Do We Really Need To Speed-Up Baseball?

Source: www.wnyc.org --- Friday, March 31, 2017
Major League Baseball has been wrestling with the question of how to shorten the length of Baseball games. They're eager to find ways to speed things up. The New York Times invited staff writers and their readers to offer suggestions (some of which they published earlier this month) — and they were inundated with ideas ranging from the reasonable (more strict enforcement of time outs during at bats) to the unrealistic (actually lop off innings of play, or make it two strikes and you're out). The history of Baseball is a history of rule changes. The mound was lowered after 1967 as a response to too dominant pitching; the foul strike rule — making some foul balls count as strikes — was introduced earlier in the 20th century to counter the opposite problem, the failure of pitchers to contain hitting. These were changes introduced to improve the game and level the playing field in the face of shifting styles of play and shifting technologies (new balls, for example). They represent a real evolution of the game. They also introduce an element of incommensurability when it comes to comparing on-field accomplishments across different eras. The extraordinary pitching accomplishments of Gibson, Seaver and others in 1967 were made possible, at least in part, by conditions of play that no longer remain. Or consider the fact that prior to 1920, the most homers hit in a season was 29 — by Babe Ruth. After 1920, offensive statistics boomed, in ...

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