Dear Major League Baseball:
It’s Time to Act like a Lobster
Several times a lobster casts off its shell when it realizes it has reached a crisis. Its shell is a hard exoskeleton designed to protect and nurture it as is grows. However the shell can be a hindrance that limits its growth. Ultimately it has no choice but discard and grow a new one.
Major League Baseball (MLB) needs to cast off its shell.
Don’t get me wrong. Baseball is a wonderful sport — full of drama, excitement and players with amazing abilities. Millions of people have experienced emotional highs and depressing lows as participants and spectators.
What is the problem?
Yogi Berra said it best … “If people don’t want to come out to the ball park, nobody’s gonna stop ‘em.”
The number one MLB issue is declining attendance. Why? There are lots of posts and articles by baseball professionals and enthusiasts that analyze the causes for this drop in attendance (6% in 2018). See for example MLB Greats Think Baseball Is In Trouble and What’s Wrong With Baseball? Aside from ever-increasing ticket prices, the causes fall into three main categories: long game times, lack of action and lack of emotion.
Following the evidence of each type of issue I describe below, I provide some grow-a-new-shell changes that will bring the fans back. Baseball purists may rail that these changes will destroy the game. That’s OK. But they only need to look at the changes in the NBA, the NFL and the NHL that have increased fan interest and attendance.
Causes of declining attendance
Cause #1: Time
- Length of the season. A 162-game season is too long. The NFL is very profitable with only 16 regular season games. The MLB season starts in March and ends in November. Weather conditions are not ideal for baseball at either end of the season. Who wants to sit in freezing stadium for 3+ hours? By the time the season is half over, the majority of teams have no hope of reaching the playoffs — why buy a season ticket?
- Long Game Times. 9 innings is not a problem provided there is enough action (see Problem 2) to keep you interested. However the time between innings, time between player substitutions, batter and pitcher dilly-dallying, commercial time-outs, length of replays, mound consultations and pregame folderol all add up. The average time of MLB games is just over 3 hours which is comparable to NFL game times. NBA and NHL game times average under 2.5 hours and major league soccer games are typically 2 hours or less.
Cause #2: Lack of Action
- Nothing happening. A pitch takes about a fifth of a second to reach the plate. If there are 150 pitches in a game, the ball-in-the-air time is 30 seconds. Since the average time between hitters putting a ball in play is now over 3 minutes, there ain’t much going on baby. Home runs are impressive but they only take a few seconds. Strikeouts this season will likely exceed the number of hits. Stolen base attempts are declining.
Cause #3: Lack of Emotion
- With so little action taking place, it’s no wonder fans are bored. The baseball mandarins have made rule changes to reduce emotion-generating player collisions. Replay requests have eliminated manager-umpire confrontations. Video replays have sidelined emotional reactions caused by controversial judgement calls by umpires.
- The constant influx and egress of poorly-paid minor league players make it difficult to create emotional attachments to home team players. The plethora of September call-ups makes you wonder who’s-on-first.
- Announcers on the team’s payroll only offer mild criticisms such as “He’d like to have that one over” instead of an emotion-generating “He really screwed that up.”
Remedies
My recommendations to solve the problem fall under four headings: Embrace Technology, Reduce Inaction Time, Increase On-field Activity and Boost Fan Emotion.
1. Embrace Technology
The desire to win by getting a competitive edge is the major driving force behind the explosion of tech-based applications in all sports. Videos and massive databases (Statcast.com collects a thousand gigabytes of data about every MLB game) are used to: improve in-game decision making and strategy, support replay decisions, evaluate player strengths and weaknesses, improve training methods and increase player health. Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods are used to continually improve the logic in all applications. What’s missing?
a. AI-based decision-making applied to video data should replace many of the decisions made by umpires. These include: determining balls and strikes, deciding fair/foul/home run, out/safe decisions, tagged or not tagged, tagged up violations, foul tip or not, hit by pitch or not, base path violations and others.
b. Chipping. Suppose a chip was embedded in every ball, every bat, every base, every glove and every uniform. Many of the suggested video applications could be improved or replaced by the using the data captured by these chips.
c. What’s left for the umpires? There are many subjective decisions that should remain the responsibility of umpires. These include judgements regarding interference by a batter, runner, fielder or fan, the bases awarded for fan interference, and the penalties for player and manager misbehavior.
2. Saving Time
a. Reduce overtime. Almost every other sport changes the rules at the end of regulation time. Here are 3 suggestions.
i. Allow ties. Award a single point for a tie at the end of a predetermined number of extra innings. A question: How is fan and player enjoyment increased by playing an open-ended number of innings to resolve the tie in a regular season game? Long games increase costs and logistical problems for fans, players, media and stadium workers.
ii. Load the bases at the start of each extra inning to increase the likelihood of scoring.
iii. (My favorite). Reduce the number of defensive players by 1 in each extra inning. This has worked wonders in the NHL in which the 5-minute overtime has 3 skaters per team instead of five.
b. Reduce dead-ball time during the game. Aside from shortening the time between innings, put limits on:
i. The number of pitching changes allowed in a game (for other than injuries)
ii. The number of pickoff attempts on a runner
iii. The number of defensive shifts allowed in a game
iv. The number and length of timeouts allowed (require timeouts for all but non-trivial consultations)
v. Allow only 1 replay request per inning
vi. Eliminate warm-up time for incoming pitchers (Do it in the bullpen.)
vii. Enforce the maximum time allowed for replay reviews
3. Increase On-field Activity
Having players on base increases the potential for: stolen bases, pickoffs, double plays, fielders’ choices, tag ups, balks, throwing errors, and runner and fielder interference. An increase in the number of players on base can be achieved by:
a. Enlarge the strike zone (batters will swing more often)
b. Increase the maximum diameter of the bat by a half inch (will reduce the number of swing-and-miss strikeouts)
c. Move the pitching rubber back
d. Use Designated Hitters in the National League (pitchers strike out 80% of the time and increase the number of game-delaying pitcher substitutions)
e. Allow incidental contact between runners and fielders
4. Increase Emotional Involvement
a. Increasing on-field activity will definitely increase fan interest in game situations by augmenting the number of potential outcomes of every plate appearance. It will promote discussions among fans and viewers of the best tactics to use before every play.
b. (The big one). With the omnipresence of cell phones …
i. Allow everyone attending the game to download a free game-specific app that is preloaded with lots of player performance data.
ii. The app allows each user to predict the result of every play (strikeout, walk, home run, player substitution, etc. Predictions are stored in a (temporary) database.
iii. Users can also predict the outcome of every review.
iv. At the end of the game the fan with the highest number of correct predictions receives a cash prize. (I suggest $1,000).
v. The app could be made available to online viewers and have a different prize for the winner.
Strategy for Casting Off The Shell
There are many conservative-minded owners, managers and player reps that control changes in the wonderful game of baseball. However there are also many who are open-minded to fresh ideas to increase fan enjoyment. To accommodate both attitudes and prove that the proposed changes will re-energize games I suggest a trial season in which one of the leagues adopts a significant subset of the changes suggested above and the other uses traditional rules. One could even allow teams to opt for one or the other of new leagues. I predict the league using the new rules would be a smashing success in the eyes of the fans and owners.
It’s time for Major League Baseball to return to its preeminent time as America’s Pastime. With apologies to Lewis Carroll — “The time has come the Walrus said to cast off the shell”
John B. Moore, Ph.D. is the founder of RunPlusMinus Inc.
