How to fix baseball

A rule change that would transform the game, plus my weekly shareables: Lost paintings, raccoon dogs, and a movie about Tetris

Tuesday night’s championship game of the World Baseball Classic featured one of the great showdowns in baseball history. Shohei Ohtani, pitching for Japan, faced Mike Trout, hitting for the United States, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and Japan up a run. You can make a case that Ohtani and Trout are the two best baseball players in the world. Ohtani is a modern unicorn, the first real two-way player in decades, a pitcher with a 100-mph fastball AND a power hitter whose home runs sound off like rifle shots. Trout is one of the great all-around players of all time; even though he has battled injuries the past few years, he’s already a sure Hall of Famer. To add a layer of drama, they’re teammates in the major leagues on the Los Angeles Angels. So this might have been the only chance we’ll ever get to see them face off in a game.

Here’s how it turned out:

I was trying to think about the last time there was a single at-bat with so much star power and so much on the line. My friend Joe Posnanski, the best baseball writer on the planet, could probably come up with several—he has a book coming out on the greatest moments in baseball history (preorder now!)—but the last one I could think of was when Bob Welch faced Reggie Jackson in Game 2 of the 1978 World Series.

And even that one’s not quite the same … Reggie was a huge star at the time, but Welch was just a rookie. My larger point is this: To come up with a decent comp for Ohtani v. Trout, I had to go back 45 years. And that points to what I think is baseball’s biggest flaw.

I have an idea how to fix that flaw.

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You might know that the Major League Baseball has made some big changes for the upcoming season. Joe’s got the full scoop on that, but here’s the basics: There’s now a clock for both pitchers and hitters to speed up the game. Defenses can’t shift an infielder to the other side of the field to load up against pull hitters. The bases themselves are slightly bigger in hopes that those few inches will tempt players to steal more bases.

I’m not sure I love all the moves—I’ll have to see how the pitch clock works before I make a judgment. But I do love that baseball is trying SOMETHING. Baseball games are too long and too predictable. It’s a game of home runs and strikeouts and not much in between. Baseball is best when there’s a mix of styles—slap hitters and speed guys and bombers, flame-throwers and corner-painters and junkballers. Maybe these new rules will bring some of that mix back.

But the biggest problem with baseball, I think, is rooted in good intentions. Baseball has a batting order. After one player hits, eight other players get to take a turn before the first player comes up again. It’s a civilized method. It’s a great game for kids because everybody gets a chance. But it often removes the best hitters from the biggest moments of the game.

In the majors, the starting pitchers are already long gone by the time the endgame rolls around. Even the best starters are lucky to go seven innings these days. Every good team now has a fusillade of relievers who can put their all into every pitch because they’re only going to face one or two batters. So they all throw fastballs like bullets and sliders that break like a teenager’s heart.

That’s hard enough for a team’s best hitter to face. But in the late innings of a close game, because batters have to take turns, that pitcher often ends up facing the worst hitters in the lineup. Sure, a manager can pinch-hit, but that sometimes means taking your best defensive players off the field. And you can’t pinch-hit for everybody. So at the very moment a team needs its best hitter up there, they often have to send up somebody who’s overmatched.

Other sports don’t have this problem. The Golden State Warriors can give Steph Curry the ball every time down the stretch and dare you to stop him. If the Kansas City Chiefs are driving for the lead in the fourth quarter, the ball is in Patrick Mahomes’ hands every play. He doesn’t have to take turns with the backup quarterback. The best players get to make the game-deciding plays.

Which is why I would make one more rule change in baseball: In the eighth and ninth innings, a team can send up any batter they want.

In those last two innings, the batting order goes away. The manager could send up any of the starters or somebody off the bench without having to substitute on defense. It would literally disrupt the order of things, which is hard for a sport so bound to its old ways. But at its core, it simply allows baseball to do what every other sport does: give its best players the chance to win the game.

It would absolutely lead to more rallies and comebacks and late-inning drama. It would also make managers come up with new ways to deploy their pitchers. And it would definitely create more showdowns. That smoke-throwing reliever playing the Angels wouldn’t get to breeze through the bottom of the order in the ninth. He’d have to beat Mike Trout. Or Shohei Ohtani. Or maybe both.

(As those of you who follow baseball know, the Angels have been mediocre despite having Trout and Ohtani in the lineup. One byproduct of this rule could be that a couple of transcendent stars might be able to carry a team.)

I think you could apply the rule to pitchers, too. It would probably be too much of an injury risk to bring a starter back in the game to get the last out. But I don’t see any reason you couldn’t swap relievers in and out to get favorable matchups.

There’s no reason, beyond tradition, why the game’s best hitters shouldn’t be part of the game’s best moments. Baseball has finally made it to a place where it’s willing to try new things. I’m guessing a lot of people in MLB saw Ohtani v. Trout and wished something like that had happened in the World Series. This is how you make it happen.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My weekly for WFAE was about the wrongness of piling debt on top of school kids’ lunches.

2. Speaking of WFAE, today is the last day of our spring fund drive—do your good deed for the day and donate. (Even if you read this after the fund drive’s over, we’ll be happy to take your money.)

3. Eli Saslow is my current pick for best journalist in America. His stories go into our deepest divides and show complicated people trying to do the right thing. He recently moved from the Washington Post to the New York Times, and his first piece for the Times, on a Phoenix sandwich shop surrounded by a homeless camp, shows all that nuance and empathy.

4. My friend Joshua Needelman has a wild story on a painter named Bradford Boobis and the artwork that vanished when he died. (The best part about this story is that it’s not really about Bradford Boobis.)

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: You might have learned about raccoon dogs in the recent stories about the origin of the COVID virus. Turns out that raccoon dogs are neither raccoons or dogs.

6. A perfect story for March Madness: tall people who do not play basketball and are tired of you asking. This reminded me of Mr. Lee, my seventh-grade teacher, who always got roped into playing in the student-faculty basketball game because he was 6-7. He was terrible.

7. Speaking of March Madness: The star of this year’s men’s tournament is a 5-8 point guard from Kansas State named Markquis Nowell. Last night he set the NCAA record for assists in a tournament game. Here’s the highlight reel. Make sure to stick around for that last alley-oop.

8. The 40 Watt, the legendary Athens nightclub where I spent so much of my college years, has added a new type of show: pro wrestling.

9. I learned from this story that there are upcoming movies about the invention of Tetris, the Blackberry, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

10. Bono and the Edge did an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Pretty damn cool.
    

    
    

    See y’all next week, everybody.