The league continues to chase people who aren’t interested in baseball while alienating the people who are.
Major League Baseball is making permanent the temporary rule that puts a runner on second base automatically to start any inning beyond the ninth during the regular season.
An automatic runner on second base to start extra innings is the kind of rule modification made for a U14 weekend tournament, not the highest level of the game. If you’ve ever coached or umpired youth baseball, you know that this is the sort of thing you discuss at the plate conference before an early-morning Saturday game, right in between flipping a coin to decide which team will bat first and clarifying whether the balk warning is one-per-team or one-per-pitcher. The “M” in “MLB” could stand for “middle-school” now.
The arguments made in favor of this rule change are weak. Teams claim that long extra-innings games mess up their rosters, since using more pitchers in extra innings reduces the number of available arms for the next game. The change also fits with MLB’s pace-of-play goals to eliminate long extra-inning games.
The teams’ roster concerns are little more than whining. There’s no game clock on baseball (at least not yet), and you play until one team wins. Sometimes you play a long game. That’s why teams employ managers who get paid millions of dollars to — follow this next part carefully — manage the roster. There are two things teams can do in the first nine innings to make sure games don’t drag on into the night: (1) score more runs, or (2) give up fewer runs.
As for pace of play, less than 10 percent of games ever go to extra innings, and the ones that do rarely go beyond the tenth or eleventh inning. MLB is solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
This rule change will have no effect on the vast majority of games, so it might seem like there’s little reason to be upset about it. But it demonstrates MLB’s continued efforts to deliver as little of its product as possible while tinkering with long-standing rules for little benefit.
Marathon extra-inning games are the kind of unusual, memory-creating events that baseball fans talk about for years after they happen. Milwaukee Brewers fans, such as myself, remember Ryan Braun’s walk-off hit in the 18th inning against the Mets in 2019. The famous racing sausages usually only race once per game, in the middle of the sixth inning, but in that game they raced in the middle of the twelfth and 18th innings as well, and in the middle of the 14th, fans got a second seventh-inning stretch. Brewers fans also remember catcher Martin Maldonado’s 17th-inning walk-off dinger to defeat the Diamondbacks in 2015. In addition to winning the game with his bat, Maldonado caught all 17 innings, which is more impressive than the home run.
Marathon games are common memories in other sports as well, such as the six-overtime Syracuse vs. UConn game during the 2009 Big East men’s basketball tournament. But MLB has decided to make baseball slightly more standardized and ensure there will be slightly fewer unforgettable moments for fans going forward.
The automatic-runner rule also screws up scorekeeping. There’s a set number of ways runners may reach base (between seven and 23, depending on how you count), and none of them apply to the magic runner. This is the workaround MLB came up with for 2022:
For the purpose of calculating runs, the runner who begins the inning at second base is deemed to have reached second base due to a fielding error, but an error will not be assessed to the opposing team.
In other words, the rule is to write a lie into the scorebook. Nobody committed an error, and no pitcher should have to deal with a runner that neither he nor anyone on his team did anything to allow on base.
MLB continues to demonstrate that it simply doesn’t get it. There isn’t a multitude of potential fans who would tune in to baseball games if only extra-inning games ended sooner. The league continues to chase people who aren’t interested in baseball while alienating the people who are.