from Amazon
Monday, July 11, 2011
Should we go to 3-balls and 2-strikes?
"Two strikes, you’re out.” That seems like baseball-blasphemy.
You never (as in ever) get an NFL game where a 3rd down is mistaken for a 4th down. Or not knowing how many yards for a 1st down. Even 12-men on the field gets called for a penalty. Or too many men on the ice in hockey. Even the clock is corrected to the second. Counting, it seems, is easy. Basically, it’s important to the referees, and the players, that the things that can be counted are counted perfectly. Not mostly perfectly, like Intel did once. But perfectly perfect.
But, what if it’s not easy? What if you get 3-ball walks and 5-ball walks? Some players forget about 2 or 3 outs, but at least that gets corrected immediately. But to not correct the ball or strike count, where all the umpires and an entire team did not catch the mistake? This happens a few times every year.
Doesn’t that imply some problem? Is it possible that the 4-3 system is… outdated? The take rate on first pitches is huge: 70% of all first pitches are takes. On every other count, other than 3-0, the take rate is 25% to 60%. Seeing that 0-0 is neutral, we’d expect that take rate to be in-between. Instead, the first pitch is a “feeler” pitch, on both sides. Is this really needed?
Basically, you are starting both sides at 1-1. The problem here is that this benefits the pitcher much more than the hitter. Run scoring will drop by 10%. So, that’s a huge impact.
So, we have a situation here where that first pitch is treated differently, and probably because you can go deep in the count, and because you can have so many pitches, rarely (but it happens), people forget how many pitches were thrown.
But, what would happen if you start everyone at a 1-1 count? Does that all of a sudden make it “not baseball”?