Four simple ways to shorten the game

Those wacky baseball owners are at it again. The complaint of the week down at MLB headquarters is that games are just too long, and that the fans are losing interest. To that I say, "who cares?" If you can't sit there and enjoy three solid hours of baseball, perhaps you need to re-think your priorities.

As I was saying, baseball's high and mighty have set out to shorten the length of major league games by 15 minutes, which frankly isn't a whole lot. At the owners' meetings last week in Florida, it was decided that pitchers will only have 12 seconds from the time the batter steps into the batter's box to deliver the ball to the plate, provided there are no runners on. If the pitcher takes too long, the umpire may call a ball. Also, batters who are given permission to leave the box cannot venture more than three feet, under penalty of having a strike called against them. Finally, umpires have agreed to actually adhere to the rules governing the length of time in between innings, which is 2:05 except in the case of a FOX Saturday or ESPN Sunday broadcast.

I'll be the first to say that these changes just aren't going to help. Asking the umpires to change the way they do things is like, well, asking the umpires to call the correct strike zone. Sure, things may be different the first month of the season, but you can rest assured that by July you'll be able to count on a good ol' three-and-a-half-hour American League baseball game.

If the owners really want to shorten the game, more drastic measures must be taken. With that in mind, I've outlined several changes which, if implemented, would dramatically reduce the time it takes to play nine innings.

- Umpires would keep the count a secret. As it stands now, the umpire makes the balls and strikes count known after each pitch. Imagine if he didn't? Depending on how good a pitcher's control is, a batter may not know the difference between a 3-0 count and a 1-2 count. Not wanting to go down on called strikes, hitters would be forced to swing earlier in the count, shortening the length of an at-bat. This would also help reduce offense, of which many think there is just too much anyway. Pitchers would throw fewer pitches, reducing the chance of over-work and injury.

- No extra innings. That's right, no extra innings. A complex scoring system would be used in the case of a tie after nine frames. The system would take into account stolen bases, sacrifices, walks, errors, hits, and "hustle factor". A single number would be generated for each team, telling you which team played the better game. A similar system is currently in use in Japan.

- Special pitching changes. Have you ever been at a game when a pitcher just can't find the strike zone? All those walks take time, and they make the game much longer than it really needs to be. Instead of replacing the struggling hurler with a scrub from the bullpen (and hey, pitching changes take time), why not replace him with a pitching machine? Those things are pretty accurate, you know. Machine throws a strike, batter puts the ball in play, and the inning is over.

And if none of those work...

- Two words: exploding baseballs.

Jason Michael Barker likes nothing more than to sit through four hours of American League baseball in a sunless concrete dome in Seattle, Washington, endlessly watching Joey Cora overthrow first base. Share his pain at jmb@strikethree.com.

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