Let me first say that all but one of the recent rule changes in Baseball were positive ones. Allowing pitchers and batters 18 seconds between pitches seems to have worker seamlessly. Eliminating the shift will also raise batting averages. Preliminary stats in 2023 see a 7% increase. However, the new rule limiting pickoff throws by the pitcher to 2 unless the 3rd is a successful pickoff move is grossly unfair to pitchers and will not appreciably speed up the game. It will result in lots of cheap stolen bases.
Baseball’s most serious problems, and the main causes for being labeled as boring are expansion dilution of talent and pitching domination with the majority of pitchers throwing over 95 mph + bee bees by the batters. How is that so?
The Dramatic Pluses and Minuses of Expansion
Expansion has been both the best and worst development in Baseball history. An enormous success for team owners as far as revenues and attendance are concerned. The original two leagues, for many years, had only 14 total teams, with the only playoffs being the World Series. Today we have 30 teams all over the country, extended playoffs, and five teams which are worth an estimated 1 to 3 quarters of a billion dollars and most worth at least 75 - 100 million. So, what could possibly be bad about this?
The unintended negative consequences of expansion are:
1 — A serious shortage of talent, particularly in the area of hitting. Up until the 1950s, baseball did not face significant competition for athletic talent. Gradually, sports like Football and Basketball also began to get many of the more talented players.
2 — At the same time, there was a general decline in the level of play. Insufficient revenues were also invested in minor league teams and the developing shortage of talent tended to shorten the time players were schooled before being brought up to the big Leagues.
3 — While both pitching and hitting were affected over time, the most serious imbalance developed in the area of hitting. Brought on both by a general decline in talent and by major changes in pitching speed and strategy. Baseball began to rely more and more on relief pitchers. At first, in most games, this occurred mainly to relieve a tiring starter in the 8th or 9th inning, or one that got hit hard early in the game.
4 — Last and perhaps worst is the destabilization of salaries thanks to the shortage of talent caused mostly by expansion. Salaries have gone through the roof for talented players and far beyond what was legitimately achieved after free agency was won, which the fans have had to pay for thanks to the new corporate $$$ priorities in force, putting the cost of tickets out of reach for many people. Gone also are the days in which a superstar will be able to play for the same team their entire career. One of the real attractions for fans was looking forward to seeing their stars. It has also led to the domination of a limited number of teams that can afford enough talent to make it to the World Series.
Pitching Changes Dramatically Altered the Game
Simultaneously but slowly, managers realized the advantages offered by relief pitchers that threw hard, and by that I mean 95 mph or faster. Starters, up until this point, usually threw less than 95 mph on average and mixed in more pitch types and employed a lot of variations in pitch location, vertical movement and angles so they could last late into the game.
Given the shortages of starting pitching talent that were slowly developing because of expansion, the emphasis on speed seemed to increase. Players in the minors, if they were pitchers, began realizing that more speed was expected of them and that was also a way to get into the big Leagues quicker. This has been happening mostly in the last 20 — 30 years. Throwing harder was easier than mastering the other aspects of pitching and harder throwing became the norm. And overall talent shortages lessened the time spent in the minors.
The Controversial Role of Tommy John Surgeries
Throwing harder created two major problems for most starters. More breakdowns of pitching arms resulting in more Tommy John surgeries and the gradual reduction in the number of innings a starter can throw in a game. Warren Spahn, a great pitcher who played from 1942 to 1965, won 363 games. And pitched an astounding 382 complete games. In the entire year 2021, the combined total of complete games for all teams was 50!
A staggering percentage of Major League pitchers have had Tommy John surgeries. As of 2021, 33% of all pitchers have had the operation! It is also said that some pitchers can throw even harder after they have had one! Frankly, at least for me, this is a very disturbing figure. Even scandalous.
Baseball’s Scandal that Isn’t
The demand by teams for 95 + speed is clearly responsible for the growing number of surgeries performed as pitcher after pitcher blows their arm out. Players need at least a year or more recovery time, and it’s considered a major surgery. It has helped to further put hitters at a disadvantage. Jacob deGrom, for example, is one pitcher who threw about 95 mph before surgery, topped out at 100 mph afterwards and became one of baseball’s highest rated pitchers. Many if not all can throw harder afterwards. When hitters boosted their hitting prowess with steroids, they underwent disgrace and suspension.
Almost overnight, you had scores of middle/long relievers and starters that barely could go 5 innings. And requirements that 3 or 4 pitchers would be needed to complete most games. The pursuit of more wins seemed to cover up the more scandalous aspects of the drive for more pitching speed.
Baseball has so far avoided the scandalous implications of so many Tommy John surgeries, forced by pressures from management, as they knew such surgeries would become epidemic with the demand for more pitching speed. They encouraged harder throwing, even though they knew in advance that pitchers, especially starting pitchers, risked blowing out their arms in epidemic numbers.
The Era of the Strike Out
Increased pitching speed is dramatically lowering batting averages and increasing the number of strike outs. The number and percentage of .230 or less hitters that managed to stay in the big Leagues increased dramatically as they now face almost exclusively hard throwers with fresh arms.
In fact, the average for both Leagues has dropped to .243 in 2022, the lowest since 1888! We began to see some relief pitchers throwing at or even over 100mph after Tommy Johns. Contact declines along with batting averages. Total strike outs per season for all teams have more than doubled since 1983. The lower average hitters began swinging for the fences as it was rare to be able to string 2 or 3 hits together for a run, so even mediocre and marginal hitters were encouraged to swing for the fences. Total strike outs per season for all teams combined in 2021 have more than almost tripled since 1950.
