At times like these, it never hurts to dig into the Canon of Yogi.
“If the fans don’t come out to the ballpark,” baseball’s most eloquent philosopher may or may not have said many years ago, “you can’t stop them.”
I get what Rob Manfred is trying to do. He is trying to invent baseball fans. He is trying to make his sport appealing. One of Manfred’s predecessors in the commissioner’s office, Bowie Kuhn, made it a full-time preoccupation to always identify what was “in the best interests of the game.”
No commissioner of any sport ever works for the worst interests of the game.
But there are times when you wonder if Manfred, commissioner of baseball, actually likes baseball. There are times when you see him working so furiously to cultivate and create however many millions of people that aren’t fans of his game that he risks alienating and infuriating however many millions of people are.
And so we get … well, we get a lot of weird stuff. We get weird ideas. We get the rule that debuted in some minor leagues last year where, after a few extra innings, a runner is planted on second base to start every inning. We get the rule that will be introduced in the big leagues this year where relief pitchers must face three-batter minimums.
Now, we are about to get expanded playoffs – which will almost certainly bring about “playoff” teams who finish under .500, which is bad enough – which will reportedly bring a perk to the teams with the best record in baseball: the ability to pick their opponents in the playoffs. The thought is that’ll be great TV. It’ll make for intriguing storylines if one of the picked opponents picks off the favorite.
What it is, is preposterous.
Look, you don’t have to be a baseball purist to understand that these rule changes are substantially different than any that have preceded it. Even the designated hitter, still anathema to a lot of fans, makes sense within the broad context of the game.
When baseball first expanded its playoff system in 1969, it was the natural result of expansion. It was one thing to have only the winners of two eight-team leagues face off in the World Series; even 10 teams seemed manageable. But by ’69 you were looking at 12-team leagues. Now it’s 15. Adding more teams wasn’t just an artificial way to pump up interest (though it was a byproduct), it was a necessary way to make sense of the regular season.
Even when the extra wild card was added a few years ago, that made sense within the context of the sport: there is now a premium on finishing in first place. Nobody wants to endure the play-in gauntlet. The A’s won 97 games last year and saw their playoffs end in a one-and-done blur. There is supposed to be some great injustice to that. But the A’s had two options to alter that fate:
1. Finish in first place.
2. Win the play-in game
They did neither, and so in the words of Willy Wonka: they get nothing.
There is something terribly cynical about the measures Manfred has mostly taken to “improve” his game. He wants shorter games, and sure: shorter games would be nice. Anyone who’s sat through 4 ½-hour nine-inning games can tell you it’s no fun to be in the top of the fourth inning as a game reaches the two-hour mark.
But here’s something to think about: the thing proponents of radical change keep pointing to is that baseball has lost attendance seven straight years. Well guess what: that incorporates the time frame of the intentional walk going away. It incorporates a time when we’ve had a clock counting down and managing the time in between innings, and when baseball has tried to reduce dawdling in the batter’s box.
Oh? And baseball games took an average of 3 hours and 5 minutes last year, highest ever. How are those reforms doing?
There is an argument that more playoff berths means more playoff teams and that’ll be a panacea. Then why, exactly, does it seem like we’re heading toward the Tampa-Bay/Montreal Rays inside of a few years? Anyone who thinks it will be a civic booster shot to rally around a 79-win team is either fooling themselves or downright foolish.
There were still 68.5 million people who came out to ballparks in 2019. By all means, make sure you agitate them in pursuit of would-be fans who have already spoken, loud and clear, that they have other ways to prioritize their disposable income. Hey, using Manfred’s logic, why not change baseball’s call letters to what he clearly wants his sport to be.
The XLB.