Martin Brodeur, who officially retired last week, after twenty-two seasons in the National Hockey League, is the most accomplished goaltender in the history of the sport, but his legacy is somewhat fraught. I’m referring to the painted lines beneath the ice that form the so-called trapezoids behind every net in N.H.L. rinks today. They were instituted in 2005, after a labor dispute forced the cancellation of an entire hockey season. The league’s owners and officials, desperate to woo embittered fans, worried, as ever, that their “product” lacked sufficient scoring to hold the attention of impatient Americans. (Lest you doubt that this is a perennial concern, I direct your attention to the writing of Niven Busch, this magazine’s first hockey correspondent, who in the late nineteen-twenties complained that “goalguards are too efficient” and lamented the “stalling” tactics of defensive-minded teams.) So the N.H.L. trained its sights on Brodeur, then the two-time-reigning Vezina Trophy winner, as the sport’s chief goal suppressant. He was, it was often said, like a “third defenseman,” because he skated and stickhandled so well, in spite of those clumsy pads and that oversized goalie lumber. Not content to wait in his crease like a target dummy, Brodeur roamed the ice, ably fetching dumped pucks in the corners and springing his teammates on the transition with long passes. Just as Bobby Orr, in the nineteen-seventies, had re-imagined the defenseman’s job description, by skating the full length of the ice instead of simply rear-guarding like a soccer fullback, Brodeur, through his own ingenuity and talent, expanded the possibilities of goaltending. And the league’s shortsighted response was, in effect, to tether him to his goalposts. To the left and right of the trapezoid, goalies must not engage with the puck.

I’d been thinking about Brodeur lately, even before the retirement news, because of recent discussions surrounding the ascension of Rob Manfred as Major League Baseball’s new commissioner. Manfred has expressed an immediate openness to tinkering with his sport’s rules, in the interest of adapting the game for a new generation. Baseball’s revenues are high, but its demographics are lousy. Larry Baer, the owner of the San Francisco Giants, has said, “I think, in terms of modernizing the game, everything is on the table.” Among baseball’s presumed problems, in this context, is the recurring hockey dilemma: not enough scoring. We got rid of steroids, and now we miss the home runs. Actually, it’s more than that: we miss the hits altogether. Last year, the Mets collectively batted .239, and they weren’t even the most inept team at the plate. (The Padres hit .226!) One of several factors in this ongoing Mendozan slide has been the emergence of defensive shifts—an effective abandonment of the default positions in favor of bespoke fielding, tailored to each individual hitter. What a brilliant idea!—says this fan, at least. As with Brodeur’s innovation, the obvious question is why it wasn’t popularized sooner. (Big data helps, of course—and yes, I’m familiar with Lou Boudreau’s shift against Ted Williams, an example so iconic that it proves how marginalized the idea remained for so long.) Rearranging the fielders brings the supposed managerial chess game vividly to life, in a way that pitch counts and platoons have long failed to do. Yet the banishment of these shifts is evidently on the modernizing table, according to reports, and, with hockey’s example in mind, I’d urge baseball’s stewards to knock it off.

In hockey’s case, a decade ago, the thinking was that Brodeur’s wandering ways negated the essential, time-tested offensive strategy known as dump and chase—by effectively preëmpting the chase. (Why dump it when the goalie’s just going to retrieve it and sling it back the other way?) If other goalies copied him, the executives feared, too much time would end up being contested in the neutral zone, where scoring remains a distant thought. Compounding the problem, Brodeur’s New Jersey Devils had long excelled at a conservative defensive strategy called the neutral-zone trap, in which they more or less clogged the middle of the ice with bodies and sticks. More time in the neutral zone, less space with which to escape it: ugh. Worse still was the increasing tendency, across the league, of defensive players to impede the skating progress of offensive players through “clutching and grabbing.” Technically illegal, just like travelling in basketball, hockey’s hooking and interfering tactics had spread gradually, like a plague, with the referees’ tacit endorsement. Not only was there less space; it was as though toll booths had been set up to extract a fee for passing through. Another of the league’s proposed solutions was a no-brainer: asking the referees to enforce the written rules. And it was owing principally to this crackdown on interference that goal scoring went up by twenty per cent in the season after the N.H.L. lockout. It has since gradually declined, with goalies’ save percentages climbing to all-time highs.

Meanwhile, the analytics revolution has taken hold in hockey, too. The Devils themselves now employ a stats whiz whose background is in professional poker. And perhaps the chief insight to have emerged in the early days of Moneypuck is that dump and chase, the pride of the trapezoid, is a mostly silly strategy. Soviet-style puck possession is what’s now prized by the ascendant rink philosophers, and before this season, as if in penance, the league expanded the size of the trapezoids, allowing goalies slightly more freedom of movement. In fact, a revisionist theory holds that Brodeur may inadvertently have been helping his opponents during the first half of his career by discouraging them from dumping. So yes, please, by all means: let’s keep the neutral zone free of congestion. But the trapezoid is for naught. Strategies evolve to counter one another, and better to encourage experimentation than to calcify tradition by fiat.

Baseball’s concerns are not limited to scoring, of course. Too many games drag on well past the three-hour mark, which explains the most common intervention currently under discussion: the introduction of pitch clocks, to speed the pace along. As in hockey’s case, with clutching and grabbing, the rule forbidding baseball pitchers from napping on the mound, mid-at-bat, is already on the books. (See Rule 8.04, with its specification that no more than twelve seconds should elapse between the pitcher’s receiving the ball and throwing it again.) The umpires have just let it go, to the game’s detriment. So bring on the clocks, if need be. And as for those dwindling batting averages, let’s not overlook what the baseball writer Rob Neyer calls the “#StrikeoutScourge,” a problem not of batted balls too often landing in well-positioned mitts but of too few balls being batted at all. If forced to choose, I’d blame the proliferation of hundred-mile-an-hour relief specialists—another strategic innovation, to be sure, but one that has threatened to turn every weeknight game in June into another October marathon. A team can realign its fielders in a few seconds. Every time it changes the pitcher, we cut to commercial. Good for revenues in the short term, one imagines, but bad for the demographics.