Sunday, August 24, 2014

27 outs or 60 minutes, whichever comes first.

I've been fiddling with an idea to mandate two hour games.  The nature of baseball is that one team can stall, no matter how much the umpires try to avoid that.

How about giving teams 60 minutes on offense, then cutting them off?  On offense they might as well play as quickly as possible.

What about on defense?  A team would always have the incentive to delay and run out the the other team's offensive clock.  How about time delayed on defense being subtracted from their 60 minutes of offensive time.

It might actually work.  How about trying it in the Experimental League that I recommended?

2 comments:

Edd Rodriguez said...

I don't understand your stubborness on this matter. Like why do you want baseball games with a duration of less than 2 hours? This is not a physical (at least not as much as other sports) gane, it is a mental one.
It is such a privilege to not have a clock that affects your in-game decisions other than the miliseconds it takes the pitch to arrive to the plate and decide to swing por not.
In soccer for instance, when a team is winning by one goal and the clock is at 85' (90' is full time) they tend to make stupid pases in order to not give the opposing tema the chance to equalize the score... Where's the sportsmanship in there? I certainly do not want that happening in baseball.
And I personally DETEST short-during games. Why the rush? Are you bored? Don't you like pitching? Why do you even watch baseball then?
Seriously man, there are so many other things that can make the gane better, this is not one of them.

Kenneth Matinale said...

Edd,

Thanks for the thoughtful cmments.

1. "fiddling with an idea", not a recommendation.

2. There ARE clock rules but they are not enforced.

3. Soccer sucks. I was not suggesting that a team run out the clock.

4. All the stuff you like would still be there minus the DEAD time, especially that between pitches. Games can absolutely be played within two hours.

Watch films of an old World Series. Try 1952. You'll see that batters stay in the box and that there's some flow. The problem is that just about everything that can slow down, has slowed down.