A Modest Proposal to Fix the Humiliation that is Major League Baseball.

If you want professional baseball to survive, take the advice of someone who currently thinks it sucks.

Photo by Joshua Peacock on Unsplash

You won’t find any sources cited here. That would require me to read about or, God forbid, watch Major League Baseball in 2019. Now that I’m in my thirties, I only watch something that lasts four-and-a-half hours if (1) I’ll get fired if I don’t, (2) sleeping through it is permitted/encouraged, or (3) it doesn’t involve nine guys standing still on a field, playing for a team that’s out of the playoff race with FORTY games left.

It’s time for a major overhaul of MLB baseball from the top down, and only someone who currently admits how much it sucks is qualified to do it. So here are my ideas:

Well, first, just so you know I’m being fair, there are still plenty of good things about baseball, and I have no problem highlighting them:

• Round ball. Don’t overlook this part. True its name, a literal ball is used in baseball. Not every sport has this. See the misidentified brown oval at the center of foot“ball.” Also, golf. Yes it’s, strictly speaking, a “ball,” but it’s so small it’s really more of a glorified marble you don’t throw, catch or kick. And was there some ball shortage when the “puck” was chosen by whatever Canadian or Russian guy invented hockey? (Side note: hockey also largely sucks, but the games are shorter, which is a plus.)
• Any idiot can understand the rules. I’ll admit it. It’s nice you never have to explain baseball to an adult. None of that “Wait is that 6 points? I thought a touchdown was 7 points? Is a touchback different from a touchdown? Why did he foul him with 5 seconds left?!” and so forth. Instead: Hit the ball, run the bases to home plate. Easy.
• Out of shape people can sort of play it. As a chunky kid growing up, that never stopped me from playing on a little league team and standing still in right field for an inning or so (while the athletic kids got a breather) without breaking a sweat. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have worked out in basketball.

Look. If I didn’t like baseball on some level, I wouldn’t care about trying to fix it. So after painstaking research, here’s what baseball needs to do to stay relevant and watchable.

The New Rules of Modern Baseball

1. Eliminate ONE HUNDRED AND TEN (110) GAMES from the regular season schedule. I’m not ****ing around with these changes. The worst thing about the baseball season is the meaninglessness of any one game to the season outcome. You can lose six games in a row, and it’s just a blip on the radar. By contrast, for the NFL fan, every game your team plays is appointment TV —with 16 games the stakes are high from day one. By going from a 162 game season to 52 games, suddenly you’re on a two games per week schedule (Sunday and Wednesday, prime time) and every win is critical. Are any Yankees fans going to miss one of the two home games against the Red Sox? Let’s stop screwing around for a hundred extra games and up the stakes.
2. Penalize excessive foul balls. Hey batters, fans aren’t tuning in to see nine pop ups into the crowd six minutes into your at bat. Solution: After the second consecutive foul ball, the pitcher gets to move ten feet closer to the plate. You like to hit purposeless balls into the stands? Try it now, hot shot.
3. No pitching substitutions during the inning — unless it’s for a player already on the field. Managers, if your pitcher is in the middle of a meltdown, that’s on you. He stays on the filed until the inning is over. No mulligans. If you want somebody new throwing the ball, you’ve got eight other players out there who are free to give it a go. If you want to swap the pitcher for the right fielder who’s just been standing there for two hours, you go right ahead. No more, in-inning bailouts.
4. No hats. This isn’t the 1920s. Until the fans in the stands are wearing derbies or fedoras again, today’s audience isn’t interested in seeing a band of grown men playing catch in pinstriped newsie caps. Why not instead use team-branded AirPods™ or Beats™ headphones in the team color? Whatever the kids are using these days.
5. No bunting. This one needs no explanation. Make a real effing swing at that effing ball or get out.
6. Stealing any base scores a run. You’ll never watch a snoozer again. Get a man on base, and there’s a potential for a huge point swing.
7. New ways to get an out. (1) If an outfielder (not an infielder, that’s crazy) pegs a base runner with the ball during play, the runner is out. Let’s make that third base coach earn his money and give the runners a little pep in their step while rounding second. (2) If a fan in the stands catches a ball and throws it back on the field, that ball’s in play and the runner can be tagged out. (3) If a batter steps out of the batter’s box, that’s an out. (Adjust your crotch on your own time. There’s a game going on.)
8. The Penalty Box. When a pitcher hits two or more batters with a pitch, we all know what’s going on, and he should suffer the consequences. Put him in the penalty box (a team-branded, plexiglass cell behind the first base coach) for the next three batters or until the inning ends, whichever comes first. This results in an exciting hockey-like power play. (Repeated side note: hockey also largely sucks, but the games are shorter, which is a plus.)
9. Complete overhaul of extra innings. Since a tied game was probably already boring enough, fans need some excitement when we get to extra innings. Here’s how the new system works: Before starting the tenth inning, there’s a coin flip. Whoever wins the flip gets to decide two things: (1) whether they want to bat first or second, and (2) (a) whether to start their at bat with a man already on base, but with two outs, or (b) with no men on base, but with no outs — just think through those choices for second, and tell me you don’t love it. For each successive inning past the tenth that overtime continues, the defensive team loses one fielder. If you get to 13 innings, everyone’s ready to see the defense out there with no outfielders to catch anything, so the game can just mercifully end. If the game gets to 19 innings and no more players are on the field, team-branded cyanide capsules are to be distributed to the remaining fans and viewers at home who were subjected to that much baseball.