As
I watched my Yankees hold on against the Mets tonight to finish the 2012
edition of interleague play, I had the briefest moment of mixed…feelings – to
call them emotions would probably be hyperbole. For as long as I can remember having cognizant baseball
memories – not the ones that are vague visuals that you later in life reinforce
with fact – interleague play has been a part of the game.
The
issue with interleague play, of course, is that the American League features
the Designated hitter (DH) while the National League still forces pitchers to
bat (or be pinch hit for). I could
wax historic about the aptness of this condition for thousands of words, but
that’s not the point of this post.
(2,000+ word essays on the subject available upon request). Instead, I would like to talk about
next year’s interleague play, which will in fact encompass the entire season.
Interleague play was introduced in
1997 as a way to buoy baseball, which had struggled mightily in the public’s
perception after the players’ strike in 1994. It gave fans a chance to see players that they normally
would not have the chance to watch their teams play against. Unsurprisingly, this method had evident
flaws. If you were a Cleveland
transplant to San Francisco, say, and your team came to town, instead of having
the good fortune of watching your team swing away in all its glory with David
Justice at DH, you were (mis)treated to the spectacle of aging hurler Blackjack
McDowell flailing away for an at-bat or three. (If you were real lucky, he got angry and gave the crowd the
finger.) This would happen for
about 9 games every year, and for nine other games your team would go on the
road and switch formats. If you’re
reading this and thinking that this has an element of intrigue yet at the same
time might be categorically insane, then you’re right. Imagine your favorite NFL team playing
an inter-conference game in which field goals count for four points. Or a basketball team’s inter-conference
games using different three-point arc distances based on which conference the
home team is from. It would be
chaos, not to mention a watershed moment for gambling as spreads and totals
went all to hell…but I’m rambling.
The Houston Astros are moving to
the American League West for the 2013 season, a condition of their sale to Jim
Crane in 2012. This means that
there will be 15 teams in each league, and necessitates an interleague matchup
for every slate of series, league rules dictated by the home team. For an ultra-conservative sport like
baseball, this move is massive, even if it only slightly increases the
existence of a current oddity of the sport.
One would think that the Astros’
realignment would provide a chance for baseball to end the split existence once
and for all, but of course it won’t.
To entirely give up either the pitcher batting or the DH is to remove from the
game either an intrinsic quality of its history or the chance for increased
offense, and thus increased ticket sales and viewership and revenue, etc. And in reality there are perks and
drawbacks to both systems.
Ideally, the game would combine parts of both systems to form a better,
more streamlined game. Usually,
crazy and simple ideas to revolutionize sports and other aspects of the world
are the prerogative of my hero Bill Simmons, but here I’m giving the Grantland
editor-in-chief a break, because I’ve got this one in the bag.
The best way for baseball to
compensate it’s odd-split of the divisions is to make the following
adjustment: The game begins with
all teams employing the DH, and as soon as the starting pitcher leaves the
game, the DH spot in the lineup is replaced by the pitcher. This change has a number of what I
believe are positive impacts on both the pitching and hitting sides of the
game.
1) Starters
immediately become more valuable.
The longer your starter goes, the longer you can keep your best hitters in your lineup. This would
be especially helpfully for offense-starved NL teams with good starting
pitching like the Giants and Phillies.
2) Rosters
now are usually comprised of 13 hitters and 12 pitchers. There is the off chance that some
daring teams, especially those with strong starting staffs, could go 14-11 on
this. That move would have a
twofold positive effect, as it would increase the job opportunities for
position players who have a more limited set of skills – say 2 plus-tools and
nothing more – while ridding teams of that pesky 5.00+ ERA middle reliever who
somehow makes $3 million a year while specializing in walking enough hitters to
give away any lead no matter how large.
3) A
change that I believe to be aesthetic in nature, we would likely rid
ourselves of the goddamned tiresome arm-side matchups in relief that were made (in)famous
by legendary Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa. I’m normally a stats aficionado and advocate, and I’m sure
there’s plenty of data that backs up these matchups, but consider these
contextualizations. The most
likely reason that arm-side matchups pan out so well is that the ball travels
from behind the hitter’s head into the strike zone. Moreover, lefty-versus-lefty matchups probably yield the
gaudiest numbers because there are simply far fewer left-handed pitchers in
baseball. Less exposure and less reps lead to less confidence and less production from hitters. Were the numbers
equalized, our data would be better, especially because it would not be so
heavily correlated to certain characteristics that are predetermined. In LaRussa’s tedious 'strategy' the
outcome is heavily weighted in one direction before the first pitch of the
at-bat is even thrown. That may be
strategy, and it may be playing percentages, but those numbers are miniscule at
best and ugly as hell to witness and it takes a lot of fun out of the
game. And…
4) …while
relief pitching would probably align greatly to the AL model of 1 IP per
reliever, you would still have the double-switch! Take, for example, today’s 1-0 10-inning game of futility
between the Brewers and the White Sox.
Both teams decided to have their DH hit cleanup. In this case both starters went 7+
innings, but could you imagine what happens when the Red Sox have to pull Big
Papi from the three hole after only one at-bat because Beckett gave up 7 ER in
4.1 innings? The possibilities
here could be endless and awesome.
5) Not
only that, but we might finally be able to grasp how good managers are at
actually managing. It’s kind of
the same as how we’ve come to understand that Andy Reid is a great offensive
football mind but has serious issues with the usage of timeouts. For all the advanced metrics available
in baseball, we still lack a solid way to evaluate managerial impact. This would also confirm my suspicions
that current manager of my beloved Yankees Joe Girardi is actually good at
everything else involved in baseball other than managerial decisions. (I’ve threatened to give him a
binder-colonic on more than one occasion.) Could you imagine Girardi’s face trying to decide whether to
sacrifice Jeter’s bat from the fifth inning onwards because he had his DH hit
leadoff or to let Phil Hughes continue to strikeout the side while giving up at
least one home run each inning? At
the very least, the media would have a field day second guessing managers’
moves and we could spend the time between the end of the NBA Finals and the
start of college football (i.e. summer) talking about actual sports in season
(read: baseball) instead of prognosticating the NFL season based on OTAs or
making much ado about Tweets or something.
6) This
last point is very personal to me.
This small change in the way baseball is played would revolutionize
baseball gambling. Right now, the
baseball betting market is awash in foolish pricing as books continue to set
lopsided lines based solely on the starting pitcher, forgetting in the interim
that Justin Verlander could throw 14 no-hit innings with 30 strikeouts but
there’s no way he can actually score runs to win the game. Now these lines would become a little
sharper by default. As the
starting pitcher goes deeper into the game, their respective team is able to
keep its (theoretically) best available lineup together, thus increasing their
chances of winning the game.
Alas, this is all wishful thinking, and will file it away in
a box that also contains placards for “Chicago Bears 2006 Super Bowl Champions”
and the imaginary invitation to my wedding to Emma Watson in 2015. And I’ll still keep betting against
overvalued starting pitching lines and winning. And I’ll still keep daydreaming about simple fixes to a
complex world.
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