Pretty much everywhere I go, someone will inevitably ask the question: “If you were commissioner, what would you do to improve baseball?” I’ve been asked this question so many times that, well, you would expect me to have come up with an answer for it. But what I tend to do instead is sort of riff about a bunch of vague ideals I’d chase—I’d want to make the minor leagues more vital to communities, I’d want to figure out a television and streaming package that allows people to watch the baseball teams they love without blackouts, I’d want to ask some hard questions about where the game is going with gambling, I’d want to promote baseball and the players nonstop because this is truly a great game…
And more than anything, I’d want to figure out how to get starting pitchers to go longer and how to get fewer strikeouts and more balls in play, because I think, of the many problems that baseball faces, this is the biggest.
Of course, I’m not running for commissioner and would never in a million years want to be commissioner, and so I say all of this without offering any specifics at all, because I would hope that people a whole lot smarter than me are actually working on these things.
As the pitching crisis gets graver and graver and graver and graver and graver, I think it’s time to at least try and think of a way for baseball to get out of the mess it has been building toward for a very long time.
As such, I’ve been reading everything I can, and casually talking to people in and around the game, and thinking a lot about it, and I’ve come up with a sort of model for how I think baseball could change course. I’m under no illusions that:
- This plan would work the way I want it to work.
- Anyone would agree with this model.
- Doing any of the following things is actually feasible.
But we’re talking about an imaginary “You’re commissioner of baseball and can do whatever you want” scenario here. You know how sometimes you might play an imaginary game like “What three books and movies and albums would you bring if you were to be stranded on a desert island?” and the person you’re playing with would say something like, “I’d only bring the books because there would be no electricity on the desert island.” Well, please don’t do that. We’re just playing games here.
The Problems
I think we know the basic problems:
- Pitchers are going down like we’re in a Matrix movie.
- Starting pitchers are throwing fewer and fewer innings and are being replaced by a faceless army of one-inning, 100-mph mercenaries.
- There are way too many strikeouts in the game. Strikeouts are up 30 just over the last 20 years, and way more than that if you go back to before the 1994 strike.
- All the strikeouts equal five or six (or seven or eight) fewer balls in play every game, and that means five or six fewer chances to see a great play or a triple or a play at the plate (or, admittedly, a routine ground ball to second base).
We can go a bit deeper into each of these things, but I think we more or less understand the challenges here.
The Causes
People are still arguing about the causes for all this—the players union seems to be going all in on the new pitch clock being the driving force behind the pitching injuries—but I think most people agree that:
- Pitchers are throwing much harder and putting much more spin on the ball than at any point in the game’s history.
- This max-effort pitching is straining arms and blowing out elbows.
- This max-effort pitching is also fueling the strikeout craze. Pitchers are throwing ever-more-unhittable pitches.
- And batters, knowing this, have adjusted their hitting styles to go for broke, accepting strikeouts and lower batting averages in exchange for optimal launch angles and the home runs that naturally follow.
What we’re talking about here, I think, are incentives. The incentives—pretty much every one of them—are for pitchers to throw as hard as possible, and with as much spin on your breaking stuff as possible. Velocity and spin rates are how you get scouts to look at you, how you get teams to draft you, how you move your way through a system, how you get to the big leagues, how you succeed at the big-league level. The game has evolved in such a way that the decks have been cleared specifically for max-effort pitchers. Nobody expects you to throw seven innings, much less nine. Nobody wants you to pitch to contact. Nobody even cares how many people you walk.
The Cy Young winner in the National League last year, Blake Snell, walked 99 batters in 180 innings and never threw even one pitch in the eighth inning all season long. He is the new paradigm. He’s also one of only two former Cy Young Award winners who’s healthy enough to pitch. He has battled elbow and abductor injuries throughout his career but is the rare pitcher who has never had Tommy John surgery. Fingers crossed. Maybe he knows something.
Anyway, you’re not just going to get pitchers to stop throwing as hard as they can to prevent injuries. That’s a non-starter. These are, as Mike Schur likes to say, “competition monsters,” and they’re going to do anything and everything in their power to succeed.
Joe Posnanski has been called “contemporary sports writing’s biggest star.” For more stories from Joe, subscribe to his Joe Blogs Substack newsletter at joeposnanski.com, where he writes about sports, pop culture, life, and all manner of nonsense.
So how does baseball change what’s happening here? How does baseball change the game so that the incentives change? Okay, we’re close to my plan, but first, let me tell you about a couple of ideas people throw around that I’m not crazy about:
Ideas I Don’t Love
No. 1: Moving back the mound
I’ve thought a lot about this one; it does make logical sense. The hitters have so little reaction time now, wouldn’t moving the mound back a little bit help with that, and give hitters a little bit more of a chance?
