THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

After 20 votes, 17 think the game is perfect, even if it’s not.
20 out of 21 want to watch to the bitter end. It’s a small sample but I believe, you have a long way to go with your suggestions, Tom.

I don’t think I have a long way to go at all.

Right now, 83.3% think the game is perfect even if flawed (20 of 24).  Those people will never convert.  I am shocked at the number of Field of Dreamers who visit here.

So, of 4 people, 3 like it, and 1 is intrigued. 

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I am shocked that 92% of respondents who have watched 11 innings of regular season baseball will continue to watch the game to the end.

Regular season?!?  Don’t you guys have to drive your kids to school and go to work the next day?  How the heck do you get away with that?

In general one of the things I really like about baseball is specifically that I don’t have to watch entire games.  There are enough of them that I can put the game on, then go do something else, then come back to it, etc.  I don’t watch much TV, so if I’m home at 7 but have dinner plans at 8:30, I’ll watch the game from 7 to 8:30.  If I get home at 10 and the last 2 innings of a game are on, great.  If not, no big deal.

I rarely feel as if I HAVE to watch a game (the exception being if my favorite team is in the playoffs or playing must-win games in September).  I contrast this to football fans, who have half their weekends completely booked for about 5 months of the year.  I’d kill myself if my free time was limited in that way.

I see most baseball games as “something to have on in the background.” If turn on the TV and a game is 3-3 in the 8th, that’s great, but in general I don’t feel that strongly about watching them.

Plus, you can run the numbers, but obviously expected number of innings of any game drops off exponentially (or I guess that might be logarithmically) after 9 innings.

I think it’s great that .2% of games (or whatever) will go to 14 or 15 innings.

I think Question 5 is a little biased—the game is not perfect, but 8x8 holds little interest for me.

Re Q.3, I think the problem again is the choices—usually if I’ve watched till the 11th, I will TRY to watch to the bitter end, but I may not (indeed, I gave up on the All-Star Game this year). Still, I slightly prefer playing games out to a tie, and strongly prefer it to the runners-on approach for reasons stated elsewhere.  So I picked play it out, even though I’ll usually have to drive my kids to school and go to work the next day.

I am shocked that 92% of respondents who have watched 11 innings of regular season baseball will continue to watch the game to the end.

Regular season?!?  Don’t you guys have to drive your kids to school and go to work the next day?  How the heck do you get away with that?
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Tom, I think part of it is how you phrased the question.  After 11 innings, I’m pretty invested in the game.  If I go past 9, I’m probably in for the long haul. 

If I’m going to turn off a game, I normally turn it off as it’s going to extras (but that tends to be a game I pick up in the late innings anyway, once I’m already watching TV from bed).

I am shocked at the number of Field of Dreamers who visit here.

It’s a stretch to refer to those who are happy with the game as Field of Dreamers.  I voted the “perfect” one and I’m not at all against changing some aspects of the game even to hurry it up, but not one of these ideas intrigues me in the least bit.  Based on what choices you gave me, I voted to leave the game alone.  it just happened that choice was “perfect even if flawed.”

I’m a Cubs fan and I watch most of their games.  I don’t watch many other games unless I happen to be up late at night (west coast game).  I’m not interested in fewer innings.  That won’t increase my enjoyment of the game.  I’m not interested in getting rid of the DH. 

I’d be happiest if they played baseball all day, every day so anything that attempts to limit the amount of baseball that I can enjoy I am going to be against.  I understand there has to be a set number of games, but I’d always vote for the most number of games possible.  I’d never vote for anything that shortens the number of innings or changes how extra innings are played.  I like extra inning games.  I’m in no hurry for those to be over and I’m certainly not irritated by it. 

Present me with something that I’d be interested in and I’ll vote differently, but until you do that you haven’t proven I’m a Field of Dreamer.  You’ve only proven that your ideas aren’t as well liked around here as you’d hoped.  I have a suspicion that most people who frequent this site aren’t going to vote for less baseball.  After all, here we are in the offseason talking about baseball and I’m sure each of us would like to turn the TV on and find a game or two to watch.

I certainly don’t consider myself a “Field of Dreamer”, but I voted for the third option in the last poll.  Given those choices, it’s the one that best fits my preferences.

I don’t think that shortening baseball games or seasons is a good idea; I want more baseball.  If crappy relievers are the issue, then I would look at other possible solutions, many of which have been touched on before (reduced roster sizes, forcing pitchers to face multiple batters, restricting mid-inning pitching changes, etc.)

