Baseball's Problem I recently finished "Speed Kills," an excellent article in the March 30, 2015 issue of Sports Illustrated about pitching improvements outpacing hitting improvements. And the author sees no end in sight. I knew that strikeouts were up and offense down, but I hadn't ever really thought about why. The article explains the trend as being driven by the application of a much better understanding of pitching physiology that leads to faster pitches and pitches that look the same for the first 20 feet out of the pitcher's hand. Defensive shifts also increase the challenge for the hitter. Physiologically, there's not really anything that can be done to help hitting catch up to the faster, more disguised pitching. Reaction time is reaction time. The game's in trouble. It's no surprise that I'm a soccer nut. But make no mistake, I love baseball. I don't love watching baseball, mind you. But I love the idea of baseball: its slow pace, its nod to summer, its history. It's a great American game (I just don't like to watch it). So I worry for its future. With all of the talk about speeding up the game via pitch clocks and the like, the bigger problem is the lack of offense. A 3-hour game would be fine if there was a fair amount of hitting, running, and scoring. I'm not sure what baseball should do to fix this. There doesn't appear to be a way for batters to keep pace physiologically. That leaves rule changes. But in a game anchored to its history, which rules do you change (and which ones would word)? Lower the mound? Add distance from the pitching rubber to the batter's box/home plate? Shrink the strike zones? Make the ball livelier? Make the ball slower? Change the rules for pitching substitutions? Just about all of these ideas tear at the fabric of the game. Or, at least, its history and its ability to look at statistics across eras. So what does baseball do? Oh, and if you were hoping that this was one of those blog posts with a killer answer at the end, it's not. |