Baseball games are being swallowed up in a vortex of strikeouts and home runs. The subtler elements of the game, fielding and hitting behind the runner, are gradually disappearing. This article is about how to stop this from continuing unabated, and this article is a sort of continuation of the article “Whiff 7”, which was published here yesterday.
I hope you all know that I greatly admire Royals broadcaster Denny Matthews. I always have. But Mr. Matthews, at the moment, is selling a book which advocates expanding the strike zone. Expanding the strike zone is exactly what baseball does not need. Strikeouts are rising and rising and rising. Expanding the strike zone would cause them to explode. You expand the strike zone by one inch, you’re going to have ten strikeouts per team per game.
Look, this is what I never understood, until about three years ago. Until the K zones started on TV, the pitchfx and the Questec, I had no idea how good major league pitchers were at hitting the corners of the strike zone. You sum up the pitches made by any good major league pitcher in a typical game, you’ve got 40 pitches on the edge of the strike zone, 40 pitches just off the edge of the strike zone, 15 pitches WAY out of the strike zone, and 5 pitches that are somewhere near the heart of the zone. At most 5. And a high percentage of those get crushed.
Maybe you always knew that—but I didn’t. I remember Jim Bouton, in Ball Four, talking about pitching coaches telling him to hit the black. He thought it was impossible. What I always thought is this: that pitchers tried to hit the edges of the plate, but that, throwing 90+ miles an hour and spinning the ball, it was impossible to do this consistently. Pitchers would get behind, and they’d have to throw the pitch over the center of the plate.
Whenever a home run is hit, the announcer will usually say that it was a bad pitch, it was right out over the middle of the plate. I always thought that was BS; there’s lots of pitches out over the middle of the plate, he just happened to hit that one.
What I understand now, and did not understand until we had the K zones, is that it is not BS. Good pitchers can and do trace the outlines of the strike zone—and pitches that go over the heart of the plate DO get crushed. Even bad pitchers with bad control throw many more pitches on the edges of the strike zone than they do in the heart of the zone.
The key fact is not that pitchers have fantastic control. The key fact is that major league hitters DO crush baseballs in the heart of the zone. Pitchers know that batters do crush balls in the heart of the zone, so they are very careful not to throw the ball there. They aim pitches—70% of the pitches—to be just outside the zone. Sometimes they miss, but usually they miss by a few inches. If you aim two inches off the strike zone and miss by four inches, you’re two inches into the zone. If you aim a pitch two inches inside the strike zone and miss by four inches, you’re in the heart of the zone. Therefore, most pitchers aim most pitches just outside the zone.
Well, if pitchers can trace the outlines of the strike zone with their pitches, and you expand the strike zone, what happens? They trace the outlines of the expanded strike zone, of course. All you’ve done, by expanding the strike zone, is reduce further the number of hittable pitches.
The problem with baseball now is that the batter/pitcher confrontations drag on, and the batter/pitcher confrontations drag on because the hitter is trying to force the pitcher to throw him something he can hit, and the pitcher is very good at avoiding doing that. If you expand the strike zone, you make the problem worse. You’re going to have no hittable pitches at all, and you’re going to have batter/pitcher confrontations that drag on forever and wind up with ten strikeouts a game. This is NOT a solution to our problems.
What you need to do is, shrink the strike zone. Take the edges of the plate away from the pitcher, and force him to throw the ball where the hitter can put some wood on it.
Of course, if you do that, then you also have to do some other things to help the pitcher, or the league ERA will go to 6.14. You have to do other things to help the pitcher—but that’s easy.
Here’s what you can do.
First, deaden the baseball a little bit. Major league baseball tests the resiliency of the baseballs, and has for many years. The problem is, they never do anything about it. The only reason they test them is so that, whenever some nitwit complains about the balls being too lively and too many home runs being hit, they can say that they test the baseballs, and they’re no more lively than they ever were.
That’s true; the liveliness of the baseballs is not the reason for the high number of home runs. But if you need to help the pitchers out, it’s easy: Just reduce the resiliency of the baseballs.
Second, put the batters back in the batters’ box, and move the batter’s box back about three inches. If a hitter wipes out a line of the batters’ box, call time out, call out the grounds crew, re-draw the line, and tell him not to do it again. If he does it again, you throw him out of the game.
If you keep the batter in the batter’s box and back the batter’s box up just a few inches, it becomes harder to get to the outside pitch, and it becomes easier for the pitcher to pitch inside. It will make a huge difference.
Third, get rid of the thin-handled bats and the multiple coats of shellac on the bats. We don’t want to drive anybody out of the game, any hitter. Just set a minimum thickness for the handle of a bat—I’d suggest 0.90 inches to start with—and then increase that by .05 inches every other year until the bat handles have a minimum thickness of 1.60 inches. It will take about 30 years to get there, and hitters will adjust gradually and barely notice the differences.
At the same time, this will a) eliminate 95% of the broken bats, b) reduce the risk of someone being killed by a flying bat shard, and c) reduce the cost of using wooden bats, thus making it more practical to use wooden bats in college or other amateur venues.
The whip-handled bats have taken over for a reason: they’re better for the hitter. They have a larger hitting surface, and the thin handle with the large head enables the hitter to generate more bat speed. It’s good for the individual hitter—but it’s bad for the game. It is one of the factors driving the game toward more home runs and more strikeouts. If you gradually go back to bats more like the bats that were used 30 years ago, you can then restore the resiliency of the baseballs, without having another 70-homer season.
Fourth, move a few fences back about ten feet.
My general point is, if you want to help the pitcher, it is really, really easy to do that, and to do that in ways that are all but invisible to the fan. You could keep the strike zone where it is now, keep the parks the same, and reduce the league ERA to 1.80 by just deadening the baseballs and moving the hitters off the plate. There is no reason to do anything radical and stupid like expanding the strike zone or, God forbid, raising the mound. Just deaden the balls a tiny bit, back the batters off the mound, and regulate the bats a little bit, the pitchers will be fine.