"Go to the bathroom and miss that ball in play, you could go nearly eight minutes at the ballpark without seeing anything happen," another veteran scout quips. Increasingly this summer, that conversation-and grumbling about today's product-is underway in every ballpark you visit.Īnd there's plenty of time for that grumbling: Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated in June noted there is more dead time per game than ever before and that the average time between balls in play is three minutes, 45 seconds.
"I think we are at a point of time where we need to begin to manage that change." "There is a growing consensus among ownership that we need to have a serious conversation about whether all of those organic changes are good for the game over the long haul," Manfred said at this year's All-Star Game in Washington, D.C. The shifts in strategy, many brought on by the increased use of analytics in the game, have come fast and furious over the past few seasons, to the point where Commissioner Rob Manfred seems to have an ongoing, open dialogue regarding what he calls these "organic changes" and whether he should move to ban shifts, limit the number of relief pitchers teams can use each game and even corral the amount of time chewed up by waiting for replay decisions. Ten years before that? AL pitchers fired 141 complete games, and NL pitchers checked in with 161. As recently as 10 years ago, in 2008, there were 75 complete games in the AL and 61 in the NL. There has been a grand total of 24 complete games in the American League and 10 in the National League. I'll bet the under because you know the starter is not going to make it.
Before the game, we'll say, 'What's the over ? It's 5.1. "I'll bet some guys in our box in Atlanta. "Every box score you read, it's 5.1 innings pitched for the starter," Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox says. Says another: "The game is unbelievably bad right now." "You know exactly what's going to happen before it starts." "It's the most boring game I've ever been to, and it's every night," says one scout who has been in the game for 50 years.
And longtime baseball people shake their heads at the bland sameness of it all. Perhaps not coincidentally, per-game attendance this season has dropped to its lowest point in 15 years. Games are averaging about three hours in length and replays almost one-and-a-half minutes per review, according to Maury Brown in a story written for in April.
#MLB PLAY BY PLAY FULL#
The race is on for whether it will happen in a full season for the first time.
There were more strikeouts than hits in a month for the first time in MLB history in April and, through early August, MLB had accumulated more strikeouts than hits overall.248 MLB batting average is the lowest since 1972, the season before the American League instituted the designated hitter, when it was. The ball is not put in play in roughly a third of all plate appearances, 31.6 percent of which end in a strikeout, walk or hit batter.Hall of Famers are not the only ones voicing their displeasure with an all-or-nothing game in which: Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton are not loving this. But right now it's about the home run and the strikeout and give me five good innings. Says Hall of Famer Don Sutton, now an analyst for Atlanta Braves television broadcasts: "As soon as somebody decides it's not a good idea, then people will draft differently. "It just breaks my heart to see the changes that have been made. "I try to watch a baseball game, and I find it very difficult to be able to watch today. "We could sit here and talk all day about the way the game has been changed, and not in a good way," Hall of Fame reliever Goose Gossage says.
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