Philadelphia Phillies: Joe Girardi shares view on three-batter rule

Philadelphia Phillies manager Joe Girardi is not a fan of Major League Baseball’s new three-batter minimum rule and he has no problem making it known.

The three-batter minimum rule is preposterously stupid and Philadelphia Phillies manager Joe Girardi wants everyone to know that.

Girardi even went so far as to say that it’s “the dumbest rule that we’ve ever put in”.

And he’s absolutely right.

The rule was enacted in an effort by Major League Baseball in order to speed up the pace of games. Baseball catches a lot of heat for the length of its games, with an average nine-inning game lasting over three hours. It’s a popular concern to raise when thinking of ways to bring new fans into the game.

But the beauty of the game is that it has no clock. You can’t dribble the ball out with a lead. You can’t run the ball constantly to keep the clock rolling. The game is over when the winning team earns all 27 outs and no sooner. Baseball will never be the fastest game in the world and that’s perfectly ok. It’s part of the charm.

And the three-batter minimum rule essentially does nothing to cut major time off the final game length. The rule requires that a reliever entering the game must either face three batters or finish an inning before being removed from the game. Major League Baseball believed that limiting bullpen moves would lead to quicker games.

It didn’t.

In 2019, before the rule was enacted, the average MLB game time was three hours and ten minutes. In 2020, the first year that the rule was in place, the average game time was three hours and nine minutes. Major League Baseball shaved an entire minute off the average game. It was as close to inconsequential as a rule change could possibly be.

But that’s not entirely the point Girardi made. His concerns are about “changing the strategy of the game”. And that’s exactly what it did. The “lefty specialist” is almost completely pointless now. Any manager worth his salt can stagger a lineup to ensure that a left-handed reliever can’t exploit three favorable matchups in a row. And the opposing manager will now think twice before going to his lefty reliever knowing that the risk-reward decision of trying to exploit a left-handed batter has tipped decisively towards risk.

And many of those lefty specialists are going to be out of a job. Why would a team sign a left on left only guy to a contract when the stars have to be perfectly aligned to utilize him? It’s inefficient roster construction, and teams are all about efficiency in this day and age.

But the biggest problem is that Major League Baseball is giving managers parameters on how they’re allowed to deploy their team. Managers should be allowed to make whatever decision they want. If they want to use a reliever to get one batter out, that’s entirely their right to do so. Just like it’s their right to put four people in the outfield or have their third baseman closer to the first baseman that their second baseman. It’s their roster, and they should be able to decide how best to use it.

Nobody likes the three-batter minimum rule. It takes jobs away from lefty pitchers. It forces managers into bad situations. And it does literally nothing to speed up the game.

It should be abolished and never mentioned again.