Baseball Rule Changes

Barely did one have a chance to enjoy the start of Spring training when an article appeared in The New York Times by Victor Mather warning us that baseball was experimenting with rule changes in the independent Atlantic League this year.  These include:  robots to call balls and strikes, bases expanded to 18 inches from the current 15, allowing coaches and managers only to the mound when there is a pitching change, moving the pitching mound two feet back, disallowing infield shifts and requiring relief pitchers to pitch to at least three batters.

These proposed rules are an absurd combination of speeding up the games (fewer visits to the mound, fewer pitching changes) and encouraging more hits (no shifts, moving the pitching mound), which will encourage longer games.  In any case all these changes (including the 20-second pitch clock now being used in Spring training games) strike at the heart of what makes baseball such a beautiful game, a game that is not played against the clock.  One suggested change is reducing the time between innings and half-innings by 15 seconds, which is unlikely to happen because it would reduce income from commercials. As for the designated hitter threatened for the National League I would argue instead that it should be removed from the American League:  it ruins pitchers' arms and violates one of the beauties of baseball, the balance of being at bat and in the field.  Fortunately baseball is such a difficult and complex game and salaries have (justifiably) gotten so high that Roger Angell's suggestion that we might eventually have two sets of players on each team --one for hitting and one for fielding, as in football -- is most unlikely.

I return to my own suggestions (see my earlier posts):
1) enforce current rules, especially the one not allowing the batter to step out of the batter's box (this, combined with more complete games by pitchers, is why games were much shorter 45 years ago).

2) make the spitball legal again; this would take some the pressure off pitchers to throw as hard as they can for as long as they can and allow them to go deeper into games.

3) raise the mound back to 15 inches and expand the strike zone to what it was in the 60's, from the shoulders to the knees; this would cut down on boring home runs and encourage hitters to "put the ball in play" (as Reggie Jackson said from the Yankees booth this spring), as well as learning to "hit 'em where they ain't" to defeat the shift.