Major League Baseball is boring, but it can be fixed by allowing only bunts in extra innings for the 2020 regular season, and only the 2020 regular season. As I write this, the Milwaukee Brewers and Minnesota Twins have failed to score a runner from second base with no one out a combined five times. Starting extra innings with a runner at second base was a rule implemented to shorten MLB games during a 60-game season scheduled over just 65 days. The rule has resulted in 17 of 27 extra-inning games this year ending in the tenth inning, but that’s irrelevant since MLB’s aging fan base won’t accept the rule outside of a pandemic. More importantly, the rule has shined a spotlight on how embarrassingly bad today’s MLB hitters are at HITTING.
Most of today’s MLB players are solely focused on slugging. They’re one-dimensional, which is why so many fail to advance a runner from second to third base by hitting a ground ball to the right side of the infield. It’s why so few runners are on base throughout MLB games, and it’s why baseball is boring. Five home runs spread over a five-hour game accounts for a few minutes of action per hour. The rest is time between pitches, which accounts for more than an hour of watching nothing, commercial breaks, and strikeouts, which are “boring” and “Fascist,” as Crash Davis so eloquently conveyed to Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham.
MLB has a lack of action problem. That lack of action is not due to strikeouts or defensive shifts or every hitter swinging for the fences. MLB’s lack of action problem is due to professional baseball players either being unable or unwilling to lay down bunts.
Defensive shifts cease to exist the moment a batter proves he can and will bunt for a hit if you leave one side of the infield unoccupied. The game as a whole is so obsessed with advanced statistics estimating the probability of scoring runs given the situation, it’s forgotten the unmeasurable but obvious stress a runner at first base can have on pitchers and defenses.
The slowest man at first base still forces every pitcher to abandon their windup (if they have one) and quicken their delivery to home plate. Just because MLB players don’t steal bases anymore doesn’t mean a pitcher is comfortable pitching with a man on first base. With so many batters with power potential swinging for the fences, pitchers are likely to be even more nervous about making a mistake that results in a two-run homer instead of a solo shot.Almost all pitchers are less effective throwing from the stretch. Whether that’s due to the altered delivery or nervousness is irrelevant.
Hitters should strive to make pitchers as miserable as pitchers make hitters when they strike them out. A pitcher under stress is not the same pitcher, and the more stress put on a pitcher the fewer pitches he’s likely to throw effectively.
Action, in baseball, requires men to be on base, and too often, there aren’t any. But this year, after completing nine innings, there is a man on base, and he’s being stranded there because his manager either believes that the benefit doesn’t outweigh the risk or doesn’t want to make a player uncomfortable and embarrass them. Regardless of reasoning, it makes for boring baseball and is an embarrassment for the game. But I have a solution that will fix MLB while protecting managers from the wrath of their players: only allow bunts in extra innings this season. Anything deemed a swing by umpires and, if necessary, replay review, would be an automatic out.
With a runner at second base and no one out, you don’t need a hit to score a run. You don’t even need a sacrifice fly. All you need is two well-placed bunts: one to the right side of the infield to advance the runner, and another past the mound to the pitcher’s glove-side, so even if he cuts it off, he has to play the ball with his glove, get the ball out of his glove, and turn to throw or toss home.
If MLB hitters can’t lay down bunts, they need to learn, and what an opportunity this pandemic-shortened season offers for them to do so. Not only will MLB hitters learn to bunt thanks to the “only bunts allowed in extras” rule this season, but their failed attempts will be more entertaining than the strikeouts and complete disregard for and lack of situational hitting we’re getting now. Even if defenses are expecting bunts, I’m betting MLB players are so terrible at bunting they’ll end up bunting balls over the heads of defenders for extra base hits. Frankly, allowing only bunts in extra innings would make those innings the most entertaining innings of MLB games.
