00:00The game did highlight, though, that baseball might have a problem on their hands, Jason.
00:04Like, the pitching's too good.
00:06Really, the Derby is now more fun than the game,
00:09because in the Derby, you get to see the best hitters alive do their thing,
00:14and they remind you how talented they are.
00:16And then they get into the game, and it's just too hard for even the best hitters on earth
00:23to hit these dudes throwing this velocity with this much information
00:29with the defenses playing so deep, using all the information to stand
00:35where they know these guys are going to hit the ball hardest.
00:39And so I feel like this is the last thing on the field that baseball has to fix.
00:47We've got to get back to a place where the hitters can hit,
00:51where there's more great athletes running around the bases.
00:55And I feel like two things have to happen.
00:57You can tell me how you react to that.
01:01One is, I would do what the other sports do.
01:04I would limit where defenses can play.
01:07You cannot let your outfitters play that deep.
01:11You can't.
01:11It takes away all the doubles and triples and gappers and all the fun stuff.
01:15And you can't allow infielders to stand right up the middle, two inches from second base,
01:23so that all those balls that used to be hits up the middle are outs.
01:28You have to figure out some way to get that under control.
01:31The pie slice is what I call it.
01:33Does that make sense?
01:34If you see my hands here.
01:35So the farther behind second you want to play, the farther from base you have to play.
01:42So I like that idea a lot.
01:44The other thing is you have to get the strikeout rate under control.
01:48And, you know, the more I think about this, I feel like the answer is you've either got to force
01:55or incentivize starting pitchers to stay in the game longer.
01:59And, you know, I once heard Bill James talk about why teams run all these relief pitchers out there.
02:06It's like a 10,000K.
02:09If you had five or six speedsters, they'd run that race so much faster than if you had one dude
02:17trying to pace himself to get through 10,000K.
02:20And that's what baseball is now.
02:22I feel like you can't have eight relievers on the roster of every team.
02:28And then here they come.
02:30You have to provide perks for teams to leave their starter in the game so that these guys
02:37can't throw every pitch as hard as they can.
02:40And then as soon as they start to diminish in velocity by a mile per hour, they're out.
02:45That's what I think the fixes are.
Comments