The MLB Proposes Another Terrible Change to the Game

The top guys in the MLB keep proposing terrible changes, and their latest involving extra innings may be the worst yet.

Baseball isn’t a game designed to be played quickly. The MLB doesn’t have preset times that during which games will take place. The NBA has four 12-minute quarters, while the NFL has four 15-minute quarters. The NHL has three 20-minute periods, and soccer has two 45-minute halves.

That’s what makes baseball different. They play to three outs in every half-inning, and it doesn’t matter if it makes two minutes or 20 minutes. You have to get those three, little outs.

But for a game with no clock, the higher powers of baseball want to make it move faster. The next idea on the docket is to put a runner on second base to start extra innings. Teams don’t have to earn that runner in scoring position, he just gets put there.

One of commissioner Rob Manfred’s biggest priorities when he took the job was to create more offense, and this rule change would likely accomplish that. A runner at second base with nobody out scores a little over 63 percent of the time. This likely would bring about some more runs.

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But it doesn’t seem like something that would necessarily speed up the game, especially with the intensity that extra innings brings about. Pitchers always have a tendency to slow the game down with runners on base, and in extra innings with the potential winning run in scoring position, that would give them more incentive to grinds the game to a screeching halt.

And with more offense potentially coming from this move, that means longer half-innings as teams get in more offense. More offense equals more time spent on the field, and no matter how Manfred tried to work it, he won’t get more offense from a quicker game.

So while the powers that be want to speed up the game, it could be that this change has the opposite impact.

These rules keep coming about that are supposed to make the game faster, and therefore more attractive to a younger generation of fans. Remember that big hoopla that was made about hitters staying in the batter’s box a couple years ago? Or the pitch clock that was supposed to make the slow hurlers pick up their pace? What ever happened to either of those? They have basically been thrown by the wayside.

No one really enforces the batter’s box rule, and upcoming changes to the game’s pace of play don’t include the pitch clock. There are ways to help the game move a bit faster.

Baseball’s powers have already proposed a change to intentional walks, making it so the pitching team only has to announce it and the batter can take his base. That’s not a big game-changing rule, even though it does take away that variable of a pitcher airmailing an intentional ball, but it would likely be a change that fans really wouldn’t notice. They also want to raise the strike zone, which could be another change that leads to more offense and longer games.