone just wants to get major league games over with. This doesn’t directly affect that many games, by the way — in 2019, there were 37 games total that went loner than 12 innings — but it has an indirect impact on the meaning of every regular season game where it could happen. I no longer want to avoid extra innings beacuse I want to see my team win now. I now want to avoid extra innings because they are incorrect on a cellular level. This isn’t my sport. This isn’t how you play that.
But, of course, this was inevitable. From the day Rob Manfred imposed it in 2020 as a nonsensical Covid measure — these people are already around each other for several hours at a time for several days in a row, so it seems unlikely that another few innings will change much — he was not going to give up the dream. I mean, from the day he imposed it on the minors in 2018, he wasn’t giving it up. That wasn’t a trial balloon. That was a trailer that gave away the whole movie.
Well here we are in the theater, with our popcorn, trying not to be distracted by the sticky floors. And when the movie starts, we can’t help but feel that, man, movies used to be better.
Bada. Bing.
"'I've always said that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. The hardest thing - a round ball, round bat, curves, sliders, knuckleballs, upside down and a ball coming in at 90 miles to 100 miles an hour, it's a pretty lethal thing."--Ted Williams (Berkow 1982)
It would be nice for a team allegedly playing baseball to have to hit a baseball to win a game.
Reference:
Berkow, I. (1982, August 10). Players; The 2 Loves of Ted Williams. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/10/sports/players-the-2-loves-of-ted-williams.html