Major League Baseball made numerous rule changes this year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the truncated regular season, some of which may stick around into next year. I’ve already written about why I don’t want to see the super-expanded playoffs continue into 2021, but I have opinions — as always — on some of the other rule changes as well, starting with the DH coming to the National League.
Advertisement
I’ve long supported the universal designated hitter because pitchers can’t hit and I am not here to watch players try to do things they can’t do; I go to the ballpark, and I turn on the TV, to watch the best players in the world do amazing things. Pitchers hit a collective .128/.159/.163 in 2019, with 431 sacrifice bunts — the most boring fucking thing that can happen in a baseball game — so they made outs in 86 percent of their trips to the plate that year. Nobody comes home from a game and raves about the easy outs the pitchers made at the plate.
There are two common arguments against the universal DH, both of them, in my view, fallacious. One is the appeal-to-nature argument that somehow excusing pitchers from hitting means they’re only doing “half” of their jobs, which falsely assumes that the rules of baseball, where all players must both take turns at bat and play a position in the field, were written by God on the third tablet that Moses dropped when he came down from Mount Sinai. Baseball is a game, like football or Catan, with rules made up by humans, and there is nothing sacred about them. They can and should be changed over time, especially since the people playing baseball today are both larger and more skilled than those who played the game in the 1800s, before there was even an American League and it could require four strikes for a strikeout and nine balls for a walk. The average fastball velocity has been creeping up for decades, and we have more pitchers throwing 100+ than ever before.
Remember how pitchers in 2019 made outs in 86 percent of their plate appearances? That’s higher now than it was in the last year before the DH came to the American League, when the figure was 83 percent. Pitchers are getting worse at hitting, probably because pitchers are getting better at pitching. With strikeout rates of full-time hitters increasing, there’s no rational reason to think pitchers, who barely get to spend any time working on hitting as a skill and get far fewer chances to face live pitching in games, will ever get any better as hitters. Being a pitcher is, in and of itself, a full-time, time-consuming job, even on days when you’re not going to the mound, leaving relatively little time to work on improving as hitters — and that’s before we even consider the risk of injury that most teams don’t want to endure.
The second argument usually involves the word “strategery,” repeated like a mantra, that falls apart under scrutiny. The idea goes that managers in the NL have to do more thinking when the automatic out comes to the plate, deciding whether to pull the pitcher for a pinch-hitter or accept the out so the pitcher can stay in the game. That’s wrong, to be kind, because the “decision” is usually pretty obvious. You never let a reliever bat, you nearly always pull a pitcher if he’s thrown 100 pitches or turned the other lineup over three times (now twice for many teams), you use a pinch hitter in high-leverage spots, etc. It’s increasingly rare that a manager has an actually difficult decision to make — and teams now have extensive R&D departments to make those strategy moments largely rote.
Advertisement
Instead, MLB has to ask what produces a better on-field product, and that’s clearly a universal DH. It removes automatic outs from National League lineups, increasing offense, and gives successful hitters a chance to stay in the league a little longer (or a lot longer, in the case of David Ortiz or Edgar Martinez, without whom the recent history of baseball would be much poorer). It also means we are less likely to see starting pitchers removed while they’re still effective just to get the better hitter up in a high-leverage spot. Pitching changes would be dictated by pitching considerations — the score, the base-out state, the upcoming batter(s), the pitcher’s pitch count, the times through the order — rather than by something as irrelevant as the pitcher’s time to bat. The union would certainly want to keep the universal DH, as it means a few more high-paying jobs, so there are no stakeholders involved who should oppose it other than fans who want to appeal to the so-called purity of a game that looked very different eighty or a hundred years ago.
There were other rule changes this year that I could do without, not least of which is the runner on second in extra innings. I do understand the philosophy behind it — it should reduce reliever usage by shortening games — but in the small sample of 2020 and a slightly larger sample of seeing it in the minors in 2019, it looks like starting any inning with a runner on second base is simply too strong a temptation for managers to go small ball, and small ball is just not appealing baseball. Making outs on purpose is usually bad strategy, but it’s also ugly. Nobody goes to the ballpark to watch someone ground out to the right side on purpose, and nobody comes home from watching a game to rave about that tremendous bunt a hitter dropped in the 10th inning.
I’ll admit to a small purity argument of my own on this rule, although I don’t think it’s a compelling argument for reverting to the old rules on extra innings: There’s something extremely annoying about a runner scoring without a batter actually reaching base to do so, and charging the pitcher with a run allowed (unearned, but the earned/unearned distinction is itself a bogus one because errors themselves are so subjective) for such a phantom runner. It’s statistical asymmetry and I can’t abide it.
The rule requiring teams to use relievers to face at least three batters, rather than the previous one, is a mixed bag, and I think I’d rather see it reduced to two, which would achieve the main purpose of the original rule (eliminating batter-by-batter pitching changes to try to retain the platoon advantage each time) without excessively tying managers’ hands. Left-handed batters did face fewer lefties this year; the percentage of their plate appearances against left-handed pitchers dropped from 23.9 percent in 2019 to 22.7 percent in 2020. That didn’t lead to more production in 2020, as offense was down overall, but in theory it should over time as hitters have the platoon advantage more often. Managing for the platoon advantage isn’t the problem, of course — it’s the time wasted on mid-inning pitching changes, which is itself the manifestation of another problem (notably the fact that we have to go to commercial every time there’s a change) — but I think the net result of this rule change is positive for the sport.
Then there’s roster expansion, which was in the cards for 2020 anyway, with active rosters increasing from 25 to 26 with a maximum of 13 pitchers, later augmented again due to COVID-19. I’m for the larger rosters as long as we cap the number of pitchers, for the same reason I think a three- or two-batter minimum for relief pitchers is a positive: Fewer pitchers on the roster would mean fewer pitching changes, and in this case would encourage more teams to develop long relievers (anyone capable of going more than three outs per appearance). The starter/one-inning reliever paradigm was never efficient for pitcher development; it may have been efficient for winning games, although we don’t have much of a control for that experiment. The idea that pitchers could either go six innings every five days, or could go one inning and do it multiple days in a row, with no other role available to them, seemed like awfully rigid thinking. Why couldn’t there be a pitcher who could pitch at his peak abilities for three innings (nine outs) and do so two or three times a week? Should the goal of player development be to fit square pitchers into two predefined roles, or to find out each pitcher’s skillset and durability, and then design a role around him?
Advertisement
Expanding MLB benches would also allow managers to use more of that same strategery that people who say they oppose the DH like to cite. We would see more pinch-hitters, more pinch-runners, more defensive replacements, and even more platoons, all of which would tend to increase run-scoring and also, speaking subjectively here, make baseball more interesting. Maybe MLB can use some of these rule changes to keep offense up while simultaneously deadening the Happy Fun Ball.
It’s important for all of us, myself included, to bear in mind that Major League Baseball’s ultimate goal when changing any of its rules is not fan satisfaction, maintaining purity, or improving the game’s aesthetic value. MLB exists to make money, the sooner the better. They make a lot of it, and sometimes they even share a little with the players who are the actual product. The players do get to weigh in on rule changes, which is one important check on MLB’s power, but they, too, are motivated by money. If changing a rule will create more revenue for the sport, it will create more profit, and owners will do it. That will probably drive the universal DH and expanded playoffs going forward. It may even lead to the extra-innings rule becoming permanent if owners think that it reduces pitcher injuries (or maybe it just costs more to keep the lights on after beer sales have stopped). We can argue about what makes something “real baseball” all we want, but money will be the deciding factor.
(Photo of Nelson Cruz: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)