Maybe. There are a couple of reasons I don’t love this idea, though. First, I’m not sure that it would even work. Early experiments with moving the mound back have offered muddled and unsatisfying results. In the Atlantic League, they moved the mound back a foot, and what happened was almost nothing… home-run rates and strikeout rates both increased slightly, and while hitters did make slightly more contact, a whole lot of that was foul balls. But it wasn’t much.
Now, that might not mean anything at all; it was so new that nobody really had an opportunity to adjust to the new distance. But unlike something like the pitch clock, which had immediate and quantifiable results, the effects of moving the mound back remain a near-complete mystery.
But my reason for not wanting to move the mound back goes back to those incentives I was just talking about: It seems to me that doing so would create even greater incentives for pitchers to go max effort, to throw even harder, and to get even more distance to snap off an elbow-wrecking, high-spin-rate sweeper.* My suspicion is that, in the long run, moving the mound back would exacerbate the problems—there would end up being more home runs, more strikeouts, fewer balls in play, more injuries, and more pitchers.
*One of the more jarring quotes in the Wall Street Journal story I linked above came from elbow surgeon Keith Meister (great name! The Keithmeister!), who said: “You can look at a scan now and say, ‘Oh, this guy throws a sweeper.’”
No. 2: Creating artificial rules that force starters to go a certain number of innings or force managers to use only a certain number of pitchers in a given game.
Here I’m talking about specific rules such as, “The starter must go six innings or give up six runs,” or “The manager can only use three pitchers in any game.” Again, rules like these sound tempting, but in my view, they don’t go after the core problems, and they mess with the fabric of the game. As you will see when we get to my plan, I think there are better ways to get at this than by coming up with a bunch of clunky new rules.
No. 3: Lecturing the players.
I don’t know that this is a “plan,” per se, but there is so much lecturing going on—everybody telling pitchers they should learn how to “pitch,” reminding them that Fergie Jenkins once completed 30 games in a season, excoriating them for blowing out their elbows because they won’t dial it back 10 percent.
I’ll go back to the “competition monsters” description: You are never, ever going to convince pitchers who are in the major leagues, or are trying to get there, to cut back on their effort. It’s not going to happen and nobody should ever think otherwise. Hitters are bigger and stronger than ever before, they get more data than ever before, they hit the ball harder and farther than ever before, one mistake can be the difference between San Francisco and Sacramento, and one more can be the difference between Sacramento and a high school coaching job.
I don’t agree with the players union blaming the pitch clock for all the injuries, but I also don’t agree with MLB countering by blaming the rise of velocity and spin rates, as if the pitchers simply chose to throw harder and nastier. They didn’t choose this path. This is how the game evolved. This is the way the game has been going for three decades, and I do think there’s a root cause for it, and when I said “three decades” just now, that was a strong hint to what I think that root cause is.
I’m now of the belief that unless baseball attacks that root cause, the problems will only grow worse and worse and worse.
Finally, Here’s My Plan
Do I need to go through all the caveats again about how I know this is unrealistic and I don’t know that it will work? No? Okay, fine here we go:
Step 1: Deaden the baseball. Like, a lot.
In 1994, for only the second time in baseball history, teams averaged more than 1.00 home runs per game. The first time that happened was 1987, when the baseballs were quite obviously juiced. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with the exception of 1987, teams averaged roughly .75 home runs per game. That was pretty much true in the 1960s, too, even including the year of the pitcher. It was a little bit higher than that in the 1950s, quite a bit lower than that in 1930s and 1940s, but basically that’s what you got in baseball, roughly .75 home runs per team per game.
Then came 1994, and home runs jumped dramatically, and then there was a strike that canceled the World Series. When the game finally returned, the fans were pretty ticked off, and they needed a reason to come back to a game that had betrayed them.
Baseball offered home runs.
Sure, all of this is a simplified version of a complicated story, but I would contend that 1998—the McGwire-Sosa home-run-chase summer when baseball broke all attendance records and managed to get back on the front pages of America’s newspapers—did not just happen.
To the contrary, everything in baseball—from juiced baseballs to juiced players to smaller stadiums to expansion-based pitching shortages to no drug testing to ever-shrinking strike zones to a shift in weight-training philosophies to harder bats to the military gear batters were allowed to wear so they could dig in at the plate without fear—pointed toward such a season. A flurry of home runs was not just what baseball wanted. It was what baseball so desperately needed.
