Seven Inning Games

Via Maury Brown, Ben Lindbergh worries that the length of playoff games will spill over into the regular season:

Subtract the high stakes and rich backstories, and the postseason would start to resemble pro-offense/fast-paced-play commissioner Rob Manfred’s worst nightmares about baseball’s on-field future.

The length of the average nine-inning game time in the playoffs this year has expanded to 3:24:30, up almost 24 minutes relative to the regular season.

…

It would be one thing if October’s longer game lengths were the result of more runs, but the delays have coincided with less action than usual. Thanks to superior pitchers, more aggressive managing, and colder temperatures, offense (as represented by weighted on-base average) is down and strikeouts are up?—?not relative to only the regular season, but also compared with previous postseasons.

Of course, as usual, Ben doesn’t really offer a remedy. It seems to me that during the regular season, rules to speed up the game were laxly enforced compared to 2015. I don’t like rules that take away the intentional ball, or put too many limits on other useful things, although I am all for a pitch clock.

So let me suggest something that was floated in 2014, shortening the game to seven innings. I know it messes with the nice “powers of three” aspect of the game, but it would have a number of positive side effects. Pitching could get back to being about the starters instead of the bullpen. That means teams could carry fifteen or sixteen position players, so there could be more platooning and more pinch hitters and defensive replacements. There would be fewer injuries, since there would be fewer opportunities for injuries to occur.

Yes it messes with the stats, but if MLB really wants faster games, playing fewer innings is the way to go.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2e3w5XP