If you’re already a baseball fan, you’ve long since learned to live with how the sport takes its time. Any given baseball game is a slow burn, and there’s a certain charm to that.
However, it’s doubtful anybody is clambering for games to become even slower burns. Major League Baseball certainly isn’t, which is why it should be afraid of one of the ideas in the air right now.
With the league’s collective bargaining agreement set to expire on December 1, among the topics of discussion between MLB and the MLB Players Association is how to make the season—162 games in 183 days—less of a grind for the players. According to David Lennon of Newsday, shortening the season is one idea. As Jorge L. Ortiz of USA Today reported, others are working more off days into the season or expanding rosters to include more than 25 players.
One senses the union prefers either of the first two ideas. But per ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark, it seems union chief Tony Clark would settle for the third:
Here’s the thing, though: Whereas arranging for fewer games or more off days are merely imperfect ideas, expanding rosters is more like a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.
That might be a no-brainer as far as the owners are concerned. Bigger rosters mean more paychecks to sign. In a sport where the average salary is nearly $4.4 million, per the Associated Press, that’s an expensive proposition.
For the union, more players getting paid is obviously a good thing. Plus, there is something to the notion that bigger rosters would lessen the grind. That would make it easier for everyday players to find rest and for managers to require pitchers to throw fewer pitches. Hypothetically, players would be healthier and fresher throughout the season, and thus, the product would be better.
But in reality, the product would be just as likely to get worse. The games themselves might be better played, but they’d also be really, really long.
Baseball games are long enough as is, and they’re trending in the wrong direction to boot.
The progress that initially emerged after MLB implemented new pace-of-play rules for the 2015 season has been halted. As the AP noted (via Mike Axisa of CBS Sports), the average game time increased from two hours and 53 minutes in the first half of the 2015 season to three hours in the second half. According to Anthony Castrovince of MLB.com, the average game time in the first half of 2016 was three hours and 13 minutes.
“Pace of play for me is like dandelions in your front lawn,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said prior to the All-Star Game, per Castrovince. “I just can’t get rid of it.”
One reason for this has nothing to do with roster size: the time in between pitches. According to PITCHf/x data, it dropped from 23.0 seconds in 2014 to 22.1 seconds in 2015. This year, it’s back up to 22.6.
An issue that larger rosters would worsen, however, is bullpen strategy. Managers have been asking more and more of their bullpens in recent years, and bullpen usage is spiking big-time in 2016:
This is partially due to the return of high-powered offenses. Beginning in 2010, starting pitchers enjoyed a nice six-year window in which they had their way with hitters. But this year, they’re issuing more walks and surrendering a lot more home runs.
This is also a continuation of a more overarching trend. We know—courtesy of Jonah Keri and Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight—that modern bullpens are using more relievers to handle more innings. This is an era of bullpen specialization, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.
Even if rosters were only expanded from 25 to, say, 27 or 28 players, most managers would likely use the extra two or three roster spots on relief pitchers. The result would be something akin to games in September, when expanded rosters lead to bigger bullpens. Those lead to more pitching changes, which lead to longer games.
AJ Cassavell broke down the gory details at Sports on Earth last year: “From March to August of last season, only 2 percent of games saw a team use at least eight pitchers. In September, that number skyrocketed to 7 percent. As a result, the chances of a game hitting the three-hour mark also went up by about 5 percent.”
A manager could just as easily expand his bench rather than his bullpen, but that wouldn’t necessarily make things easier. It may not take as long to introduce a pinch hitter as it does a new pitcher, but what about the new pitcher to face the pinch hitter?
Of course, it’s not a given any of this would alienate baseball’s most committed fans. Although it’s unlikely many of them actually want slower games, hardcore fans could probably live with them if the trade-off was healthier, fresher players playing in more intricate games.
Casual fans would presumably be less enthused, though. Worse, longer games would strike a blow to MLB’s ongoing effort to reel in younger fans. Baseball’s audience skews old, as Mark Fisher of the Washington Post noted last April, and Manfred sees fixing that and hurrying things up as being joined at the hip.
“The issue of attracting a younger audience and a pace of game is related,” he told reporters last year.
It might not be a stone-cold given that pace of play is the key to attracting younger fans. But since baseball is having trouble hooking them with longer and more plodding games, it’s not a good idea to make games even longer and more plodding.
This is not to suggest players should just suck it up and deal with the grind as is.
Anybody can make a quip about them being paid good money to do so, but no amount of money is going to soften the punishment of playing 162 games in 183 days. Especially not in this day and age. It was hard for players to get through the season when they could take all of the performance-enhancing drugs they wanted. At a time when they can no longer do that, it’s even harder.
But the idea should be to lessen the grind without making the overall product less appealing. Adding more off days would be an OK way to do that. Shortening the season would be a downright good way to do that. It would allow players to stay fresh, and there wouldn’t be the same early- and late-season weather concerns associated with the idea for more off days.
Either is a tough sell for the players. But since they still have four months to make their pitch, nothing should be ruled out.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com