From 1994 to 2009, teams averaged at least 1.00 home runs every game, climbing as high as an unprecedented 1.17 home runs in 2000. But as we now know, baseball fans began to lose interest in home runs, they became more disgusted with the steroid stories, and, what do you know? home runs went down. In 2014, home runs hit a more-than-30-year low. It was like that for much of 2015, too.
And then, as you know, funky things started happening with the baseball, and home runs started flying out at even crazier rates than in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how do you think teams and players responded? Right, pitchers threw harder and went for more strikeouts, and managers used a bunch more pitchers and left them in for shorter stints, and the games got unbearably long and attendance tumbled and new rules had to be instituted just to counter how the game was going off the rails.
And so my plan begins by deadening the baseball. A lot. I wouldn’t do this quietly, behind closed doors, the way MLB has always handled questions about the ball. I would announce to the world that the baseballs currently being used are too lively and that we will deaden them by x percent, whatever x happens to be.
Why? I’ve already talked about the incentives of the game—to me, we are stuck in an incentives loop. The incentive of the pitcher is to get more strikeouts, because so many home runs are flying out of the yard. The incentive of the hitter is to hit more home runs, because there are so many strikeouts. The more one goes up, the more the other goes up. Swing harder! Throw harder! Swing even harder! Throw even harder!
We sometimes talk about the timelessness of baseball, of 90 feet between the bases being this magical distance that worked in 1922 and still works today. Some of that is obviously romantic gibberish, but one thing that you can see is that batting average on balls in play has stayed pretty constant over the last 50 years:
1973: .281
1983: .285
1993: .294
2003: .294
2013: .297
2023: .297
That tells you that when balls are hit in the field of play, batters are getting hits at pretty close to the same rate that they did 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years ago. So why did pitchers back then pitch to contact more? Right, it’s because they could trust their defenses to get outs. It was well and good for Crash Davis to call strikeouts boring and fascist in 1988, when every mistake pitch didn’t end up on Waveland Avenue. It was well and good to try for more democratic ground balls when you didn’t face a No. 9 hitter with a career .500 slugging percentage, like Atlanta’s Michael Harris II.
Atlanta’s most common No. 9 hitter in 2023: Michael Harris II (career SLG: .498).
Atlanta’s most common No. 9 hitter in 1973: Carl Morton (career SLG: .218)
Atlanta’s most common No. 8 hitter in 1983: Paul Casanova (career SLG: .319)
We’ll get back to some of this in a minute.
But my point here is that if you deaden the baseball, you might change the incentives somewhat for both sides. If hitters can’t hit enough home runs to make up for strikeouts, they might try to put the ball in play more. If hitters aren’t hitting quite as many home runs, pitchers might not strain for strikeouts as much. I don’t think it’s even close to as simple as that, but I feel pretty strongly that any solution to the baseball spiral will require a deader baseball.
Step 2: Limit the number of pitchers on the roster.
Theo Epstein is a huge proponent, and I agree with him … MLB has already limited teams to 13 pitchers on a roster. I think slowly, very slowly, they should get it down to 12 and then 11 and then, well, see where things stand. I’m sure there would be a bunch of fights—perhaps unwinnable fights—before anything like this could happen, but here’s why I think it’s important: It’s not just because fewer pitchers on the roster mean fewer pitchers per game.
No, I’m back on incentives. Right now, the incentives all point in that one direction: throw harder and with more stuff. That’s all. There’s little incentive for a reliever to build up the arm strength and variety of stuff to go three or four innings, or for a starter to pitch nine, because there’s little chance that a manager will let you do that.
Do you know how many relievers there were in 1977 who threw between 40 and 60 innings? Of course you don’t know, so I’ll tell you: There were six.
- Don Kirkwood, who was traded midseason from California to Chicago.
- Thirty-five-year-old Darold Knowles for Texas.
- Baltimore’s Tippy Martinez, who Earl Weaver used as a lefty specialist.
- Sid Monge, who was traded from California to Cleveland and missed some time.
- Cincinnati’s Manny Sarmiento, who didn’t get called up until late July.
- Boston’s Jim Willoughby, who missed two months in the middle of the year.
Yes, there were fewer teams in 1977, but you see the point: There simply was no job in the big leagues for relievers who gave you so few innings. You had to contribute a lot more than that in order to reach the show. A roster spot was too precious for such a limited contribution.
In 2023, do you know how many relievers threw between 40 and 60 innings? Eighty-one. There were 89 the year before that. There were 104 in 2017, before baseball instituted the three-batter minimum rule.
