Baseball Ties and Late-Inning Pitchers
Let’s make them happen (and happen less).
People think baseball is long and boring because it doesn’t get everybody involved all the time. A pitcher can strikeout the side, but that only takes away from the shortstop being able to flash the leather or the right fielder throwing somebody out at the plate. There aren’t too many instances where all nine players on defense are included on a single play, whereas football and basketball tests the ability of our eyeballs to multitask.
Not having more than one or two areas of a given play to watch starts to become a drag to those that simply just don’t enjoy baseball. Television and its advertisements have changed the way people watch sports. Lights entered the fields, allowing day-job havers to watch games after dealing with the traffic to get to the Major League ballpark or from the couch at home. There are only so many hours in the day to cater to the fans that feed the entertainment industry and baseball (and its commercials) wants more people to be attracted to sticking around for the ride.
Baseball feels boring because it wasn’t designed to have the intensity that other sports have. Even baseball romantics can get bored of watching a game that might include a pitcher that can’t find the strike zone and one team finds itself leading 13–2 in the fourth inning; there’s nothing criminal about admitting.
As a newspaperman, I cover an NCAA Division III women’s basketball team that’s ranked in the Top 25. Recently, I told two of its players how boring the games are to me because I need two hands to count how many times they’ve led by 20 or so points in the second quarter and coast the rest of the way. Even when there’s a clock involved, you kind of wish things would hurry up and end already.
When I read Travis Sawchik’s article on Fangraphs.com about letting baseball games end in ties, it was relieving to see a smart person write that. In short, baseball doesn’t really lose any value for letting a sport with 162 regular-season games end in ties whether it happens after the ninth or twelfth inning.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Pitchers are expensive and fragile, bullpens more specialized. I don’t believe any manager loves exhausting his staff in a 13-plus-inning affair and how it can affect a club the next day or next series.”
The kicker in trying to put a maximum how long games should last also triggers the way pitchers are managed. But managers utilize hyper-specialized pitchers because there’s no rule saying that they can’t. The MLB has created rules limiting actions that delay action (i.e. keeping a foot in the batter’s box, instant replay, not arguing with umpires after instant replay), so why not limit how many pitchers a team can use late in games?
MLB games can end in ties, but extra innings shouldn’t be beheaded from the equation. Not all extra-inning games become convoluted with pitching changes, but we’ve all seen that happen before. So can we find a way to help fans go to bed before 1 a.m. and make sure pitchers’ arms won’t have to suffer from two games worth of work just for one?
- MLB games cannot be played beyond the 11th inning.
- Teams are limited to two pitching changes after the 8th inning, barring injury.
- Both of those are only for the regular season; playoff games don’t end in ties.
On September 10, Minnesota beat Cleveland 2–1 in 12 innings. Both teams went to the bullpen in the ninth inning in a tie game (1–1). In the top of the 10th, Buddy Boshers replaced Brandon Kintzler, got the first two batters out on six pitches, then was replaced by Alex Wimmers, who only threw five pitches to finish the side. Wimmers came back out in 11th, got José Ramírez to groundout on a 2–1 count, then was replaced by Ryan O’Rourke who got the next two batters out on five pitches. J.T. Chargois came in to start the 12th, but this time he was trusted enough to take care of the inning by himself.
It took three pitchers in two innings to throw 20 pitches before A) the Twins finally realized what they were doing was excessive and/or B) this game might not end until the 15th (it didn’t, thanks to Joe Mauer).
Months before, Cleveland was in a 19-inning game in Toronto that involved one pitching change in the ninth, but 11 total changes after that. None of Cleveland’s five pitching changes after the ninth were in the middle of an inning, but it wasn’t until the 15th when they finally let Trevor Bauer handle the long workload since it was already time for him to throw his extensive bullpen session anyway.
Zach McAllister pitched that night, then started the next day for Cleveland. Much like the night before, he lasted one whole inning. Four more bullpen pitchers were used in the 9–6 loss.
In the series finale, Corey Kluber just had a bad start: four walks, seven hits, one dinger and five runs scored for the Blue Jays and was replaced by Joba Chamberlain in the fourth inning.
Down 5–0 to start the bottom of the sixth, Tom Gorzelanny replaced Chamberlain. Maybe it was just a bad day off one day’s worth of rest, but the bullpen is thin after the last two games. The results of the eight batters Gorzelanny faced are as followed: walk, walk, home run, groundout, walk, single, single, single. Tommy Hunter finally comes in after four runs score: ground rule double, single single, foul popfly, strikeout. An overworked bullpen cost the Indians an eight-run inning two days later.
I do see the counter-arguments to all of that. Cleveland, for one, ended up going to Game 7 of the World Series anyway. Toronto had to deal with the situation, too (but had better luck). It’s not the pitchers’ responsibility to put runs on the scoreboard.
However, these long games can be fun for to experience in the moment and laugh about after the fact, but it doesn’t mean that the pitchers’ have to suffer, either. These arms aren’t under the knife because of these games right now, but who’s to say that limiting how many pitchers are used late in games wouldn’t help prevent it happening in the first place? Why wait until Andrew Miller’s arm becomes a casualty?
And if you know the game will end at a certain point, it just makes the game easier to manage on all fronts.
(Aside: fans at the game don’t have to keep saying “well, maybe just *one* more inning, then we’ll leave.”)
Bullpens already have arms that can offer 30–40 pitches on a given day. A team can let the assigned closer or one-inning guy or whoever throw the ninth, then if the game is still a tie, then the more flexible bullpen pitcher tosses the final two innings.
The games will end, no matter how improbable they sometimes seem. Sometimes that’s a thought that crosses your mind in the 14th inning, sometimes it’s still just the fourth. Keep baseball boring. Keep it sometimes fun. But if we’re going to sometimes cut the party short, it might as well be for health reasons.
