OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: How to fix baseball

It's become a familiar mantra: Major League Baseball is becoming unwatchable.

For a baseball traditionalist, the game reached an Aristotelian ideal around 1970. There were just under nine hits in a game. Home runs were not quite an everyday experience. Between five and six batters struck out per game. There were guys in the league who were genuinely small--men who weighed 160 pounds or less. Even the sluggers were regular-sized--Henry Aaron was 6 feet tall, 180 pounds. Willie Mays was 5 feet 11, 180.

When someone hit two home runs in a game, it was special. When a pitcher struck out 10 batters, it was special. There were a lot of balls put in play in those games, lots of chances for fielders. About every fifth game someone would hit a triple.

In 2021, we see just over seven hits a game and about nine strikeouts. Home run frequency is just over one per game, but on average you have to watch nine games to see a triple. There are fewer balls put in play. The game seems to revolve around strikeouts and home runs.

These games seem sort of antiseptic, guys throwing hard to guys swinging hard and occasionally connecting. I don't relate to it, and the mandarins of baseball understand they've got a problem. They're looking at ways to nudge the game back to the 1970 model: more hits, fewer homers, fewer strikeouts and more action on the field. They want to tweak the product, make it more exciting.

That's what they should do, though I don't blame the athletes and executives for figuring out a more efficient way to play the game. Their goal should be to win baseball games by any means necessary. It's up to the off-the-field staff to figure out how to put on a better TV show.

Most of the current baseball ills proceed from the fact that there's no longer any stigma attached to the act of striking out.

Just about everyone over the age of 40 or so who has ever played baseball knows the shame of striking out. It used to be nightmare fuel. To swing and miss was traumatic, but even worse was to watch that third strike hit the catcher's mitt.

Your internal play-by-play announcer would supply the Joe Friday facts; your internal color commentator would observe how you didn't even try, imbuing your physical failure with moral rot.

You'd slow-walk back to the dugout, avoiding the eyes of teammates that you had just let down. Someone would patronize you with a pat on the shoulder, but maybe there would be grumbling too, probably from the hotshot third baseman who rode his mini-bike to practice. Striking out was embarrassing.

It wasn't just us unformed kids who felt it either.

According to his manager Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle sometimes cried in the dugout after striking out. He was demoted to the minors in his rookie year after he struck out three times in one game. There was a lot of speculation that he'd never make it as a major league player until he cut down on his strikeouts.

That was stupid. Even in his rookie year Mantle was a superb player. But the knock against him was that he struck out a lot. And for his era, he did. If you break down Mantle's career, he averaged 115 strikeouts per 162-game season.

Among his contemporary stars, only Harmon Killebrew--with a rate of 113 strikeouts per 162 games--comes close. He struck out far more often than Frank Robinson (88), Willie Mays (83), Ralph Kiner (82), Roger Maris (81), Ernie Banks (79) and Hank Aaron (68), who said he was deeply ashamed whenever he struck out, even if Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale was pitching.

Nowadays hitters routinely compile more strikeouts than hits in a season. When Bobby (Barry's father) Bonds struck out 189 times in 1970, I honestly worried about him. I couldn't imagine that striking out that often wouldn't put him in a desperate frame of mind. Now it's nothing to strike out 200 times in a season.

There's no emotional component to striking out. Everyone understands the simple logic: A strikeout is just an out. It doesn't harm one's team more than a pop-up or a sharply hit ground ball to the shortstop. An out is an out is an out, and you have 27 of them to make in a game. In a vacuum, it doesn't matter how you make them.

Sure, there are some outs that advance a team's chances of winning--a ground ball to second base might move a base runner from first to second or from second to third, a run could score on a fly ball--but you don't (usually) strike out into a double play either.

My generation was misled by box score statistics. We were taught to value stats like batting average, home runs and runs batted in: the Triple Crown stats. But you don't have to have that much sophistication as a baseball fan to see how a .250 hitter can be more valuable than a .400 hitter. A guy who strikes out three times but hits a home run with two men on base is a much better offensive player than a guy who gets two singles in five at-bats and knocks in a run.

To win a baseball game, figure out how to most effectively score more runs than the other team. It doesn't have to be aesthetically pleasing.

But it makes for a better TV show to have balls hit in the gap being chased by fielders who unleash throws that race with runners toward bases. It is a better TV show to have plays that involve lots of players. Home runs are fine, but doubles and triples and diving stops are the soul of baseball.

So we have to regress, to disincentize strikeouts, to once again grant them the power to emasculate and shame. Forget the walk-up music, let's play the "Price is Right" sad trombone as they walk back to the dugout after they wiff. We'll get those sluggers to choke up with two strikes; we might even bring back the Nellie Fox bottle bat.

Whatever it takes. We need more crying in baseball.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

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