Strikeouts are not Diamonds

Don Matting believes game times can be lowered by devaluing strikeouts:

“Analytically, a few years back nobody cared about the strikeout, so it’s OK to strike out 150, 160, 170 times, and that guy’s still valued in a big way,” Mattingly said. “Well, as soon as we start causing that to be a bad value — the strikeouts — guys will put the ball in play more. So once we say strikeouts are bad and it’s going to cost you money the more you strike out, then the strikeouts will go away. Guys will start making adjustments and putting the ball in play more.”

Strikeouts have set records in recent seasons, with teams averaging 8.03 per game last year. A career .307 hitter with 222 homers over 14 seasons, Mattingly never struck out more than 43 times in a single year.

The basic idea is good, the problem is that strikeouts are not something you can easily devalue. To me, it’s the difference between gold and diamonds. Both gold and diamonds have value due to their beauty. Gold, however, is extremely useful outside of the aesthetic:

Use Gold has unique physical chemical characteristics that made it very valuable. Gold is the most maleable and ductile of all the metals. One ounce of gold can be drawn into more than 80 Km of thin gold wire. One ounce of gold can be beaten into a sheet covering 9 square meters and 0.000018 cm thick. Gold has an electrical resistivity of 0.022 micro-ohm and a thermal conductivity of 310 W m-1. Hence, it is very efficient for the transmission of heat and electricity. Gold has the highest corrosion resistance of all the metals and it is corroded only by a mixture of nitric and hydrocloric acid. Gold is a noble metal because it does not oxidize.

If suddenly out tastes changed, and we no longer valued gold for its beauty, the metal would remain valuable for its other uses.

Diamonds, on the other hand, are simply valuable for their beauty. Their high price also seems to come from an artificially created shortage. If people no longer wanted to decorate themselves with diamonds, the value would drop. Manufactured diamonds can accomplish the non-aesthetic uses of mined diamonds. In other words, we can think away the value of diamonds.

Strikeouts are more like gold. They are the best way for a pitcher to record an out, since they take away much of the randomness of allowing a ball in play. For batters, high strikeout rates tend to go hand-in-hand with high power, and that is a very valuable commodity. That paradox, that strikeouts are good for both batters and pitchers, is why the rate keeps climbing.

If teams pay less for batters who strike out often, some team like the Athletics are going to take advantage of that market inefficiency.

I suppose a rule that states a batter is removed from the game after striking out twice, and a pitcher is removed from the game if he strikes out a certain number of batters after a certain number of innings. (If after five innings he records six K, he comes out, seven after six innings, etc.) Relief pitchers are allowed two strikeouts. In those cases, a pitcher might want to save his K pitches for dire situations, and a batter might not swing for the fences in every plate appearance. Paying players less by itself will not lower the K rate.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2mipxF9