We’ve all played shorthanded games in our time, choose-up games where you’ve got only six players on both teams, or eight, or eleven, and somehow we managed to make two teams out of them and play a pretty satisfying afternoon of baseball. In the beginning, bearashith (not the kind involving the woods or the Pope and a funny hat) in the infancy of the game, you know the early teams improvised the number of players, and the number of bases, outs, strikes and every kind of thing you can imagine, including all sorts of made-up-on-the-spot ground rules about what do we do if the ball hits that big old hay-thresher parked out behind second base.
But let’s limit ourselves to an incorrect number of fielders for the nonce, and speculate on what sorts of changes in the game might be wrought by having more, or fewer, fielders than the nine we’ve grown accustomed to. It’s not hard to imagine seven fielders on each team, for example, configured more or less as custom has placed them with the exception of having one fewer infielder and one fewer outfielder. (Not much can be done to change the number of players in the battery—one pitcher and one catcher seems essential to getting a play started.) Placing the outfielders seems simpler than placing the infielders—not much strategy there, you’d just position the left fielder and the right fielder closer together, shading them depending on the batter, and give up more hits closer to the foul lines. That decision would be made that way because the foul lines would themselves turn a few hard-hit balls per game into mere do-overs. Foul flies caught by the outfielders would become a rarity.
Positioning the three infielders, however, would become a constant strategic game-within-a-game. There really isn’t much you could do about repositioning the first baseman, who would pretty well have to play where he does today, maybe a step further to his right but always within reach of the first-base bag. But which of the three other current infield positions would we eliminate? In keeping with the model of the outfielders I outlined above, it seems to me that we would almost necessarily eliminate the third baseman, on the basis that some of the balls hit down the third base line would wind up harmlessly foul (and we’re already necessarily protecting the first-base line because of the need to play one fielder fairly close to first base). So I see the second baseman being positioned a bit closer to the 2B bag and the shortstop a few steps closer to 3b, but that still leaves a gigantic opening where the third baseman now plays. It would be a righthanded pull-hitter’s paradise, and a bunter’s too.
There is not much you could do to keep the righty pull-hitter in check, aside from pitching him as much as possible to reduce pulled balls, but how about the skilled bunter? Seems to me that, no matter how much you’d shade the shortstop to his right, there would still be a lot of open territory to bunt in down the third base line.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting that the defensive configuration would simply leave the shortstop playing at his traditional positioning, or his traditional depth. By moving him a few steps to his right, and maybe a step or two deeper than he typically plays today, a strong-armed shortstop could cover much of the third baseman’s territory, all except for balls hit close to the line and balls bunted close to the line, some of which would wind up as foul balls. Often, when the hitter is trying to pull the ball down the line, he’s a little slow on the fastball and hits a ball within the shortstop’s range.
This would be a very exciting, high-offense sort of game, a football-game sort of score, I’m thinking. An inning where the defensive team held its opponent to only three or four hits would be a stellar defensive inning. A more typical defensive inning might be seven or eight hits, and at least five runs.
A 4-6-3 double-play would be a remarkably rare but brilliant defensive coup, what with the shortstop playing as far as he would from his present positioning, but the 6-4-3 play would still be fairly common, I’d imagine, and would assume even greater importance as an inning-killer than it does today.
What would seven-man teams do for pitching? With batters routinely batting around the order in every inning, pitch-counts would of course rise dramatically. I’d expect a mid-inning pitching change in most innings—after throwing his 30th or 40th pitch of an inning, a pitcher’s arm would no longer be of much use, so I’d suppose that pitching staffs would have to increase even further than today’s, perhaps to fifteen or even twenty pitchers on a team. Keeping the ball out of play would increase in importance, so strikeout pitchers would be at a premium while pitching-to-contact would disappear as a tactic.
What I think I’d like about this sort of game would be the changes brought about in terms of the type of player required. The only positions at which you could have a slow-running slugger would be the two positions manned by fielders who have to play close to their bases, catcher and first-base. Both outfielders would necessarily be as fast and cover as much ground as current centerfielders—you’d never see another Greg Luzinski in the outfield again, a blessed outcome, and most flyballs would be exciting pursuits.
