The season is still young, so it’s entirely possible you may not have seen much baseball this year even if you think of yourself as a genuine fan.
It has evolved into a different game, not just this year when we have first evidence since Babe Ruth that one player — the Angels’ Shoei Otani — can be both the best pitcher and best home run hitter on your team. Otani has started the season more impressively than anyone since Ruth, but this isn’t about him.
Let’s just say the timing for Otani to make his major league appearance could not have been better.
Consider a few statistical facts that have changed the game in the last few years, starting with strikeouts — last year in MLB there were 3,400 more of them than five years ago. Home runs? There were 2,000 more in the major leagues last year than as recently as 2014.
You say there’s a guy who hits home runs and strikes people out? He’s perfect for this era.
The very fundamentals of the game have changed for most major league teams. For a lot of us old school types, the game was better even if the ballparks were unremarkable and not built for fans like all the trendy new ballparks with their homer-friendly dimensions.
Major League Baseball is concerned with its image of being too slow, of having too much standing around, so they changed rules to limit visits to the mound, with a 30-second clock on those visits, initiated pitch-free intentional walks and other small moves designed to pick up the tempo of the game.
It all happened too late. The band box ballparks changed the game, as was examined in detail last week by Jayson Stark, in the athletic.com.
Through help with MLB researchers, Stark discovered that in the 2017 season, there were 144 batters who had enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. Of that number, 89 of them — that’s 61.8 percent (up from 32.0 in 2014) — hit at least 20 home runs.
Here’s another look at baseball’s problem, courtesy of Stark:
— In 2017, just 17 players stole 20 bases or more. In 1983, the average was 128 stole bases per team. In 2011, nine teams stole 130 or more bases. Us old-timers remember Rickey Henderson stealing 130 bases himself in a single season.
These days, they might tell Rickey to take it easy on the base paths, don’t leave first base open so they can walk the next guy who can hit it out.
These are the unintended consequences for fans and the game. You build the ballparks they want and in so doing you create a game that makes everything slow down. Forget about stealing bases, don’t worry about striking out, just work on your launch angle.
“That’s what they all want now,” said Kaha Wong, “launch angle, launch angle. I’m old school, I still like hitting the gaps, putting the ball in the 6 hole or the 4 hole and getting on base. They don’t seem to think that’s as important any more.”
Wong is the Hilo baseball guru who runs instructional camps and training five days a week, producing local players who have been drafted such as his son Kolten (St. Louis), Kean (Tampa Bay), and several others. Last week he had a handful of local high school players at Walter Victor Field to take some hitting and fielding while being observed by five professional scouts.
Wong loves this lifestyle he’s created. He teaches Monday-through-Friday, monitors his son’s games with live streaming on his laptop, and has no plans to do anything else.
“I love what I do,” he said, “it’s like living a dream.”
Detail oriented, Wong can teach “launch angle,” essentially an uppercut swing, to get the ball in the air, but he doesn’t believe it’s good for the game or the batter.
“For one thing, swinging up like that takes a lot of time (to train the batter), because if you are off just a bit, it’s a popup to second” he said. “I like line drives, gappers, balls hit through the hole that sends base runners in motion.”
The new game has discouraged line drives and ground balls by using far more shifts than the big leagues have ever seen.
From Stark’s research, with the assistance of Sports Info Solutions, there were 26,705 shifts in 2017, compared to 6,882 in 2013.
“I don’t get it,” Wong said. “If it was me and they had that shift on with everyone on the first base side of the infield, I’d drop a bunt down third base every time. Every single time. It’s a guaranteed base hit, why don’t they do that? Is it wrong now to be on first base?”
And now we’re back to launch angle. The teams that have bought in to launch angle approaches at the plate, like the Dodgers, will say you need to swing with a launch angle against those shifts, get the ball in the air, over the shifts, over the fences if possible.
Wong would probably say if you beat that shift often enough with a bunt the other way, you could force teams not to shift so much and you’d almost be back to playing baseball again.
But a lot of teams aren’t looking back. They have teams geared up for home runs and pitching staffs ready to compete against batters looking almost exclusively for the long ball.
Scouts are almost never allowed to speak publicly to reporters but chatting with three of the five on hand last week, the frustration level was evident.
I asked these three how much a part of their reports these days are concerned with launch angles and all three of them immediately shook their head, side-to-side.
They are not encouraged by this turn toward home-run-or-nothing baseball, but on the other hand, they are lifers, they love baseball and they all believe they know what makes up a big league ballplayer.
Trouble is, people in the organization above them are removing some of that insights organizations gain from scouts by telling them what to concentrate on and what not to worry about.
An excess of swinging for the fences, more strikeouts than you can ever remember, a seeming ban on stealing bases, shifts on for every pull hitter and bases on balls for all.
The game is still in our hearts, but it’s a little painful to watch it this way. Imagine if football decided to throw deep on three downs and then punt if necessary, then back to throwing deep, all day, both teams.
I’ll be looking for that team that hits gappers, steals a base and scores a run then turns it over to a pitching staff that avoids walks and makes you put the ball in play.
That team will bring me joy when it beats the home-run-or-nothing sluggers, because that’s the team that plays baseball the way its is supposed to be played.
Comments? Whistleblower tips? Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com