The 40-60-inning reliever only became an actual job in the 1990s. Can you throw 20 pitches super-hard once every two or three days? Apply here! Lots of people did. Lots of people still do. The vast majority of pitchers in baseball now have that job. In 2023:
Pitchers who threw 180-plus innings: 26
Pitchers who threw 120-180 innings: 77
Pitchers who threw 80-120 innings: 68
Pitchers who threw 60-80 innings: 102
Pitchers who threw 40-60 innings: 81
Pitchers who threw fewer than 40 innings: 453
If you want your kid to pitch in the big leagues, you tell me: What are you going to teach? You see where the jobs are. If you want pitchers to work on stretching out and developing multiple weapons and not being afraid to challenge hitters, well, you better start by making such things more important. Teams will not just do that on their own: You have to limit the number of pitchers available to them.
Step 3: Rethink the strike zone.
Our pal Joe Sheehan is on the forefront here… from his latest newsletter:
What [the strike zone] should be is designed to force pitchers to throw hittable pitches, which was the goal of calling “balls” in the first place 140 years ago. The entire point of a strike zone is to keep the ball in play, and the current strike zone, as called by human umpires and exploited by pitchers and catchers, is doing the opposite.
I could not agree with this more. You will hear a lot about people wanting an automated strike zone, because they’re sick of obvious blown calls on a daily basis… but we don’t hear enough about what the strike zone SHOULD ACTUALLY BE.
In my view, that’s largely because we don’t talk nearly enough about why the strike zone exists in the first place. It is, as Joe says, to get pitchers to throw the ball where it plausibly can be hit. That’s the reason it was instituted, that’s the reason pitchers are penalized when they throw four balls. The strike zone is the hidden piece of genius that makes baseball go.
But… what is the strike zone? What should it be? The parameters have changed many times through the years. Beyond that, the parameters have changed daily, depending on which umpire is behind the plate.
Well, we now have the ability, through remarkable technology breakthroughs, to determine EXACTLY what the strike zone should actually be in every game, every night. And instead of being trapped by such technology and having it just register the ol’ letters-to-knees strike zone like some sort of AI Paul Runge, we could actually use the mounds and mounds of data we have to carve out an ideal strike zone that would find that happy ground between pitcher and hitter.
I go back to something Theo has told me on multiple occasions: We should work backward when trying to determine baseball’s path forward. That is to say, we should think of what the best version of baseball looks like and build toward that game. Sure, we’ll argue bitterly about the best version of baseball, but there are certain things I think everybody likes about baseball, and we should work to be sure that teams, in their effort to win, do not eliminate those things. Yes, pitchers and catchers manipulate the umpire-called strike zone with pitch-framing. That’s smart on their part. It’s not good for the game, though.
Step 4: Tie the DH to the starting pitcher.
Brandon McCarthy is big on this one… I’m not entirely sold on the idea, but I do like it a lot, and I do think that there needs to be advantages to teams leaving their starters in for longer stints
This idea—which I’m sure you’ve heard—is that you only get a DH for as long as your starting pitcher is in the game. When a reliever comes in, he automatically becomes your designated hitter. This would, in most cases, lead to late-inning pinch-hitters, I imagine, but the point might be that if your starter is trying to get through the fifth, and you have, I don’t know, Bryce Harper or J.D. Martinez (or, obviously, Shohei, but he’s a whole other matter) due up, yeah, maybe you’ll let the starter try to work through the jam, which is what I think more of us would like to see.
I say that I’m not entirely sold on it because I’m not sure how, in practice, it would actually work. I mean, nobody wants to see LESS Shohei, and any rule that might give us less Shohei is kind of tough to get behind. And would it get managers to actually stay with starters longer? I don’t know.
What I do know is that there really needs to be some advantage a team gets for keeping their starter in the game or, maybe, some disadvantage a team gets for bringing in a reliever. One wild idea that I know has been talked about at the MLB offices is making a reliever start with 1-0 count. That doesn’t feel right, but again, we’re throwing around ideas, and what I do believe is that a starter going deep into the game should be intrinsically* more valuable to a team than it is. We have to give teams a reason to not just jump to one of their many 100-mph, 20-pitch relievers at first opportunity. A re-engineered DH might be an answer.
*I don’t think I’m using this word right.
That’s about it. That’s my plan. Would it work? No idea. Is there any chance of it happening? Absolutely not. But I would bring Casablanca, Goodfellas, and The Princess Bride with me to the desert island, anyway.
Joe Posnanski has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations, including the Sports Media Hall of Fame and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has also won two Sports Emmy Awards. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, and he co-hosts the PosCast with television writer and creator Michael Schur.
