Rob Manfred Has Confused Pace Of Play And Entertainment Value

All baseball fans have at least one friend who just isn’t buying this hardball stuff. These people might like other sports, but they just don’t have much tolerance for baseball.

When you press these people about why they don’t care for baseball, the most common answer (at least in my own limited experience) is that they find the sport “boring.” Generally, when asked to clarify, they’ll talk about the downtime between pitches, the lack of physical action, and a perception that a 162-game regular season makes any individual game pretty much meaningless when weighed against the “you can’t lose, ever” feel of college football.

It is this mentality of baseball losing fans that has prompted commissioner Rob Manfred to push, over his tenure, for sweeping changes to baseball’s pace of play. This year, that pace of play issue has cleared up something we’ve long lamented: The lost time in ballgames due to intentional walks.

Now, to give a batter a free pass, a manager—not the pitcher, not the catcher, the manager—can signal the umpire, who then just sends the batter to first. The actual process of intentionally walking a player has been skipped. As there were over nine hundred of these during the course of the 2016 season, the thinking is that this can really add up.

The problem is that Rob Manfred’s entire strategy to revitalize baseball’s supposedly lost generation of fans revolves around making games faster. He has equated the word “boring” with “slow,” at no point worrying about the actual entertainment value of a game of baseball, as though that were secondary to the time investment.

This is the third change Manfred has made to the game in the interest of speeding things up. Two years ago, rules were implemented that limited the amount of lost time between innings and prevented batters from stepping out of the box during an at bat. The average time of a baseball game has dropped, albeit slightly, in the wake of these changes.

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If it were up to me, there would be a change in intentional walks, but it would not have been this change. I would have eliminated the IBB in much the opposite way. No, this change would not speed up games, in fact it would slow things down at times. It would, however, make the sport a bit more entertaining.

Suppose that the intentional walk as we remember it being thrown to Bryce Harper and Barry Bonds were simply made illegal. That is to say, suppose the catcher standing up and leaving the batter’s box to receive an intentional walk was considered illegal. This would mean that, if you want to pitch around Bryce Harper, you have to pitch around the guy. Four pitches, and I mean real ones. Let one hang? Too bad. Airmail one and send any runners on base down the line? Too bad.

According to Baseball-Reference, there were about 930 intentional walks in the 2016 season. That’s nine hundred and thirty or so plate appearances, and not one of them had a shred of drama or interest. Just free passes all around. Let’s say each intentional walk averages about 45 seconds (I’m basing this off of some basic research on a Sunday morning). The commissioner of Major League Baseball just saved the league, oh, about 700 minutes over the course of a season.

Of course, there are 2,430 games on a Major League schedule all told. When you factor that in, this move just saved…oh, about seventeen seconds per game.

So, what would you rather have if you were the type of person bored by baseball: More tense at bats for the league’s best power hitters, or games that are about seventeen seconds shorter?

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The most entertaining part of baseball has always been undermined by the intentional walk. There is no ballplayer who draws more attention than the power hitter. Think of your favorite team if you have one. Of the three biggest figures in their history, I bet at least one hit home runs. Offhand, I can’t think of a franchise for whom this would not be true.

Home run hitters are stars. They own the spotlight at home games. Rival fans, deep down, enjoy the experience of getting to root against that guy. Intentional walks have limited these players for a long time. What is more entertaining, more gripping, or more memorable than a power hitter coming to bat in a high leverage situation?

I’ve never liked the intentional walk. It might be an inherited trait. I remember my father yelling “GUTLESS” at Tom Glavine when the pitcher would walk a Pittsburgh Pirate in those two straight NLCS battles. Nothing profane, nothing you couldn’t share in a column, but gutless stuck with me. It was, of course, good baseball for the Hall of Fame pitcher to not pitch to Barry Bonds with a runner in scoring position. Not pitching to Barry Bonds was, for most of Bonds’ career, considered a winning strategy.

It was also boring. Bonds owns the record for intentional walks, and for good reason. Many good reasons, in fact, some of which may reflect poorly on the man. Intentional walks can take a player out of a game. Joe Maddon opened last season by having the Cubs essentially protest the existence of Bryce Harper, walking him constantly. Again, smart move. Not pitching to Bryce Harper is often preferable to pitching to Bryce Harper. It was the baseball equivalent to Hack-A-Shaq, except even that was more fun to watch because we got to see the adventure that was the Big Nickname trying to make a free throw.

Under these new rules, if you walk somebody as often as the Cubs walked Harper in that early series, we would hardly get to see that player at all over the course of a weekend. Again, these are the most entertaining and often most marketable players in baseball. Growing up, people had posters of baseball players, and those players were usually guys who hit home runs. The 1998 home run chase, whatever you think of it now, turned baseball upside-down for a reason. Everyone digs the long ball. Conversely, we also love the big strikeout, the “Casey At the Bat” moment where the big star goes down swinging to a wily pitcher.

More of these matchups will make baseball less boring. Rather than trying to figure out how to get there, we have now made it so the big hitters are on screen even less than they were before. That might not help.

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When was the last time you heard somebody say that they thought the movie Goodfellas was boring because it took longer than the average movie? Chances are, you haven’t heard somebody say that. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King had an ending sequence that felt like it lasted an hour. It won best picture and deserved it. I’m writing this on a Sunday morning. The Oscars are tonight. Movies being entirely about entertainment, a lesson might be learned from the fact that a movie being long does not necessarily turn off an audience in and of itself. There are exciting movies with nearly two hundred minutes of runtime, and boring movies that are in and out in ninety.

In a baseball context, a lot of people would find a 1-0 game boring, unless it’s a duel of two power pitchers. That’s also generally the quickest possible baseball game. A 1-0 game without many strikeouts is over in less time than it takes to watch Inglourious Basterds. The problem is, of the two, the latter is far more exciting and potentially involves better baseball swings.

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One of the biggest problems with the pace of play issue is that the things that really drive the length of a baseball game upward are all things we agree have improved the game.

One-out relief specialists might add more time to a baseball game than anything else. The eighth inning reliever parade pioneered by Tony La Russa slows ballgames to an utter crawl, but removing them from the game would be a complete nonstarter as it should be. Mound visits can be limited, but not eliminated. Only tennis can do instant replay without costing time, though I fail to see why baseball couldn’t use a similar system for fair/foul calls. Perhaps if we didn’t need to go to World War II-style field phones for every review, things would be a bit quicker, but that’s an issue of security.

This again speaks to the commissioner having the right mindset but poor execution. Trying to respond to critics who say the game is “boring” might not be bad for the sport. If we could convert that type of person, it would only help the old ball game. However, simply harping in on the pace of play will not do that, in part because the way baseball is played means there’s not all that much you can do to speed up a game.

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At pretty much every point in baseball’s history, somebody was punching keys somewhere about how the game is losing popularity, and how baseball is dying. More often than not, these articles highlight children, and suggest that younger people just don’t care about baseball anymore. Of course, these days we have some data to back things up, and ratings and marketing data will be cited in a way that reminds me of being back in college.

It’s difficult to imagine pace of play being the culprit behind this supposed dip in interest among younger people. Football games generally run well over three hours at a time, and the NFL remains king. The NBA continues to see their league gain in how much interest people pay to it, yet basketball games in the final two minutes can slow to a near-intolerable crawl and that’s simply how the game has always been.

Pace of play is a problem for the public golf course, where a slow foursome that likes to put little wagers on every hole can diminish the experience a bit for every group stuck behind them.

Maybe baseball could stand to be more exciting if it wants to appeal to new audiences. It’s just that excitement will not come from rules designed to make the game seventeen seconds faster.