A Philadelphia sportswriter has come up with a batch of new MLB Big Ideas, and the most radical of the three proposed is actually quite intriguing.
Now that Dr. Fauci has weighed in on the matter of MLB baseball in 2020 – he thinks it could happen in empty stadiums – it’s time to expand our bank of MLB Big Ideas. And the first significant contributor to that pile of new notions is Inquirer.com’s David Murphy.
Inquirer.com seems to be recycling material about baseball at this point, and thus included Murphy’s Apr. 7 op-ed about “radical” ideas for baseball in the April 16 print edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. For this, I’m grateful since the only other big baseball news is that some guy in Taiwanese baseball has apparently come flying out of the starting gates this season with four homers and seven RBI in his first two games.
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In any event, Murphy’s contribution to MLB Big Ideas are as follows, in order of ascending radicality:
- Since there will be no minor league baseball when MLB starts, presumably later this year, why not have practice squads comprising the best 25 minor leaguers on each team. Five of them would be eligible to play in any MLB game played by the parent club. It’s not clear how often Murphy sees those five players changing.
- Eliminate the final three innings of each MLB game – well, maybe the final two – enabling evening double-headers. This is because the final three innings of most MLB games are “like watching the nightly exploits of your average house cat.”
- (With a loud MLB Big Ideas drumroll): Allow star players “to get to bat each inning.” Now, it’s unclear if Murphy considered one player per team per game here, but let’s leave the notion of one player a game batting nine times in a nine-inning contest on the table, and let’s think about this for a minute.
Another sentence in Murphy’s essay reads, “in terms of logistics, it would be as easy as allowing managers to hit from the top of the lineup each inning,” so maybe this ideas guru doesn’t mean to limit that recurring star batter to one a game.
Hmm. Putting aside all the blood on the floor from MLB traditionalists’ heads that just exploded, maybe starting with batters 1-2-3 again and again would soon become as tedious as all those relief pitchers who bother Murphy so badly.
Moreover, wouldn’t the power dynamic in the game shift radically with such repetition? Wouldn’t each team simply try to load up with the best three hitters possible every year if this were a permanent change?
Early on in his piece, Murphy suggests his changes would be a one-season thing, as an experiment perhaps, but let’s imagine his most radical suggestion as a building block for a permanent change.
What’s actually wrong with the idea of one Designated Repeater per game?
With Mike Trout batting nine times a game, the Los Angeles Angels might finally get over the mediocrity hump.
But wait – wouldn’t Trout wear out quickly that way? No problem – he and Anthony Rendon can rotate. Or maybe there would be a rule allowing the DR to become another player after five innings.
The best part of this notion is that it would very likely generate a whole bunch of other MLB Big Ideas that would befuddle the analytics guys for months. What would be the best way for a team to approach a situation in which one player could bat again every inning with the proviso that he could be replaced at some point?
At the very least, this notion could distract the computer boys from the dumbest of their MLB Big Ideas, the launch angle.