Back to the baseball future of rule changes: Mercy rule? Raising strike zone? Reset the lineup?

Publish date: 2024-06-28

Let me show you a picture. It’s a picture of an iPad or a computer that was taken on an airplane in 2015. It was then sent to a friend of a friend, who sent it to a mutual friend, who sent it to me. I make no claims about this picture, other than the year I received it and the words it displays.

Here is that picture:

I do not know if this came from Hunter Manfred’s laptop when he brought it in for repairs, or if it belonged to a literal baseball god who is walking among us, like something out of a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and W.P. Kinsella. Maybe it’s just something that a random baseball nerd whipped up when he was bored and on the toilet. It’s just a picture, after all.

A picture from 2015. An eerily prescient and ominous picture of proposed rule changes that would eventually be implemented in Major League Baseball, one by one, in a slow drip over the next decade. A picture that sure seems like it’s of an electronic device that was in the possession of someone who knew exactly where the sport was heading.

I’m willing to engage the list up there in good faith, then, even if we don’t know its exact provenance. Let’s recreate the bullet points, then check off what’s already been implemented.

Pace of Game

• Pitch Timer ✔

• Limitation on Manager/Coach Mound Visits ✔

• Limitation on Pickoffs ✔

• Time Limit for Activity Between At-Bats ✔

• Start Extra Innings with Runners on Base ✔

• Mercy Rule

• No-Pitch Intentional Walks ✔

Offensive Production

• Raise Strike Zone to Top of Knee

• Limit the Number of Roster Spots Allocated to Pitchers ✔

• Limit Defensive Shifts ✔

• Allow Manager to Reset Batting Lineup in 9th Inning

Instant Replay

• Moving Crew Chief Review Back to Later in Game ✔

Nine down, three to go.

Our job today is to bicker and argue about the three proposed rule changes that remain from The iPad of Christmas Future. How awful would they be? Would they be regular-awful, or would they be a special kind of awful that would turn you into a Major League Lacrosse fan? Or could they be – stay with me here – actually good ideas?

No way to know until we bicker about it. We’ll go in the order that they appear in the picture.

Mercy Rule

First thought: No.

Second thought: Oh, hell, no.

This would be the only mercy rule in the four major North American sports, and a quick scan of Wikipedia indicates that the only sports that use some form of it at the highest levels are curling and goalball. I’m not a baseball purist by any stretch, but you’d better believe that the idea of a mercy rule makes me sink deep into a Hank Hill voice and say, “Bobby, this isn’t curling. This is baseball.”

When the world shut down in 2020, here’s one of the very first full games that MLB uploaded to YouTube:

It is, without hyperbole, one of the purest examples of baseball in the sport’s history. Between this and Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, you have the entire spectrum of the sport. The Cleveland comeback is the story of a game without a clock, a hundred cosmic tumblers clicking at once. It’s a story of perseverance, and it’s a reminder that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. It’s a game that rewarded the sickos who sat there in the officially licensed gear of a team that was losing, 14-2, in the 7th inning. There was no earthly reason for them to do this, other than they’d bought a danged ticket, so they were going to watch the danged ballgame.

From 1900 through 2022, there were 18 regular-season comebacks in games where one team led by 10 runs or more. Two of them happened in a span of four days between June 4 and June 8, 1989. Every single one of them was a gift.

However, there were 428,453 regular season games played during that span. That means there’s a roughly one-in-23,803 chance that one of these comebacks will occur in any given game. That’s a .004 percent chance, which is about the same odds of having identical triplets. You don’t see a lot of those around, so maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about the extreme outliers.

Also, consider what it costs to get to those unicorn games. We’re talking human costs, actual people and baseball players working hard in baseball games that have almost no chance to end differently. Every inning in a 10-run blowout has to be thrown by a human being, and it’s not always a giggling Brett Phillips. Sometimes it’s a pitcher, a tired pitcher, someone with ligaments and tendons that are already irritated. And if the next day’s game goes sideways, maybe he’ll have to pitch again. The drudgery of a mop-up man has a trickle-down effect that can last an entire season and spread throughout the rest of the bullpen.

Third thought: Maybe. But give the manager of the losing team the ultimate decision. Don’t make it an automatic mercy rule. Let the managers survey their bullpen, check out the upcoming schedule and do something that they’ll have to answer for and explain to reporters later.

Fourth and final thought: It’s not just about the comebacks. It’s about the major-league debuts and first hits, the potential for a diving catch that blows your mind, a player sneaking behind an umpire and tying his shoelaces together, which leads to a controversial suspension that eats up two entire news cycles. One of the best parts about the sport is that it’s constantly offering things you’ve never seen before. Fewer overall innings eliminates some of those.

