A Modest Proposal
Pretty much everywhere I go, someone will inevitably ask the question: “If you were commissioner, what would you do to improve baseball?” I’ve been asked this question so many times that, well, you would expect me to have come up with an answer for it. But what I tend to do instead is sort of riff about a bunch of vague ideals I’d chase—I’d want to make the minor leagues more vital to communities, I’d want to figure out a television and streaming package that allows people to watch the baseball teams they love without blackouts, I’d want to ask some hard questions about where the game is going with gambling, I’d want to promote baseball and the players nonstop because this is truly a great game…
…and more than anything, I’d want to figure out how to get starting pitchers to go longer and how to get fewer strikeouts and more balls in play, because I think, of the many problems that baseball faces, this is the biggest.
Of course, I’m not running for commissioner and would never in a million years want to be commissioner, and so I say all of this without offering any specifics at all, because I would hope that people a whole lot smarter than me are actually working on these things.
As the pitching crisis gets graver and graver and graver and graver and graver, I think it’s time to at least try and think of a way for baseball to get out of the mess it has been building toward for a very long time.
As such, I’ve been reading everything I can, and casually talking to people in and around the game, and thinking a lot about it, and I’ve come up with a sort of model for how I think baseball could change course. I’m under no illusions that:
This plan would work the way I want it to work.
Anyone would agree with this model.
Doing any of the following things is actually feasible.
But we’re talking about an imaginary “You’re commissioner of baseball and can do whatever you want” scenario here. You know how sometimes you might play an imaginary game like “What three books and movies and albums would you bring if you were to be stranded on a desert island?” and the person you’re playing with would say something like, “I’d only bring the books because there would be no electricity on the desert island.” Well, please don’t do that. We’re just playing games here.