LOCKOUT '22: When will we see baseball again?

[Tiger337]

I don't care which side wins.  I kind like the draft lottery.  It will be fun! 

I don't really like the DH, but it's not practical to have pitchers bat anymore.  I just wish they would do something to discourage the use of professional designated hitters - maybe limit the number of plate appearances some can have as a DH over the course of the season.  

Expanding the playoffs to 14 teams is the worst thing ever.  

[sabretooth]

13 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I don't care which side wins.  I kind like the draft lottery.  It will be fun! 

I don't really like the DH, but it's not practical to have pitchers bat anymore.  I just wish they would do something to discourage the use of professional designated hitters - maybe limit the number of plate appearances some can have as a DH over the course of the season.  

Expanding the playoffs to 14 teams is the worst thing ever.  

Agreed on the 14 team playoff!

[casimir]

The DH thing should have been settled a while ago.  Its just not practical to ask Ps to hit in the majors when they don't do it in the minors.

[1776]

I tuned in to a podcast last week that Bruce Bochy was doing with a Bay Area reporter. He was adamantly opposed to the DH overall and especially vocal about the NL adopting it. I agree with him entirely.

The rationale used to eliminate the pitcher as a hitter because of his skills is flawed. The system has diminished his skills over the time he has been playing baseball from high school to present. Two wrongs don’t make a right is how I perceive it. 

[oblong]

pitching has changed so much over the last 40 years with advances in medical knowledge and training.  I'd rather they focus on their mechanics and staying healthy rather than worrying about swinging a bat.  

 

[Jim Cowan]

I don't like the DH, never did right from the start.  I don't like the lottery, because baseball picks are of such little value compared to other sports that no one actually tanks to get one.  Expanding the playoff teams weakens the regular season even more than it already is.

So, all this stuff is just dumb.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, 1776 said:

The rationale used to eliminate the pitcher as a hitter because of his skills is flawed. The system has diminished his skills over the time he has been playing baseball from high school to present. Two wrongs don’t make a right is how I perceive it. 

I have never been a fan of the DH, but TBH, pitchers were bad hitters even in the 60s. 125-150 was not an unusual BA for a pitcher even when they did it all the time. I would guess the difference is that the pitchers that did like to hit were able to stay sharper but I don't remember there ever being too many of those. Just on on a quick comp, the hitting on the '68 Tiger WS team starting staff wasn't particularly better than last year's Braves - a couple weren't terrible, a couple weren't.

[Tiger337]

Pitchers hit .142 with a wrc+ or 6 in 1972, the last year before the DH.  They hit .108 with a -22 wrc+ in 2022.  So, they have gotten signicantly worse since 1972, but they were bad back then too.   

Pitchers weren't always anemic hitters.  They hit .216 in 1930 with a 32 wrc+ which was still not good but they were enough of a threat to not be considered an automatic out.  Even in the 1940s and 1950s they hit .180 some years.  They started to drop off a lot after that.  

The Negro League pitchers were actually pretty good hitters and it was not uncommon for individual pitchers to play multiple positions and hit better than league average.

[oblong]

I go by what Jim Leyland said.... managing in the AL was harder than the NL because once the game starts he said the biggest decisions a manager makes is bullpen usage.  In the NL those decisions were often made for you by the pitcher's slot in the lineup.

 

[Jim Cowan]

The '68 Tigers had a big competitive advantage in Gates Brown, who provided so many exciting moments.  In today's game he doesn't exist.  Without the DH, the 4th outfielder gets to come off the bench just about every game, and teams discover value in guys like Rob Fick and Eric Munson who aren't good enough to start.  And it means that you have to gamble and put a big ox like Greg Luzinski in left field just to get his bat in the lineup.  Baseball is played by baseball players, all of whom hit and all of whom play a defensive position.

[sabretooth]

2 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

The '68 Tigers had a big competitive advantage in Gates Brown, who provided so many exciting moments.  In today's game he doesn't exist.  Without the DH, the 4th outfielder gets to come off the bench just about every game, and teams discover value in guys like Rob Fick and Eric Munson who aren't good enough to start.  And it means that you have to gamble and put a big ox like Greg Luzinski in left field just to get his bat in the lineup.  Baseball is played by baseball players, all of whom hit and all of whom play a defensive position.

I totally agree with this from a moral and philosophical basis, and I would prefer if there were no DH at all.

With the DH in the AL for so long it was inevitable that it would arrive in the NL.  

The 14 team playoff format is much worse in it's long-range impact.  My fear is that most teams (especially super-cheap-arse owners like Chris I) won't ever give their teams the tools to win more than 82-85 games, so we'll bounce along in mediocrity trying to eek into the playoffs.  Blech.

[chasfh]

23 minutes ago, oblong said:

I go by what Jim Leyland said.... managing in the AL was harder than the NL because once the game starts he said the biggest decisions a manager makes is bullpen usage.  In the NL those decisions were often made for you by the pitcher's slot in the lineup.

 

But ... but ... double switch!

[chasfh]

14 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

The '68 Tigers had a big competitive advantage in Gates Brown, who provided so many exciting moments.  In today's game he doesn't exist.  Without the DH, the 4th outfielder gets to come off the bench just about every game, and teams discover value in guys like Rob Fick and Eric Munson who aren't good enough to start.  And it means that you have to gamble and put a big ox like Greg Luzinski in left field just to get his bat in the lineup.  Baseball is played by baseball players, all of whom hit and all of whom play a defensive position.

