Among baseball’s attractions is the leisurely pace of the game. But if it is necessary to speed it up, I can offer two suggestions, one of which would be radical and, if memory serves, was recommended by Charlie Finley 20 years ago:
Three balls for a walk and two strikes for a strikeout.
Two things would happen. The hitters would be swinging and the pitchers would be throwing strikes.
It would be a severe change but would be an extension of the owners’ desire to quicken the pace. It would go along with expanded playoffs and interleague play, which are on the way and designed to bring the grand old game into the 21st Century.
I don’t think it’s necessary and would fight against it, but consider this:
There was a time, when professional baseball was in its infancy, that the batter was entitled to nine balls. It was reduced to seven in 1886, to five in 1887 and to the present four in 1889. These changes, I am sure, were introduced to speed up play.
Peter Hirdt of the Elias Sports Bureau, who is among the nation’s leading statisticians, insists that if the three-ball walk and the two-strike strikeout were adopted, a new set of stats would be necessary.
“If they do that,” said Hirdt, “they’re throwing out the baby with the bath water.”
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No argument here, and so on to the second proposal: Make the umpires enforce the strike zone.
There is, and has been for some time, considerable dispute on what is a strike. According to the 1992 Official Baseball Rules, it is defined as follows:
“The strike zone is that area over home plate the upper limit which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the top of the knees. The strike zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.”
In other words, from the bottom of the letters to the knee.
Modesty does not prevent me from pointing out the change in the strike zone was reported first in this column about five years ago. Actually, it took me two or three years to catch up with what had happened.
For whatever reasons, the umpires stopped calling the high strike. Today, the pitch above the belt is a ball.
Doug Harvey, a distinuished National League umpire recently retired, said he and his fellow umps were forced into the change by the hitters.
“We had nothing but arguments,” Harvey said at the time. “They made us bring it down.”
“It’s a copout,” said Carlton Fisk, the veteran White Sox catcher. “Sometimes even a ball at the belt is too high.”
Like Fisk, I find it difficult to understand why the umpires buckled under and, in effect, allowed the hitters to change the rules.
An explanation, in part, was offered here Friday by Marty Springstead, the American League supervisor of umpires.
Said Springstead, “All the pitching coaches teach their pitchers to keep the ball down.”
Springstead, 20 years an AL umpire, brought his hand two inches above his belt and said, “The hitters don’t swing at a ball higher than this.”
On an average, there are 260 pitches in a game, 130 by each side. If the strike zone were enforced, the number of pitches would be reduced by approximately 20 percent. There would be about 50 fewer pitches. The result would be a saving of almost 30 minutes.
In December, 1991, Commissioner Fay Vincent recognized the importance of enforcing the strike zone. A meeting was scheduled with owners, general managers, field managers and players. It never was held.
The players backed out at the last moment. According to a Vincent aide, the players “offered the lame excuse that if they criticized the umpires, the umps would take it out on them.”
There may have been more to it than that. The Players Association, as I see it, didn’t want its membership to participate in what would have been an internal dispute; 60 percent of its members are hitters, 40 percent pitchers. Why separate the troops into two distinct factions?
For the last four decades, all the rule changes have been against the pitchers. It began in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher. Batting averages dropped to an all-time low for the lively ball era, .230 in the AL, .243 in the NL. Bob Gibson had a 1.12 earned-run average. Carl Yastrzemski, who hit .301, won the AL batting title.
To make it easier for the hitters, the mound was lowered from 15 to 10 inches, a severe change. Remarkably, the pitchers adjusted and have continued to succeed despite the postage-stamp strike zone.
Understand, I agree that the games sometimes drag. With the bases empty, the pitcher doesn’t need more than 20 seconds between pitches, but a 20-second limit was tried and abandoned more than 30 years ago.
The managers could speed things up by summoning a reliever when they cross the foul line on their second and final trip to the mound. Some hitters, Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson among them, shouldn’t be allowed to stray 15 or 20 feet from the batter’s box after each pitch. There would be no delay on broken bats if the hitter carries replacement lumber into the on-deck circle.
There is no question the games are getting longer, 15 minutes longer than 10 years ago. If the fan at home watching on television is unable to stay up to the finish, this could be avoided with earlier starting times.
I suspect the beefs about the long games have been triggered by football and basketball fans who are leading what seems to be a prevalent anti-baseball mood.
I seriously doubt the fans who pay their way in are terribly upset. Neither are the players. I never have heard a player complain about the length of games. Only about the small strike zone.
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There is also this to consider: Many of the people without 10 or 15 minutes to spare wind up in the coronary unit.