Written by Sam Miller at ESPN.com
Every few months since he took over as commissioner, Rob Manfred has floated some idea for making baseball more exciting. The challenge, though, is that there’s one thing he can’t change: the players’ incentives. They want to win. They exist to win. There is no sport without players trying single-mindedly to win.
That drive is the most relentless force in the sport, the gravity of baseball pulling everything toward it. It’s beyond the league’s control, more powerful than money, more powerful than entertainment, and totally non-negotiable.
Thirty owners walk into a room, intent on making baseball more exciting in an era when surging strikeouts slow the game but are seen as sound strategy.
What happens next?
At a meeting of the clubs of Major League Baseball, held on March 31, 2017:
RESOLUTION: Acknowledging how crazy it is that Ian Kennedy had a higher strikeout rate in 2016 than Bob Gibson had in his very best strikeout season, and doing something about it finally.
WHEREAS, the league’s strikeout rate continues to climb, having in 2016 surpassed eight per game for the first time, the ninth year in a row that the league has broken its previous record;
WHEREAS, the league’s pitchers have chosen a defensive strategy that is centered on getting strikeouts by throwing hard or inducing batters to chase pitches out of the zone, while the league’s batters have chosen a walks-and-homers offensive strategy that is largely tolerant of strikeouts, creating a competitive vortex in which strikeouts might theoretically continue to rise unabated if the league’s governing body doesn’t step in to save the sport from ballplayers’ short-sighted strategic decisions;
WHEREAS, this emphasis on homers, walks and strikeouts has great and aesthetically unwelcome ramifications on baseball play generally, leading to less base stealing, fewer opportunities for defensive excellence, more pitching changes and far more pitches thrown;
WHEREAS, this last bit, the pitches thrown, is among the biggest causes of baseball’s so-called Pace Of Play Problem;
WHEREAS, in 2016, the average plate appearance took 3.87 pitches, a record, up .05 pitches from 2015 and up almost .30 pitches per plate appearance since 1988, an extra 22 pitches per game, all because baseball players don’t care how boring they are, they only want to win;
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