MLB: Five changes to save baseball from being boring
By Bill Felber
Major League Baseball has become too walk and strikeout-friendly; MLB needs major change and it needs it now.
Major League Baseball is in deep, serious trouble.
World Series ratings hit an all-time low in 2020. The Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers drew an average of just 9.75 million viewers, well off the previous low of 12.7 million set in 2012.
There are many reasons for this, not least of which is the coronavirus epidemic. For most of the summer, it taught us that it is possible to live without sports. We believed it.
The immersion of MLB – along with other sports – in political causes – also played a part by alienating core fans bases that hoped to tune in for a diversion from real-world cares. The young activist movements baseball hoped to placate? They were too busy with their causes to watch a silly game.
But the other systemic problem is that – and as a long-time fan it hurts to say this – baseball has become boring. Nobody would ever design a game where literally nothing happens one-third of the time, but that’s the game baseball is today.
In 2020, 66,506 hopeful batters stepped up to the plate. Nearly one-third of those batters, 21,678, either struck out or walked.
The SABRmetricians will tell you that is sound baseball strategy. Agents will tell you that strikeouts are the price you pay for swinging for the fences, which produces home runs, which produces fat contracts.
All true. And all boring. That’s what MLB has become…boring.
It wasn’t always the case. Just 20 years ago, only about one in four plate appearances ended without a ball put in play. That date, not coincidentally, roughly overlaps the introduction of SABRmetric analysis, with its emphasis on efficient offense. During most of the 20th Century, walks and strikeouts consistently combined to represent only about 20 percent of all plate appearances.
In order to make itself less boring and more interesting, baseball must change in at least a couple of fundamental ways.
We’re not talking here about legislating strategies, which ought to remain the provinces of the individual teams. But there are structural changes baseball could legislate to make itself what it used to be…a more exciting and thus more interesting game. Here are five suggestions to bring MLB back.