If time of the game is the issue, then there’s any number of other possible remedies.  I would rank 8 innings close to the bottom of those that I have seen suggested seriously.

I echo a lot of the comments seen here.  I don’t consider myself to be a purist (or “field of dreamer"), as I like having the DH in the AL and supported the Wild Card when it was proposed.

If I were commissioner, I would take more subtle steps to speed up the game (force pitchers to work faster, don’t let batters call timeout, etc).

I don’t mind the accelerated scoring proposal that puts men on base, but the way the question was asked I felt I should answer “to the bitter end” because I will watch either way.

I think the best way to work this in would be to introduce the men-on-base accelerated procedure in the 10th inning of the All-Star Game.  It beats having a tie, HR derby is a terrible idea, and this can get the fanbase used to the structure.  After it works successfully once or twice, then you could try to bring it into the regular season.

I’m not sure anyone has shown how the accelerated extra innings would improve the game.  Would more people watch?  I think that’s highly unlikely as the people who would be watching those innings are fans of baseball already.  If someone can show me how it improves the game I might agree, but nobody has done that yet.  The proposed accelerated extra innings could be just as awful as a long extra inning game is now for most people. 

I think the time of the game is a real issue.  I don’t think the time of an extra inning game is of issue at all.  Few games reach extra innings and even fewer go past 11 innings.  The reason college football went with the accelerated overtime was because they had never had an overtime and it was new just to have overtime.  More games would be concluded and that’s what everybody wants. 

I find it hard to believe that most would want the kind of extra innings Tom is talking about. 

I don’t care about the purity of the game as many call it, but I do care whether or not I enjoy the game and putting runners on base for the sake of speeding up a small number of games isn’t even a band-aid on the problem being addressed:  the time of game. 

What’s wrong with playing as is until it’s over?  I rarely read any complaints about it.  In fact, most of them that I have read come from this site.  I think you’re fighting a battle that A) few people care about and B) few people agree with.

It’s sound like Q5 deserved a 4th response, like:

“I’m intrigued by alot of change proposals, but this one doesn’t it do it for me”

Or I could have phrased the second response as “initially intrigued”.

As it is, I left too much of a gap between the possible responses.

In any case, I loved Field of Dreams, and I wasn’t trying to insult anyone.  Just surprised that “intrigued” wasn’t more of a response.  My bad.

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And like I said, stopwatches in baseball simply can’t work.

I don’t watch regular season baseball games on television so I couldn’t answer the poll questions.  I guess I’m an outlier.

TT #11 --

For someone who is not afraid to suggest pretty significant changes, I’m just curious about “stopwatches won’t work” notion.  Why not?  Wouldn’t an objective standard be easier to apply than just encouraging umpires to speed things up?  I agree it would be a change, but I don’t see why it’s impossible.

Right, I’m not afraid of significant changes, but I don’t like the entire idea of a game/shot clock like basketball and football.

It works in those sports because it’s all about going from a jog to a run.  You are in motion, things are happening, you can accelerate a little.

In baseball, the pitcher is at zero.  You don’t want him to be worried about the clock as he’s about to hurl a pitch in such a small spot, as he goes zero to 100.  It’s just too much.

For the batter, you can simply prevent him from stepping out of the box.  That’s a ridiculous thing the batters do.  Who the heck wants to see a pit stop after every pitch?

It seems that a lack of pitching seems to be behind some of the extras ideas.  Softball went to the extra runners because so many games went extras and dominant pitchers can result in many and long extra innings games.

So let’s bail out the managers who use four pitchers to get through 1-1/3 and then the game goes extras and he has top use a starter.  Back in the day you had 9 pitchers and everything was OK, now you get 12 pitchers and it isn’t since most of the relievers are incapable of picthing more than one inning.

On the stopwatch issue, what was the result of some of the college conferences instituting the pitch clock?  I don’t believe it was every fully adopted anywhere.

What about time between innings?  Used to be about 90 seconds, not it is up to 3 minutes regular season and 4 minutes in the playoffs.  90 seconds times 17 innings changes is an extra 25.5 minutes pergame in nothing happening.  Almost 42 minutes in the playoffs.

I say allow more in game advertising and bring the time between innings back to 5 pitches and let’s go!

As far as long games, if I have watched from pitch 1 I am in until the game is over and suffer from the lack of sleep.

Yes, between inning time should be shortened considerably.  That’s the one spot where you use the stopwatch.

I’d be all in favor of in-game advertising, like Fox does with their behind the plate ads.

What does this mean: “So let’s bail out the managers who use four pitchers to get through 1-1/3 and then the game goes extras and he has top use a starter. “ ?