1) Institute full instant replay and computerize the strikezone - I can agree with that. You could also just train umpires with it for a year so that they all called the same game because the system would retrain their strikezone judgment, then grade them on their usage of that new zone. We don't use pressure pads or lasers to determine when someone grazes the out-of-bounds line in football, but they do a LOT to try to get the call right.
There's more baseball can do w/r/t balls and strikes for sure.
2) Institute the aggressive drug-testing policies used by the IOC for screening our olympic champions - not a big deal to me, especially since I think what's illegal now will be on cornflakes in 20 years, but we'll see.
3) We need a salary floor - 100% agreed.
4) Expand the game by the addition of two more teams - disagree. Details on the other thread. The other stuff on this list needs to come first.
5) Expand the playoffs - agreed, but not the way you want to do it. 2 extra teams, one extra best-of-three wildcard round, followed by the 5 game divisional and the 7 game Championship and World Series rounds. 7 game early playoff series are boring, and take away from the longer ones that matter. Personally I think best-of-five is the most exciting format, but I understand mileage varies.
I'd also be fine with the 154 game format, FWIW, but I don't expect it.
And I still think you left off #6: Pitch clock/batter's box clock.
The stepping off, adjusting crap in the box, step in, pitcher thinks about it, looks at first, looks back at the catcher, goes back through the signs again, checks second, checks first again, batter holds up a hand for time...
It's gotta stop. Yes, baseball goes by its own rhythm. But you can have that rhythm without making the games go at a snail's pace. The fact that a pitch may never be thrown to home in a 2-3 minute span is crazy, and bores TV watchers to tears.
The game has to be more TV friendly. There's so much excitement in some of the individual plays of baseball that getting to those plays shouldn't be so arduous. Just give a team 1-3 warnings a game or whatever, then start awarding balls for delayed pitches and strikes for excess trips out of the batter's box. Speed the thing up, let observers KNOW there will be a throw by the pitcher in X seconds (I'd limit throws to first too, but we all know that's not gonna happen) and have at it. There doesn't need to be a clock or anything in the stadium, either. The Ump can have a stopwatch, that way he gets to make the call.
The boys in blue can always use more stuff to do. Especially when it makes the game more watchable.
~G
We need to do five things to fix this game. Five things. That's it. Cool, no? :) Here I will lay out my plan for fixing what ails baseball, in order from the smallest proposals to the biggest ones.
1) Institute full instant replay and computerize the strikezone, but give the umpire the call (put a beeper in his ear that tells him ball from strike and let him make the call on the field in case the system fails). I've heard just about enough crotchety geezers telling me that the game is better with unfair umpiring. That's bubkus and we ALL know it. Making the game fair does not remove the "human element" any more than increasing the number of umpires did. They'll still have all the calls...they'll still have the power they did before...limit managers to three challenges per contest and fine panagers who protest a call and have it turn up in the ump's favor. Also...we need to abandon this idea of the umps leaving the field and consulting via telegraph wire with the official MLB office who apparently receive the footage approximately forty days after it occurs. Show the replay on the jumbotron and make the call on the field or have one umpire EXTRA per game (HEY UMPS...MORE JOBS!!!!!) sitting in the press box with the video footage...he can make the call immediately.
2) Institute the aggressive drug-testing policies used by the IOC for screening our olympic champions. Why baseball has resisted this while even the meat-heads that run/play football have not is beyond me. Current drug-testing standards are certainly better than they were, but equally certainly don't catch everything. We need to restore fan confidence - that's the bottom line. Even now, you hear a lot of fans on the fence about whether to invest in baseball grumbling about how X player probably roids it up and how much that bothers them. I, personally, have no moral beef with steroid use. I think better living by chemistry is a good thing. Steroids are bad only because they have negative health impacts later on. But I also listen to the fans...and the fans want their game completely devoid of artificial skill enhancements. That's fine with me too.
3) We need a salary floor. Forget the cap...we can break the Yankees by choking their market (I'll discuss this free-market strategy shortly), but we can't under the current rules, force Pittsburgh to stop being such cheap heartless cowards without instituting a salary floor. If you want to run a big league team, you must spend 74 million on player payroll. For those who claim they can't afford that...I guess their markets can't support a team...threaten contraction and suddenly "holy cow, look at all this money we have!!"
4) Expand the game by the addition of two more teams. Some of you will wonder whether there is enough baseball talent to do this without watering down the overall strength-of-league. I would argue that baseball talent depth has never been greater. The days of weak leagues caused by expanding to 30 teams are long over with the fresh blood coming from the far east and Central America. And the bottom line is that more teams mean MORE MONEY FOR THE OWNERS!! and MORE JOBS FOR THE PLAYERS!!! so it should, theoretically be an easy sell at this next CBA.
