Or what I'd do if I were told that I was designing a baseball league to break up MLB's monopoly. To start:
1. No infield fly rule. An infield popup is weaksauce. If it turns into an easy double-play, so what? The pitcher earned it by making the batter pop up! This would take away one of the big advantages of "groundball pitchers", thus opening up more places for "flyball pitchers". And most importantly, the least exciting play in baseball is immediately transformed into the most-exciting play.
2. No DH. Duh.
3. Knock down the outfield fences and replace them with a line on the ground. If a ball is caught behind the line, it's a live ball, i.e., the batter is not out -- but he had better be running if he wants a triple or home run. Like getting rid of the infield fly rule, this replaces a boring dead-ball play with an exciting play. Strong-armed outfielders and hitters who combine power with speed see their value go way up.
4. Possible rule changes to enable/refine rule change #3. Depending on how it seems to work with the baserunning, there might be need for a second line, closer to the plate (maybe 50 feet closer?). A ball hit in the air past this second line would free runners to advance as far as they want, i.e., they couldn't be "doubled off" -- however, the batter is still out on a ball caught on the fly between the two lines.
Sure, the changes are crazy, but they introduce a lot more running, a lot more intrigue on the basepaths, and a lot more action generally...and dare I say "fun". (And don't go all purist on me...I'll just say, "fine, this isn't 'baseball'".)
What other rule changes would you imagine to create a different version of baseball that might compete successfully on the market?
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2 comments:
If we could borrow one rule from cricket, my choice would be tea time. I propose the middle of the fifth inning. As a bonus, the 7th inning stretch could be phased out as redundant.
Well, tea time would correspond to somewhere around the 7th inning stretch. A game with tea time would also have lunch, and that could occur in the middle of the 5th. If one was to get technical.
Onto wacky Briggsy's rules. I agree with no infield fly rule, get rid of dat $#!+. I don't mind the DH - I think it's perfect actually that one league has it and the other doesn't.
As for rule change 3, I'm thinking, no. The outfield fence is supposed to represent a distance beyond which one can assume that the batter could round the bases before being thrown out. We don't actually have them do that because that would eventually wear people down (more so in cricket than baseball). Even if you knocked down the (current) outfield fences, you would still need another boundary, because the field can't keep going around the world. So what you're proposing really is making the field bigger, and having a couple of lines around which rules change, the idea being to increase running and exciting plays. I think a home run is exciting as it is. Yes, it would be more exciting for Paulie to leg it out rather than just trot, but that's going to limit his effectiveness over the long run, which is bad for business. So I wouldn't change baseball that way, but a competing sport, why not?
As for Fung's ideas, hmmm. I wonder what it would be like if you went to the cricket way. An inning would mean having to get 9 outs, and you'd have 2 or 3 innings each. You'd probably have to allow pitchers to rotate in and out, but the way baseball goes that would slow things down. Perhaps pitchers have to face a minimum number of batters?
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