My wife is not a baseball fan. She didn’t grow up watching the sport, and her only interest now is through me, watching whatever game I might be watching.
During the AL Wild Card game, I switched over to the ESPN2 Statcast broadcast, which was amazing. My wife also watched it and enjoyed it, despite not being a baseball fan.
It’s not the first time she’s been interested in the analytics side of the game. She loves seeing pitching GIFs, breakdowns of how the ball moves, and other forms of analytics that have shown up over the last few years.
This all got me thinking: Maybe that’s the answer for baseball.
I wrote yesterday about how MLB focuses on shortening the game, even if that meant changing the game away from what existing fans are used to, all to embrace the potential of new fans. I think this approach is foolish. If anyone cares that a game is just over three hours, they’re not going to care if the game is now slightly under three hours. I’ve never heard anyone say “Baseball is boring, and that’s why I turn it off after two hours and 45 minutes.”
Rather than shortening the game, MLB should focus on making the game more entertaining to casual fans while it’s on. And I think they’ve already got the tools to do that.
I might be biased with liking the Statcast view, and I’m going on a sample size of one with my wife, but it just seems like a cool feature that casual fans would find interesting. You give a better understanding of the game when you display how much a pitch moves, how different pitches can look the same until the last minute, or even the angle, exit velocity, and distance of a home run. Even better, you can display it visually, so they’re actually watching something in between pitches and batters.
The typical cutaways to the sideline reporter can be partially replaced with a deeper dive into the analytics of a play, when warranted. And please, no complaints from the broadcast booth. Nothing turns casual fans off like showing new parts of the game, then having people inside the game shitting on those new ideas because they’re not the old ideas.
I’d also say MLB needs to have more fun. Get beyond the “If you stare at your home run for longer than 2.2 seconds, I will hit your teammate with a 95 MPH fastball and start a war between our teams for the next two games, and probably for the rest of the season because we’re playing a kid’s game, so we might as well act like children” approach. Let a pitcher celebrate a big strikeout. Let a hitter celebrate a big home run. And if the play happens against you, do something the next time around to make sure you win that battle.
I think the biggest issue with baseball is that it’s not a modern game. Any time there’s talk of a change, there is pushback. And I realize that’s what I’m doing here in speaking out against moves to shorten a game. But there’s a difference between changing your sport into something totally different, and just easing up a bit and treating it like a game that’s supposed to be fun to play and fun to watch.
Yet there’s pushback for everything. You can’t celebrate a big play. Well, now you can because it’s your player doing it, and how dare the other team throw at you. You can’t bring in your best reliever in the biggest situation because it’s tradition to save him for the ninth inning, even if he might not be used if you lose this game. The DH can’t come to the NL because watching pitchers record an out 90% of the time is more exciting, all for the 10% chance that he gets a hit, or a slightly higher chance that he does something productive with his at-bat in the name of strategy.
Oh, and maybe make the league more fair by putting every team on the same financial playing field, allowing fans of all 30 teams to believe they’ve got a chance.
I’m not saying I’ve got the answers to fix MLB’s problem. These are just some ideas, based on what I think the casual fan might want to see.
I can speak as a lifelong baseball fan that the moves the game makes turn me off to the sport more and more. Watching total backlash to any kind of fun. Trying to insist that every team has an equal chance. Complaining about game length when that could easily be solved by fewer commercials. That won’t happen because they’re not interested in shorter game times. They’re interested in more viewers and the same or more money coming in.
Sometimes I’d rather just watch a sport where teams in Pittsburgh and Tampa can truly contend, and where teams in New York and Los Angeles don’t have an automatic playoff run guaranteed. I’d rather watch a sport where the players can have fun, and where you don’t care about the game length because the league has done a good job of playing up the interesting things about the sport.
I hope MLB moves more toward that approach, and less toward the “here’s a new gimmick to shave time off the game, yet somehow the average game time keeps going up each year” approach.
SONG OF THE DAY
This is definitely still my favorite Jimmy Eat World song. After listening to their new album yesterday, I went back to some of their old stuff and rocked out to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0085_FUpics
DAILY QUIZ
I saw Joker yesterday. It was fantastic. I’ll write more about it later.
THIS DATE IN PIRATES HISTORY
By John Dreker
On this date in 1974 the Pirates traded outfielder Gene Clines to the New York Mets in exchange for catcher Duffy Dyer. The day after the trade, the Pirates released backup catcher Mike Ryan. The Pirates got four seasons out of Dyer, who mostly served as a backup. His best season was 1977 when he played 94 games, hit .241, and led all NL catchers in fielding percentage. In 269 games with the Pirates, he hit .227 with nine homers. After spending five seasons with the Pirates, Clines had just one rough season in New York before he was traded away for a backup outfielder. He had a .554 OPS in 82 games with the Mets.
Among the former Pirates players born on this date, we have two recent middle infielders and a pitcher who helped them to two World Series appearances.
Johnny Morrison, pitcher for the 1920 to 1927 Pirates. When the Pirates won the 1925 World Series, Morrison won 17 games and pitched 211 innings, making 26 starts and 18 relief appearances. He played a small role on the 1927 NL champs, mostly pitching in relief. His best season however, was 1923 when he won 25 games. He had an 89-71, 3.52 record in eight seasons in Pittsburgh, throwing 1,363.2 innings. His older brother Phil was briefly his teammate during the 1921 season.
Wilbur Wood, pitcher for the 1964-65 Pirates. In two years in Pittsburgh, he went 1-3, 3.28 in 68.2 innings, making 34 relief appearances and three starts. After spending the 1966 season in the minors, the Pirates traded him to the Chicago White Sox, where he won 163 games over the next 12 seasons. From 1971-74, he reeled off four straight 20-win seasons and pitched 320+ innings each year.
Keith Osik, catcher for the 1996 to 2002 Pirates. He was the backup in Pittsburgh for seven seasons, playing a high of 66 games in 1999. Osik was a .231 hitter with 11 homers in 359 games.
Brian Bixler, infielder for the 2008-09 Pirates. A second round pick in the 2004 draft, he hit .178 over 68 games with the Pirates. He played for the Washington Nationals in 2011 and Houston Astros in 2012.
Alen Hanson, infielder for the 2016-17 Pirates. Batted .205 in 64 games with the Pirates. Has played for the Chicago White Sox, Toronto Blue Jays and San Francisco Giants since then.
