Theo’s next curse-busting task biggest yet: Fixing baseball originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
Nobody would invent this game.
That’s the basic thumbnail description of the magnitude of the task Theo Epstein faces as the former Cubs president formally joins the baseball commissioner’s office as a consultant to fix the problems in the game he admittedly helped create.
“It’s the greatest game in the world, but there are some threats to it because of the way the game is evolving,” Epstein said two months ago as he resigned from the Cubs and foreshadowed this latest move in some of his comments that day.
“I take some responsibility for that because the executives like me who have spent a lot of time using analytics and other measures to try to optimize individual and team performance have unwittingly had a negative impact on the aesthetic value of the game and the entertainment value of the game in some respects.”
Epstein spent 18 years during a Hall of Fame career as a baseball operations boss finding enough ways to squeeze more toothpaste out of the baseball tube to win three championships, including the two biggest curse-busters in major league history.
For his next trick, he’ll try to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Games take an average of 17 more minutes to play than 10 years ago with far less action. The average time of game in 2020 was 3 hours, 7 minutes, and strikeouts continue to outpace hits at an increasing rate since total Ks first exceeded hits in an MLB season in 2018.
More plate appearances than ever result in a ball either not being put in play (K, walk) or being hit out of play (home run) — more than one-third of all PAs in 2020.
And increasingly common and more extreme defensive shifts turn the increasingly rare ball in play into outs, with the league hitting just .292 last season on balls actually in play (BABIP).
Again, consider the task at hand for Epstein and others in the commissioner’s office in this context:
If baseball never had existed, and someone tried to start a league with that level of inaction now, what prayer would they have to sell it to consumers anywhere in the world, much less a young American consumer with so many other fast-paced entertainment options available to hold their decreasing attention spans for an hour or two at a time?
It certainly wouldn’t be the $10.7 billion industry the 30-team enterprise was in its last season before the pandemic. More likely, it would be a non-starter.
The entire object of the game from its formal beginnings involved putting the ball in play and reacting to it — to the degree that the National League played nine seasons until deciding, after the 1884 season, to allow pitchers to throw overhand. And even then, pitchers were not allowed a leg kick or stride to help create velocity.
Old Hoss Radbourn might have one of the best Twitter accounts in baseball these days, but he didn’t have a pitch lab or an appetite for spin rate when he threw 678 2/3 innings for Providence in 1884.
And the game was probably more aesthetically entertaining than it is now.
Even when the game evolved to include more power in pitching and hitting over the next century, pace did not become a problem until economic theory and proprietary computer systems were applied to game strategies and the skill sets collected on rosters.
Billy Beane in Oakland and Epstein in Boston, along with their team owners and a few others, were at the forefront of the so-called Moneyball movement, involving deeper analytics in a search for market inefficiencies and 2- to 3-percent gains in competitive advantage that would prove significant over six-month, game-a-day seasons.
Lineups of “grinders” who saw more pitches exploited starters on pitch limits and then weaker middle-inning relievers, which led to longer at-bats and more pitching changes, which led to fewer innings by starters and bigger pitching staffs, which led to a dilution of pitching quality, and so on.
Throw in analytics gains in pitching technology and strategy, a launch-angle coaching response to a trend in ground-ball pitching and increasingly sophisticated defensive shifts, and — hey, kid, wake up!
It’s no wonder that some pitchers take a half minute or more between pitches these days — which wouldn’t be so bad if each pitch had a payoff of assured action like football does. But it becomes absurd with a few foul balls and an eight- or nine-pitch at-bat.
Especially when the result is 50 percent more likely to be a strikeout or walk than a hit.
Epstein makes no promises to fix all that ails the game these days — in fact, he has been quick to point out MLB’s central office already had a team of able minds working on the problem.
And part of his new job also will include helping create a peaceful transition of shared power with a new collective bargaining agreement in 2022 in era of newly heightened tensions between owners and players.
But few in the game might be better equipped to help find solutions, given his experience in recent years on competition committees within MLB’s executive ranks and even more so his role in the evolving factors that led to this point.
Whether that will result in things as incremental as pitch clocks and a universal designated hitter or as dramatic as restrictions on shifts and moving the mound back, it’s hard to imagine what will be enough. What might fix it.
Because toothpaste doesn’t going back in the tube. Whatever comes next for this game that results in an improved, more entertaining product — never mind one that finally begins again to appeal to young people — can’t be about making baseball great again as much as it must be about going forward, maybe even building on what works in the game now.
And probably will include solutions many of us have not yet thought of.
Either way, the task at hand for Epstein is certain to represent a bigger job — if not a bigger curse — than anything he helped bust in Boston and Chicago.
