Daisuke Matsuzaka is one of baseball’s slowest workers on the mound. (PHOTO: Dick Whipple/AP Photo)
In a subscriber-only post to ESPN.com, Buster Olney quotes a team executive who thinks Major League Baseball should shorten its games to seven innings:
The games are often played too slowly, he noted. The audience of Major League Baseball is aging, with polls indicating that the youngest generation expects faster and fastest in what it consumes.
At the same time, the exec said, teams are struggling to find enough good pitching — and, at the same time, the number of injuries is skyrocketing. If oblique strains were the prevalent injury two years ago, ulnar collateral ligament strains are the ailment du jour. Top prospect Jameson Taillon of the Pirates is the latest pitcher to be headed for Tommy John surgery; maybe he’ll bump into Bobby Parnell along the way.
It seems so unlikely to happen that it’s hardly even worth arguing against. As Olney points out, numbers are sacred in the game, and switching to a seven-inning format would mean forever altering the way those numbers accumulate.
Beyond that, the idea that shortening games would help limit pitcher injuries is silly. If pitchers already aren’t going as deep into games as they did a few decades ago and injuries are “skyrocketing,” why would shortening games stop them from getting hurt?
Mets closer Bobby Parnell pitched one inning this season before hitting the disabled list with a torn elbow ligament. (USA TODAY Sports Images)
Pitchers facing fewer batters would likely expend more energy per pitch than they currently do, so it’s tough to argue it’d keep them safe from arm trouble. After all, closers — like Parnell — throw one inning per outing and still get hurt all the time.
Plus, no one I know of is complaining that the actual game action takes too much time. It’s all the time spent in between the action that extends games, from pitchers taking eons between pitches, to batters stepping out of the box to adjust their gloves, to constant late-game pitching changes.
Pitchers are supposed to have a maximum of 12 seconds between pitches, a rule that’s practically never enforced. A pitch clock alone would shorten games plenty without massively altering them. And limits could easily be placed on batters calling for time, catcher visits to the mound, and managers stalling while relievers throw their final warmup tosses in the bullpen.
Plenty of baseball fans — this one included — don’t find any particular problem with the length of contests, since baseball games should be savored. But even if it’s a real concern for the league moving forward, there are so many ways games can be shortened without being fundamentally changed.
