What would happen to the game of baseball if we were to make some radical rules changes? I’m not advocating making these changes in the time-honored rules of the game, not all of them anyway, but it’s a little unclear to me what would happen to Major League Baseball if we were, say, to move the fences out to 600 feet from the plate, or raise the fences to a minimum of thirty feet high.

Or both.  

Your first response might be "Terrible idea. No one would ever hit a home run ever again," but I’m not sure that home runs would decrease. Traditional home runs, the kind that disappear into the stands, sure—we’d never see those again. But isn’t that a kind of boring play? It’s really not a play at all, if you come to think about it a little. The ball goes out of play, the batter steps on all four bases but there’s never any attempt to tag him out at any of them, and you get a one-minute hiatus as he jogs around the basepaths and the pitcher glares at him. That’s exciting?

What would be exciting would be all the inside-the-park home runs that would result from a 30-foot high fence, 600 feet away.  Instead of seeing one or two inside-the-park home runs per season—and that’s the single most exciting play in baseball, in my opinion—you’d see one or two per game, wouldn’t you? Even with the outfielders positioning themselves extra-deep, which they would have to do, you’d still get a couple of hits into the gap between them every few innings, and the race would then be on. Any line drive that has even a chance to find a gap would get everyone in the stadium on his feet screaming, and those balls that bounce between outfielders would set up the most exciting half-minute of baseball you ever saw.

Think about what would result: every fielder would have to position himself to try to prevent the batter from getting a home run. You’d have two outfielders chasing down the ball that got between them, but the other outfielder would need to run IN towards the plate, to serve as the first cutoff man on a throw in, and then an infielder (probably the first baseman, since he’s out of the play from the get-go) would have to run out to the outfield to back him up and/or serve as a second cutoff man. You’d need about three perfect throws to get the ball into the catcher in time to nab the runner who’d be hustling his ass off to get around the bases before the ball could be returned to the plate.

(I also need to note, about here, that 600 feet, and 30 feet, are just arbitrary, off-the-top-of-my-head numbers. It may well be that those numbers need to be tweaked to give the results I’m speculating about here. But some fairly outrageous numbers will give those results.)

An exciting play, sure, but other things would necessarily change as well, and I think most of these changes are for the good: I said that the outfielders would position themselves much deeper, which they would, but the deeper positioning would also change other parts of the game. Base hits, singles, would increase if the outfielders were positioned 350 feet from home plate instead of the current 300 feet. It would be much more tempting for a fast baserunner to stretch one of those singles into a double, too—another very exciting play we rarely see these days. Perhaps stolen bases would be reduced, if stretching these singles becomes the better percentage way to advance to advance to second than the traditional stolen base.

All of the outfielders, it seems to me, would have be very skilled defensive players, too. In today’s game, teams can afford to have at least one slow, weak-throwing outfielder—the downside to having an immobile side of beef playing an outfield position is that maybe when a ball is hit over his head he’ll have to track it down after it bounces off the wall while the batter takes one extra base. Not such a big downside, if the fielder compensates by being a powerful hitter himself. But in my scheme, it would be very costly to put any defensively unskilled outfielder into the game: a batted ball past an outfielder, particularly an outfielder who takes his time getting to the ball and who can’t throw it effectively, will surely cost many more bases in the field than he can account for with his bat. This, again, would be a good thing. It would increase the number of exciting, talented, highly skilled players on the field performing difficult defensive acts. I wouldn’t be surprised if teams would need all three outfielders to have the defensive skills of today’s average centerfielder.

Would pitching be affected? Aside from groundball pitchers increasing in value (compared to pitchers who get more of their outs via flyballs), I would think that strikeouts would be more important, since simply hitting the ball anywhere would carry a certain amount of danger with it.  But preventing walks would also increase in importance. To put a man on first base, after all, would be to put him in virtual scoring position. (Now defined as "on a base beyond first base," that definition would expand to "on any base.") With outfielders playing much deeper, to prevent a ball hit into the gap, they would intercept more hits 400 or 450 feet from home plate, which would mean that a fast runner could score from first base much more easily. Again, would this make the stolen base a less attractive option? Would this mean that fewer runners would consider the risk of stealing a base to be worthwhile, since they wouldn’t really need to be beyond first base to score on a line-drive hit? Maybe.

Just in terms of boring baseball, eliminating some stolen bases would eliminate many of the tedious pickoff-throws that people complain about slowing the game down. It’s possible that pitchers might even encourage runners to try to steal second base if that would be an effective way to eliminate them on the basepaths, and it might not be as big as advantage anymore to be on second base rather than on first. 

So rather than reducing offense, 600-foot high, 30-foot tall fences might actually increase offense. The effect of making the fences unreachable would be, overall, to introduce more speed, defensive skill, and strategy into the game of baseball. I have further ideas on the subject of what these, and other radical changes in the rules, might cause, but I’m sure you’re reaching to unloosen your seat belt to pitch me out of this car doing 75 MPH, so I’ll pause for a while to let you catch your breath and get a word in edgewise.