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The Fifth Inning Stretch

batmagadanleadoff Apr 07 2014 08:55 PM

MLB exec thinks games should be shortened to 7 innings, is wrong Excerpt: In a subscriber-only post to ESPN.com, Buster Olney quotes a team executive who thinks Major League Baseball should shorten its games to seven innings: The games are often played too slowly, he noted. The audience of Major League Baseball is aging, with polls indicating that the youngest generation expects faster and fastest in what it consumes. At the same time, the exec said, teams are struggling to find enough good pitching — and, at the same time, the number of injuries is skyrocketing. If oblique strains were the prevalent injury two years ago, ulnar collateral ligament strains are the ailment du jour. Top prospect Jameson Taillon of the Pirates is the latest pitcher to be headed for Tommy John surgery; maybe he’ll bump into Bobby Parnell along the way. It seems so unlikely to happen that it’s hardly even worth arguing against. As Olney points out, numbers are sacred in the game, and switching to a seven-inning format would mean forever altering the way those numbers accumulate. Read the rest at http://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/04/mlb-len ... n-innings/

Zvon Apr 07 2014 09:29 PM Re: The Fifth Inning Stretch

It's not too late to close the book on 20th century baseball.

Edgy MD Apr 07 2014 09:37 PM Re: The Fifth Inning Stretch

Is there data to suggest that the struggle to find pitching is any more acute than at other times through history? Is there data to suggest that injuries are actually "skyrocketing"? Does this man or woman consider that the law of unintended consequences would explode all over his or her plan? Perhaps making the new higher concentration of quality pitching to fill games with less offense, making it less appealing to the benighted coming generation desperate for more action? Can we go through the teams Olney regularly covers and conclude that his source is embedded in one of their front offices? That's pretty much the Yankees, the Sox, and the Giants, right?

Ceetar Apr 08 2014 05:35 AM Re: The Fifth Inning Stretch

I'd just like to say that the released numbers on MLB At-Bat downloads and the number of streams delivered via MLB.TV (young people technology right?) and such is nearly double what it was last year at this point. clearly we have a problem.

Frayed Knot Apr 08 2014 06:36 AM Re: The Fifth Inning Stretch

The games are often played too slowly, he noted. The audience of Major League Baseball is aging, with polls indicating that the youngest generation expects faster and fastest in what it consumes. I've been a big a critic as anyone about slow games, but I heard Bud Selig recently (like last week) citing a written article claiming the exact same thing: that the young were abandoning baseball yadda, yadda. The only difference here was that the article was from 1958. Anecdotally, I've been hearing the same thing my whole life -- and yet the sport somehow seems to survive and even thrive. There are ways to speed up the game, maybe the owners could, I dunno, TRY some of them before they resort to measures that lop off 20+ percent of the game. At the same time, the exec said, teams are struggling to find enough good pitching — and, at the same time, the number of injuries is skyrocketing. If oblique strains were the prevalent injury two years ago, ulnar collateral ligament strains are the ailment du jour. Top prospect Jameson Taillon of the Pirates is the latest pitcher to be headed for Tommy John surgery; maybe he’ll bump into Bobby Parnell along the way. As Edge said, is pitching really hard to find? If so then why have runs scored and most other offensive numbers across the board been declining for more than a decade now? Wasn't it Marvin Miller who, while mocking the owners' stance in negotiations, said that two things have been "true" since the beginning of the game: that no teams are making any money and that one can find enough pitching? Yet none of the teams ever go out of business, and pitching staffs always manage to get filled up. And, btw, complaining about there being more TJ surgeries lately is like saying that deaths in outer space were higher in the 2nd half of the 20th century than they were in the first. Ummm, yeah.

Lefty Specialist Apr 08 2014 08:11 AM Re: The Fifth Inning Stretch

Cool. Less need for a bullpen.

Frayed Knot Apr 08 2014 08:56 AM Re: The Fifth Inning Stretch

Lefty Specialist wrote: Cool. Less need for a bullpen. Nah, the new 'Quality Start' would just shift to 4 innings.