But only one of whom pitches.

[Tiger337]

24 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

The '68 Tigers had a big competitive advantage in Gates Brown, who provided so many exciting moments.  In today's game he doesn't exist.  Without the DH, the 4th outfielder gets to come off the bench just about every game, and teams discover value in guys like Rob Fick and Eric Munson who aren't good enough to start.  And it means that you have to gamble and put a big ox like Greg Luzinski in left field just to get his bat in the lineup.  Baseball is played by baseball players, all of whom hit and all of whom play a defensive position.

Yeah, this is what I don't like about the DH.  I like it when teams are forced to decide whether to play the slugging outfielder who can't field at all versus the weak hitting gold glove caliber defender.  That is more interesting to me than having the no defense slugger just bat the entire game.    

[Tiger337]

19 minutes ago, chasfh said:

But ... but ... double switch!

I think they should make it like football where you have separate offensive and defensive teams.  That way you'll always have a good hitter at the plate and great fielders in the field.  

[Tiger337]

27 minutes ago, sabretooth said:

The 14 team playoff format is much worse in it's long-range impact.  My fear is that most teams (especially super-cheap-arse owners like Chris I) won't ever give their teams the tools to win more than 82-85 games, so we'll bounce along in mediocrity trying to eek into the playoffs.  Blech.

Yeah, this could be the most destructive move they had made since I became a fan and Manfred's rationale was "fans love brackets!!!!!"  

[chasfh]

1 minute ago, Tiger337 said:

I think they should make it like football where you have separate offensive and defensive teams.  That way you'll always have a good hitter at the plate and great fielders in the field.  

I prefer position players both hit and field.

[Tiger337]

7 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I prefer position players both hit and field.

I was just giving a hyperbolic response to your cliche mocking of the double switch.  I have never seen anyone here say that the double switch was a reason for wanting pitchers to bat.  

[chasfh]

Just now, Tiger337 said:

Yeah, this could be the most destructive move they had made since I became a fan and Manfred's rationale was "fans love brackets!!!!!"  

I'm starting to wonder whether Baseball's true goal is to reduce the regular season and expand the playoffs.

Maybe start late in April, end in late August after 120 or so games, then have a two-month playoff extravaganza among 16 teams. They could make each round stretch out across two weeks by having more off days. They might be able to talk down teams like the Pirates and Rockies into giving up 21 late-season home dates, with all its attendant expenses spent to draw sparse crowds, in exchange for a commensurate cut of the playoff money even for

Or maybe they could make it like college basketball conference tournaments, where every team makes it to the playoffs and they have March Madness-like seeding: #1 plays #32, #2 plays #31, etc. Maybe give the top seed a 1-0 pre-play series lead and still go best-of-seven. This would add an extra round and make it easier to fill two months without stretching out the off days.

I would not care to see anything like this.

I could see Manfred and the owners doing something like this.

[chasfh]

1 minute ago, Tiger337 said:

I was just giving a hyperbolic response to your cliche mocking of the double switch.  I have never seen anyone here say that the double switch was a reason for wanting pitchers to bat.  

Neither have I seen anyone here say that.

[sabretooth]

27 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Yeah, this could be the most destructive move they had made since I became a fan and Manfred's rationale was "fans love brackets!!!!!"  

Yeah, as Chas indicates, baseball has the huge RS schedule which is a juicy target to swap with perhaps a big-tournament approach for more $$....that would be truly awful.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Tiger337 said:

Pitchers hit .142 with a wrc+ or 6 in 1972, the last year before the DH.  They hit .108 with a -22 wrc+ in 2022.  So, they have gotten signicantly worse since 1972, but they were bad back then too.   

 

does that 108 include AL pitchers hitting in interleague games? I would probably exclude them from a comparison.

[Tiger337]

I have never liked expanded playoffs, but 14 teams goes above my threshold of what I find acceptable.  They are trying to mold baseball to be a generic sport like any other sport and I think expanded playoffs work worse in baseball than any other sport.     

[Tiger337]

3 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

does that 108 include AL pitchers hitting in interleague games? I would probably exclude them from a comparison.

It's .109 if you exclude AL.  

[Tiger337]

34 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I'm starting to wonder whether Baseball's true goal is to reduce the regular season and expand the playoffs.

Maybe start late in April, end in late August after 120 or so games, then have a two-month playoff extravaganza among 16 teams. They could make each round stretch out across two weeks by having more off days. They might be able to talk down teams like the Pirates and Rockies into giving up 21 late-season home dates, with all its attendant expenses spent to draw sparse crowds, in exchange for a commensurate cut of the playoff money even for

Or maybe they could make it like college basketball conference tournaments, where every team makes it to the playoffs and they have March Madness-like seeding: #1 plays #32, #2 plays #31, etc. Maybe give the top seed a 1-0 pre-play series lead and still go best-of-seven. This would add an extra round and make it easier to fill two months without stretching out the off days.

I would not care to see anything like this.

I could see Manfred and the owners doing something like this.

I can see Manfred doing this too.  I don't believe he has any feel for the game or its history.  A lot of young fans don't care about history, but baseball fans, more than any other sport I think,  have always liked tradition and history and you are going to lose fans if you don't understand this.  Baseball will never be as exciting to the casual fan as other sports.  You can't compete with them at that level.