Base hits and runs scored are declining and strike outs and walks continued to rise. What we have today is still at least a two-hour game, even after the new rule forcing pitchers to throw a pitch every 18 seconds, with less and less action and bat contact. Speeding up the game has helped, but it is not the same as having more action. It’s too early to tell if banning the shift will help. Preliminary stats have league batting averages up about 7% this year, if that holds this will help.
Racism Returns in Baseball?
Baseball went from zero African American players to Jackie Robinson in 1947 to a high of 18% black players in the 1980s back down to 6.7% in 2016. There is no longer an exclusionary Major League policy of signing black players, so what happened? There are a number of potential factors. One is the diversion of black talent into Football and Basketball, both of which offer college scholarships to economically disadvantaged talent. Baseball is just not on a par with its own college baseball program and doesn't get lucrative contracts to televise their games to millions of Americans.
The road to the Major Leagues is also much longer, talent is rewarded much faster in Football and Basketball. And in Baseball it's a tougher road to master financially, especially if you or your family doesn't have the resources.
This problem was not addressed by the Baseball Majors. Nor are their many facilities in the inner cities for blacks to play baseball, where most blacks live today. Forcing talented black, and also white BTW, players with limited resources to go for Basketball or Football. Physically large talents also fit better into the latter than they do in Baseball, which also now recruits players from all over the world to address player shortages, from Cuba and the Dominican Republic to as far away as Japan and Tawain, so the percentage of non-white players has risen but includes less African Americans.
All this does not mean that racism is not a factor in the decline of black player numbers. Clearly a message was sent when both the Giants and Dodgers, which had significant black support, set out and moved to California and were denied new ballpark space by New York’s tyrannical Robert Moses.
While the influx of blacks after Jackie Robinson that came from the former Negro Leagues had populated baseball with scores of black talent, the corporate owners were developing new agendas. The more corporate and wealthier baseball became, the less they cared about recruiting black talent. Which is memorialized by the lack on any real attempt/strategy to compete with Basketball and Football in penetrating the colleges to set up a virtual minor league system within them that can get a lot of T.V. coverage and fans.
What Makes the Game Less Popular
By way of disclosure, I’m 75 as of this month. I went to ball games in Ebbets field (Brooklyn Dodgers) and the Polo Grounds (New York Giants) as a child and without question the experience of watching and enjoying a game has greatly changed. The days where the players were worshipped are mostly over. I was allowed then down to the rail during batting practice, where players often gathered within a few feet of us. Got to see, and sometimes talk, to Jackie and Roy and the Duke up close and personal.
The intimacy of old stadiums has been lost forever, except for Boston and Chicago, which still have their old stadiums, modernized as much as possible. Sat in the bleachers at old Yankee Stadium for 75 cents. Today, the top players have huge contracts, agents, financial consultants and mansions to live in.
We got a General Admission seat for $ 1.75 and a box seat at Ebbets field for $3.50, with no season ticket holders who always got the better seats. Today, at the new Yankee Stadium, while physically it reminds you of the old Ball Park, seats are sectioned off from each other and a really good seat costs more than a thousand dollars.
Remembering Ebbets Field
I remember sitting next to a black family that came all the way from St. Louis to see Jackie Robinson play. They brought all sorts of goodies and shared them with us. My mom was afraid to ever mention this, but had sat a couple of times next to the Rosenbergs and their two young sons at Ebbets field with my older brother (I was then too young to attend), not knowing who they were until she recognized them on a Newsreel shown in the movies after their arrest.
She much later told me that she told no one, even my father, as she was so afraid of people knowing she had met them given the McCarthyite terror that was going on.
Baseball is a Hard Sport to Play
OK, so it’s not rocket science. But compared to other sports it requires you do more things at a very high level to advance to higher level competition. It also requires a large field to play in and take a lot of time to learn to play it well. It our cities real estate is at a premium. It also takes around 5 years playing in the minors for low pay, unless they give you a big bonus. Many players, as mentioned earlier, can’t afford spending these five years away from home on minor league seasonal wages. There are only two minor league, and two Major League stadiums in New York, a 30-mile-long city drowning in high-rise skyscrapers, and has fewer and fewer ball fields maintained in city parks to play organized baseball in.
Young people today gravitate more to different sports for a host of reasons. There is a large field in Brooklyn adjacent to Prospect Park, it was once all baseball fields open to anyone in a local amateur league or anyone who wanted to reserve one. Now it’s year-round tennis courts and open areas for soccer. All the high schools had baseball teams, my own eventually put two in the Majors. Not anymore.
Sports are less personal and all big business today, with the violence of Football becoming more popular than Baseball and is now considered the new national past time. The action and intimacy in gone.
I guess that says a lot about us and what we’ve become.
Addendum
I originally posted this as part of the yesterday’s article:
Jacob deGrom, for example, is one pitcher who threw about 95 mph before surgery, topped out at 100 mph afterwards and became one of baseball’s highest rated pitchers. Many if not all can throw harder afterwards. When hitters boosted their hitting prowess with steroids, they underwent disgrace and suspension.
The very next day he announces going for his second Tommy John! Baseball has been employing the equivalent of bionic pitching arms, now at an epidemic 33% clip. When will we make this into a scandal it deserves to be?
Automatic Runner on Second Rule After 9 Innings
I neglected to comment on this new rule, which is worse that the two-pickup rule. Perhaps after 12 innings, this might work, but after nine it’s a dreadful way to potentially lose a ball game on a run scored on an accidental bloop single.