How MLB can tweak rules to help fix its offense problem: Sherman
Here are three potential offensive additives MLB can make.
nypost.com
Major League Baseball has become Dave Kingman.
It hits .236 — Kingman’s lifetime average. It walks in 8.9 percent of its plate appearances and strikes out in 24.1 of them — Kingman’s averages were 8.2 and 24.4 (all stats are heading into the weekend). It does this in an endless hunt to hit home runs.
Kingman was entertaining in the 1970s and 1980s as an oddity for that approach: prodigious (for the time) strikeout totals and home run distances. He was fun when there was one of him. But now Kingman is pretty much the game.
In Kingman’s 1971 debut season, a plate appearance ended in a walk, strikeout or homer 24.7 percent of the time, meaning no ball was put in the field of play. The percentage was 26.6 in his final season, 1986. It is 36.1 percent across MLB each of the past two seasons. Hit by pitches — another not-in-play outcome — also have been at record levels the past two years.
A nine-inning game is, on average, taking 3:07 to play, tying last year for the longest ever. So it is taking longer than ever to produce a half a run less per game than even two years ago and a batting average that would be the lowest ever. The record low was .237 in 1968. That was the Year of the Pitcher. That year, two pitchers — Luis Tiant and Sam McDowell — averaged a strikeout per inning among 76 qualified starters. This year, 39 of 69 so far — a group that includes J.T. Brubaker, Tyler Mahle and Logan Webb — are averaging a strikeout per inning. It used to be you had to be an elite starter to do that, now you can fall out of Pitchers Anonymous.
Among relievers, 94 of the 143 who had appeared in 15 games were averaging a strikeout per inning, 69 were averaging 10 or more strikeouts per nine, 47 were averaging 11 or more, 34 were averaging 12 or more.
There were six no-hitters — not counting Madison Bumgarner’s in a seven-inning game. A third of teams were averaging four runs or fewer — including both the Mets and Yankees, who also were among the 12 teams batting .230 or lower. Five of those clubs were in the AL (you know, playing with a DH), including the Mariners, who were batting .198.
The conceit in baseball for decades was that there was nothing harder to do in sports than hit a baseball. Then, nearly every innovation of the past decade-plus has favored pitchers, making hitting even harder. What should frighten those who love the game is this from one GM: “I think we are not at the bottom.” So brace for lower averages and strikeouts 30 percent of the time — or more.
Marlins manager Don Mattingly recently said: “It’s been coming. It’s been building. And now it is at a point where it is getting so much more attention because it is just a game that sometimes is unwatchable.”
Which is why, attempting to generate more in-the-field-of-play offense, MLB is tinkering with rule changes throughout the minors — such as limiting defensive shifts, limiting pickoff throws to encourage base stealing and even, in the Atlantic League, moving the mound back a foot.
There are no easy solutions. Many attempts will have unintended consequences — would moving the mound back, for example, lead to even more pitching injuries? But doing nothing is no longer an option. The mound was lowered after 1968, the DH came to the AL five years after that. Here are three potential offensive additives I would recommend: