No tying in baseball

Major League Baseball is coming off its greatest, and one of the highest rated, World series of all time, with the Chicago Cubs breaking a century old curse and winning a title despite being down 3 games to 1 to the surprising (and almost equally cursed) Cleveland Indians. NFL ratings were down last season, and NBA ratings are suffering from players “resting” and the fact that there are only two interesting teams in the league.  And, for the fiftieth year in a row since soccer was predicted to become America’s national pastime, soccer is not the national pastime.  So everything’s coming up baseball.

But you can’t get ahead by standing still, and baseball is looking at the next great crisis to face the sport.  The relative paucity of African-American players? The seeming inability for a pitcher to pitch for six innings a game and not require Tommy John surgery? The retirement of Vin Scully? No, the next great crisis for baseball is the tie game.

Football and hockey accept ties, albeit grudgingly. Basketball doesn’t, but given the nature of the game repeated tie scores after overtime periods are unlikely.  Soccer without ties would be like the 4^th of July without hot dogs.  Only baseball insists on preventing ties even if it means playing for twice as long as the game was originally scheduled for.  Traditionalists revel in this, but maybe it is time to reconsider.

Let’s first look at the most obvious point, player safety.  MLB, like other sports (I’m looking at you, football), trots out player safety as a reason to justify anything it wants to do.  But because of baseball’s ironclad rule against a player re-entering a game once he has been pulled, there are some legitimate concerns.  Bullpen pitchers can be asked to throw more pitches than they are comfortable with.  Position players can be put in to pitch, which can result in injury (Jose Canseco missed part of the 1993 season because he pitched, and he wasn’t throwing Nolan Ryan type heat). And heaven help the team whose catcher either has to play for 15 innings, or is taken out and then the back-up catcher suffers an injury.   Fatigue causes injuries, and playing in the 16^th inning at 1:15 AM sounds fatiguing.

There are some other, more subtle problems with the “no ties” policy.  For example, if the game being played into the 15^th inning is on a getaway day, teams may have to fly out of a city at an ungodly hour, and arrive at their net city about the time players should be waking up, not going to bed.  Some cities have established curfews to prevent games from disturbing neighborhoods (of course I am talking old school stadiums in inner cities, not modern parks out in the sticks), resulting in uneven rules being applied.

But the argument that resonated with me was, who is watching these games?  Baseball is for the fans, but if you look at tape of any 16-inning marathon that started at 7:05 PM local time you’ll notice the stands are mostly empty, filled only by a handful of die-hards who presumably have no job or school to go to the next morning.

One thing that I always felt truly differentiated baseball and football—to the betterment of both—was that baseball had rainouts but football was played no matter the weather.  Watching a game played in adverse conditions just made it better, but baseball was such a nuanced sport that if it couldn’t be played right, then it shouldn’t be played at all.  Playing after midnight after 12 or more innings isn’t conducive to playing baseball right.

Not that I am endorsing the idiotic idea proposed and implemented in some minor leagues that extra innings in tie games start with a man on base. Not only is it a gross distortion of the game, but it does nothing to address breaking the tie.  Yes, it gives the first tam up a greater chance of scoring, but then it gives the second team up the same greater chance of scoring, accomplishing nothing.  Truly moronic.

I am not a fan of distorting baseball to end ties the way other sports do.  Soccer and hockey have adopted gimmicks like shootouts and playing three-on-three in overtime.  The next thing will be basketball ties being broken by free throw shooting contests.  Baseball should be played as it was meant to be played, down to the bitter end.

But maybe that bitter end should, on rare occasions, be a tie. After three extra innings, declare the game over and avoid an unlucky 13^th inning.  Managers could manage their pitching expectations better, fans in ballparks would know (approximately) when the end was coming, and teams could adjust their strategies to a finite time horizon.  Not that many games go past 12 innings, and maybe there would be fewer ties if teams knew it was going to end before there was a 13^th.

There might be some provision for making up tie games if the affected the post-season, or maybe not allow ties until the expanded rosters in September.  But playing games until the tie is broken just leads to the situation lampooned in WP Kinsella’s novel The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, which was about a cursed baseball game that went on for months.  Maybe for over 100 years baseball played without a time limit, but maybe that time has come to an end.