Except of course, that I want to expand to...NEW JERSEY. We have a major problem right now...the market in New York City is too big for two teams. The fact that the Mets are run stupidly doesn't change that. They spend more than any other NL club except very recently the Phillies. They even outspend the Dodgers. And in the AL, we all know that Steinvador has built a qusi-monopoly over the AL with the vast financial resources of NYC at his back. We need more competition for that wealth. We need a New Jersey franchise. Hockey agrees.
I would add teams in North Carolina (Raleigh) and New Jersey (Newark - sell it to those folks as a chance to build a growth pole in an area badly in need of revitalization). Restructure the leagues into 4-team per division, 4-division sets and keep the unbalanced schedule and the interleague games...the following division and rivalry format makes the most sense to me (pairing indicates the natural rivalries):
AL Northeast vs. NL Northeast
- New York Yankees vs. New York Mets
- Boston Red Sox vs. Toronto Blue Jays (LEAGYE SWITCH)
- New Jersey Nuts vs. Philadelphia Phillies
- Detoir Tigers vs. Pittsburgh Pirates
AL South vs. NL South
- Carolina Roughnecks vs. Atlanta Braves
- Tampa Bay Rays vs. Florida Marlins
- Texas Rangers vs. Houston Astros
- Baltimore Orioles vs. Washington Nationals
AL Midwest vs. NL Midwest
- Minnesota Twins vs. Milwaukee Brewers
- Kansas City Royals vs. St. Louis Carindals
- Chicago White Sox vs. Chicago Cubs
- Cleveland Indians vs. Cincinnati Reds
AL West vs. NL West
- Seattle Mariners vs. San Diego Padres
- Los Angeles Angels vs. Los Angeles Dodgers
- San Jose Athletics vs. San Francisco Giants
- Colorado Rockies vs. Arizona Diamondbacks
Important about this structure...for one thing, I could have, for example, put STL and KC in the south and Pittsburgh/Detoir in the Midwest (and Baltimore/Washington in the NE)...which might have made more sense geographiocally...but I wanted to preserve the heated rivalry of Milwaukee, Chicago and St. Louis in the NL Central. My goal was to keep as many of the divisional rivalries as I could together and move as few teams around as possible. The two expansion teams both go to the AL as do the Rockies and I have Toronto moving to the NL where I think they make more sense anyway.
5) Expand the playoffs
Doc, below, made his argument for why playoff expansion is necessary. I agree with some (though not all) of his points. I, personally, think the marathon IS a good thing...I like that our season is long and the games build on each other. It forces teams to have enormous depth...and forces the WHOLE GAME to work very hard to maximize the talent pipeline and it makes the caliber of this game better than in any other sport. However, I believe playoff expansion is necessary because 8 out of 30 is a HORRID ratio...that's been PROVEN economically. I want my game to make a ton of money and do well...baseball's post-season doesn't get as much air time as Football's or even basketball's...because it's too short and involves too far of the markets. The post-season races are largely resolved in the AL at least by mid August, which is terrible for revenue. We NEED more teams in the post-season to increase outcome uncertainty. The outcome uncertainty not only makes baseball a ton more money...it also forces more teams to compete and therefore will drive talent levels up further.
I am in favor of a 16-team post-season, and I see that Doc is not...he's made some good points regarding it reducing the tension of the regular season...but I think it only reduces tension in the regular for the very top teams...it seriously INCREASES tension for everyone else. Even if you start the year 30-50, you can STILL fight for a play-off spot....500 clubs making the post-season may annoy some, but wouldn't you have liked to see the Mariners still fighting for the play-offs in July this year? Maybe they'd have KEPT Mr. Lee. Maybe we'd all be a little less miserable. Maybe they'd have traded for bats! The regular season is about the FIGHT to reach your shot at the big time...it's long, grueling, and it would be even longer if no teams could relax. If every decision to dump payroll and punt the season for the future came at the cost of your fans KNOWING you still had a decent chance to try for the post-season if you'd so decided, you wouldn't see Pittsburgh dumping 15 players a year for 25 more mediocre prospects. I want 26 of my 32 teams to be trying to ADD at the deadline...not subtrct. I want everyone at each others' throats over those last 8 play-off spots.
And for those of you worried about the top teams getting bored...I want overall W-L record to provide the chance at a first-round bye AND a second-round BYE.
New play-off format:
8 teams per league make the post-season. The four division winners get a first-round bye, the four WC teams play a best of 3 series to get the team count down to 6. The two best division winners get SECOND round byes and the two worst play the WC series winners for a shot at the division series in a best of 3.
Then you have 4 teams...they play best of 7, best of 7 to get the league winner and a best of 7 WS.