With more speedy outfielders, and middle-infielders with even greater range than they have today, and a fairly immobile first-baseman, the bunt would be a way of getting on base that would be used frequently. Teams would concede a bunt hit as among the less harmful of outcomes, so the ability to place a bunt down the unguarded third-base line would become far more valuable a skill than it is today, and the fast runners required in the outfield would be best suited to exploiting the bunt as batters. The bunt hit might even become the standard, default outcome, which would probably increase the value of pitchers who can field their positions well.
Other results of a seven-man team would be increased base-stealing, particularly of third base. With third base pretty much unguarded, a runner on second base would be tempted to attempt a steal of third base frequently, perhaps routinely, and going first-to-third on a single to the outfield would also increase dramatically: covering third base would be a new responsibility for the shortstop, and often it would be impossible, given his other responsibilities. Steals of second base, on the other hand, might be reduced: the reward of the base would be worth less than the risk of being thrown out. (Nothing much would change about the steal of second base—with the second baseman positioned even closer to the bag than he is, it would be easier to cover.) There may be other changes that I haven’t anticipated but these would be the major ones.
What about the opposite, a team with eleven fielders? Where would your fourth outfielder go, or your fifth infielder, and what would be the effect of these two extra fielders on your team?
Positioning isn’t terribly difficult to figure out, and the changes to the game would be pretty well be the opposite of the seven-man game: bunting, for example, would completely disappear as a tactic, since the third baseman would play a few steps closer to home plate. Why? Because the shortstop could now afford to play a little deeper and a little further to his right (almost exactly where I’m positing he would play, in fact, with a seven-man defense), covering much of the present-day third baseman’s territory.
The shortstop would be able to play further to his right, of course, because our fifth infielder would be playing right behind the second-base bag, depending on how the batter would be shaded, while the second baseman would be positioned closer to first base, eliminating the hole on the right side of the infield. With five infielders, virtually no groundballs would be getting though the infield for base hits.
With the fifth infielder playing where I’m supposing he would play, the fourth outfielder would be redundant as a short-center fielder, as we often used in softball games. I’m imagining him playing instead on an ad hoc basis closing up the gap in right-center or left-center, depending on the batter at the plate. (He wouldn’t move necessarily himself, of course, depending on the batter, but rather the center fielder would play further to his own left or right.) What would be the overall effect of such a change?
Clearly the opposite of the seven-man defense: scores would go from football-like to soccer-like, from 42-35 to 2-1. A hit would be a small miracle, and a run would be a large one. Pitching to contact would now be the way to go, but pitchers who can minimize home runs would also become more desirable. Striking out a batter might be seen as a wasteful effort, when you could otherwise induce him to swing at a pitch that he would probably hit into a waiting fielder’s glove more easily.
Contrarily, I’m thinking that offensive strategies would be centered around the home run, and beefy sluggers would be routinely employed at the corner outfield positions, and the corner infield positions and at catcher, anywhere where speed would be needed less than it is today. This might be an interesting cat-and-mouse game with pitchers and batters, the pitcher trying to get the batter to hit the ball softly, to a fielder, and the batter trying to hit the ball hard, way over every fielder’s head.
The running game would go straight to hell, I figure. Having a runner on first base would be so valuable, you’d scarcely be willing to risk losing one, and the first baseman would be better able to field his position while holding the runner on. That would pretty much be his normal position, anyway, right on top of the first-base line. So offense would be station-to-station, with more runs scoring as a result of the home run than anything else. The outcome of a game would depend on which pitcher was better able to avoid giving up more home runs than his counterpart.
Is this a desirable outcome? It would be a quicker game, for sure. Pitch-counts would be lower, far lower, than they are today. Pitchers would throw more strikes, knowing that more batted balls would find fielders’ gloves, while batters might be pickier about taking swings at pitches unless they’re confident that they can give the pitch a ride. With low pitch-counts, you’d see starters going longer into games: perhaps the complete game would be revived as a routine outcome.
Which game would you prefer? I think I know your answer: you’d prefer to watch the current nine-man game. Which is fine, but remember that it didn’t have to evolve the way it did. There is nothing necessary to the game of baseball about having nine fielders on a side, and if the seven-man game had caught on, or the eight-, ten-, or twelve-man game, then that’s what you’d watching today, and probably what you’d be defending as the normal, regular, All-American pastime.