What if the Cardinals were down by 10 runs when Matt Holliday got a moth stuck in his ear? We might never know the joy of stringing the words “Matt Holliday got a moth stuck in his ear” together.

Doesn’t seem worth it, when you put it like that.

Strike zone to the top of the knee

Consider the context of this one. In 2015, the Atlanta Braves hit 100 home runs. The average team hit fewer than 170 for an entire season. Strikeouts were increasing every season, and the league batting average was .254. It was a pitcher’s league in a sport that believes in what Nike was selling back in 1999. They wanted a big red button with “DINGERS” underneath it, and they wanted to mash it repeatedly. Raising the strike zone was a way to do that.

Turns out that the real answer was screwing around with the physical composition of the baseball. In 2022, the Braves hit 147 home runs … in the first half of the season. There probably doesn’t need to be an adjustment here, at least if you’re worried about home runs.

As always, beware of the law of unintended consequences. Strikeouts aren’t as exciting as balls in play, I get it, but do you know what’s incredibly boring? Walks. A large quantity of baseballs thrown outside of the strike zone. More walks won’t make the game better. Inorganically funneling more pitches into the middle of the strike zone won’t make the game better.

A strike zone without much of a bottom would lead to pitchers living (even more) at the top of the zone. This would create a generation of hitters who thrive at the top of the zone, which would create even more of a three-true-outcomes league.

I’d rather put little NASCAR-style restrictor plates in every pitcher’s shoulder that prevents them from throwing harder than 98 mph than mess with the strike zone. It seems like an era-specific overreaction that’s already aged poorly.

Reset the batting lineup in the ninth inning

Calvinball. Pure Calvinball. This one definitely came out of the mouth of an MBA who has never paid for a ticket to a baseball game in their life. Imagine watching a game for two hours, with your team up 1-0 in the top of the eighth inning. The setup man gets into trouble, though, loading the bases with two outs. Up comes Mike Trout. The crowd is on its feet, anxious and screaming, knowing that the entire ballgame hinges on every pitch. The reliever strikes Trout out on a high fastball, and he screams a guttural scream and struts into the dugout as the fans go wild.

Five minutes later, it’s Mike Trout at the plate again. Even though he made the last out of the previous inning, he does something that directly leads to your team losing.

This is double jeopardy, and it’s prohibited by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Seems like you’re against the Bill of Rights, my friend, and we don’t much care for those kinds of sentiments around here. It’s hard to express just how much I hate this idea.

However …

Here’s another thing I hate even more than the idea of resetting the batting lineup: The automatic runner at the start of every extra inning. It’s a blight on the game that allows a team to win even if they didn’t do anything right and the other team didn’t do anything wrong. In any other inning, there has to be a combination of successes or screwups. In extra innings, every team is automatically awarded a single and a stolen base, and they can win by not doing a single thing right. Squib off the end of the bat from a hitter trying to pull the ball into the seats, chopper off the plate, ballgame. A squib and a chopper shouldn’t be the only thing that a team needs to do for a win! Not unless there are stolen bases, errors, passed balls, balks, et cetera mixed in between.

So my compromise is this: No automatic runner, and let the manager reset the lineup in the 10th inning. Take my example up there, with Trout making the last out of the previous inning. Under the current rules, if this happens in the ninth inning, Trout is essentially awarded an automatic double for the start of the 10th inning.

Under my revision to the proposed rule, Trout will have to hit that double himself. It would lead to more Mike Trout (and Shohei Ohtani, and Bryan Reynolds, and Julio Rodríguez, and …) plate appearances, which leads to more fun. And it should also shorten extra-inning games, albeit in a more organic and fun way.

My first preference would be to arrest the person who came up with the automatic runner.

My second preference would be to eliminate the automatic runner.

My third preference would be to trade the automatic runner for a lineup reset in extra innings.

My fourth preference would be to become a Texans beat writer and stop watching baseball altogether.

About six or seven hundred options later, some of them below “bathing in sewage” and “eating a single piece of black licorice,” we get to resetting the lineup in the ninth inning. The very idea gives me chills.

The pitch clock is great. The rules preventing infinite pickoff throws is great. Most of the other changes are inoffensive or barely noticeable. The automatic runner is an abomination, but I can live with it.

These other three changes? They come with pros and cons, with the latter outweighing the former. I’m not a purist, but I am a curmudgeon. Let’s just sorta hang out for a while, Major League Baseball, and see if there are any more changes needed. My guess is there won’t be, and the sport can just coast by with 75 percent of the rules on that picture from 2015.

That strange, strange picture from 2015 that might have been of a wizard’s iPad.

Boy, I’d like to stick a finger through time and scroll just a little bit on that iPad. It’s going to fascinate me for the rest of my life.

(Photo of Mike Trout: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)

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