That means we're increasing our play-off games from the current 19 to 27 for some, 21 for others...and this takes more time to play out. I am also in favor of compensating for this by dropping the regular season to 154 games again and ending the season in late September. I would also want there to be far fewer play-off off days. None of this staggering of games to guarantee non-competing games for TV time slots. There should be no off-days in the WC series...three games at alternating venues...highest ranked teams have HFA. Then three alternating games, Division winners have HFA in round two. And only a single day off for travel between home and road stands in the rest of the post-season.
The 154 game schedule should include 18 games against each division rival (54), 6 games against your IL Natural Rival (60, 12 games (3 per team) against your current IL division pairing (rotating annually - 72), and 82 games against the other 12 teams in your league...that's 6 per team plus 10 others randomly drawn to fit the schedule.
This solves many, if not all, of baseball's major problems, IMHO.
Comments
(1) Full instant replay, electronic strike zone. Ditto.
(2) Drug-testing, having just come through the era of maximum use and visibility for steroid use, this has become a credibility issue for baseball. One this basis alone, baseball should do everything possible to regain its credibility. But the union, of course, has more clout than in any other professional sport, so unfortunately everything "possible" does not include a state-of-the-art drug testing regime. So it needs to do the best it can, because it cannot risk freak statistics that transparently indicate a resumption of artificial enhancement.
(3) Salary floor, while agreed in principal, one wonders if it won't end up with unintended consequences (as does the minimum wage). Perhaps you could find a formula that would directly link abuses to reduced revenue sharing. The trick of course, is twofold. What formula, and overcoming accounting chicanery.
(4) Two more teams. :shudders:
(5) Playoff expansion. 16 teams out of 32 is too NBA-like for me. A long season needs to eliminate more than half your teams to retain significant meaning.
(6) New playoff format. Baseball is not football. More than a day or two off is not good for quality baseball, so to me even one bye series is questionable; two is unthinkable. Granted if you're going to expand to 16 playoff teams you've gotta do something to artificially enhance the value of the regular season. That's another reason why you ought not have more than 12 teams in the pool.
(5) Realignment. :glances at map of Belgium, south of Brussels, and recalls the year 1815:
If you had go/stop tone, in the ump's ear, that told him whether a pitch was a strike -- and that he could overrule it, but had to explain every override to a supervisor, at least briefly .... how many fans would strongly resist that? 5%? Less?
That specific system, the audio tone, override and supervisor... haven't seen it brought up outside SSI, but you would assume that it had been.
................
Slap me silly, do I ever hate umps cheating on balls-strikes, for personal reasons. (See Ron Luciano's books if you doubt it.) Imagine if an NFL ref threw a bogus flag because a player had called him dirty words, earlier in the game.
All umps have, to keep the players off their backs from a petty-sniping standpoint, is the ball-strike calls.
Take that away and you'll need a rule twin: Can't get on the umps. But then: would you need to?
My list would be slightly different.
1) NFL style centralization and equal distribution of all media revenue. This elimentates *most* of the competitive advantage individual clubs have simply based on their geographic market. It would have the added bonus of forcing clubs to rely on attendance for competitive financial advantage. Anything that forces clubs to focus on getting butts in seats is a good thing.
2) Salary floor, based on a multiple of #1 above.
3) Computerized strike zone? Yes. Computerized umpiring? No. Get militant about standardizing the stike zone ***as spelled out in the official rules *** and use the computerized strike zone to grade the umpires. Assign lucrative post-season gigs to the umpires that grade the highest. Go all Jack Welch on the umpires and fire the 10% worst performers every year. It won't take very long for that to result in some damn fine umpiring. Humans aren't incapable of excellent judging of the strike zone - they just have absolutely no incentive to do so in MLB.
4) Related to #3, call the high strike. All the time. Force hitters to get the bat off their damn shoulder and swing. (And watch Ichiro win another MVP).
5) G's batting and pitching clock.
#1 point here is exactly right. Give the local population the right to determine how much money is flowing into the coffers of the team. Only thing that would need to be slightly regulated is the amount of dollars per seat that could be charged.
No expansion. Seen what that does to the NHL/CFL (yeah, yeah, I'm Canadian...CFL is not particularly good football, IMO, but the worst thing about it is, the league for a time, was run by fools).
Agree on the extra layer of playoffs with an extra wildcard, and a 3 game series. Not sure exactly whose idea it was initially, but heard the idea floated of a 3 game series, starting immediately after the season is over (i.e. the Monday), and running 3 consecutive days - no offdays, even for travel - really puts the wildcard teams at a potential disadvantage, and really makes winning the division paramount. The Wildcard series ends on Wednesday, the first division series (the one that doesn't have a wildcard) starts on Thursday, and then things carry on as they do now from there. The playoffs are delayed in total by exactly 1 day...no big deal.
You can't go limiting throws to first...think that through for a second. Pitcher throws to first 4 tes and ooops...runner gets to walk 40 feet away from the bag without a throw being legal to chech the running game? That would never work.