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THE POINT: Sure, A-Rod juiced America’s pastime, but innovation’s role in baseball is skimpy. We offer baseball two disruptive ideas whilst musing over prior game-changers like spikes, the DH and those beloved plastic beer bottles.
NEEDLING BASEBALL’S NEXT BIG IDEA
For all the feisty ink churned by sportswriters about baseball – debating whether pennants are a matter of cash or team chemistry, whether the thunder from Manny’s bat is worth the noise of Manny-being-Manny and whether this spring’s inevitable chants of ‘A-Roid’ will be justified – there’s still one ode less traveled about the American pastime: the philosophical question of whether innovation—medical, strategic or otherwise—has any role at all in baseball.
Having carved out a career in the arcane study of innovation, I tossed this juiced-up topic to a lineup of innovation all-stars (well, actually, to a few of my colleagues and friends). Apparently, the query hit a bit of a nerve, because the answers came swarming back like Joba Chamberlain’s gnats – including a few high-hard ones on innovation’s role in the game’s past and future.
“Hell no!” cried one purist. “Baseball’s perfect. No innovation required. Just chuck out the cheaters, yell play ball! and all will be fine.”
“Not so fast!” said a few pathological tinkerers. “Innovation’s as old as the game itself! The hit and run! The suicide squeeze! Bring on the next big idea!”
In the end, however, my vaunted brain trust — tweakers and true transmogrifiers alike – agreed that, to date, there have been only five bona fide transformational innovations in the entire history of baseball.
Spikes.
This sharp bit of technology gave an otherwise pastoral game a much-needed nasty edge in the pre-ESPN era, when brawling was the main entertainment in bars. And in today’s cuddly climate of organized labor and fraternizing with the opposition, seeing a guy go in spikes-high keeps the whole thing real. Props to the heavy metal.
The Slider.
It’s the single reason no one’s hit .400 since Ted Williams 68 years ago. The fact that a slider looks like a fastball until it’s on you, then dies on arrival, makes .350 the new .400, and ensures old Ted’s milestone a place all its own in cryogenic perpetuity. These days it’s more fashionable to call it a cutter— but by any name it’s the pitch that changed the game.
The Closer.
Having a guy work just one inning a night—bringing head-high gas and ungodly cutters to seal the deal 80 percent of the time—was truly a game-changing piece of genius. Pair this dude up with a set-up man and you get a seven-inning game. Honorable mention goes to The Lefty Specialist—but as we see it, a southpaw facing just one lefty hitter a night is less an innovation than an answer to, “What the hell do we do with Jenkins? Righties just crush him.”
The DH.
Replacing an automatic out with a meathead who can’t catch or run is of debatable merit, but it has indeed changed the game. It’s the lone innovation on our list that is helpful to the hitters.
The Plastic Beer Bottle.
Doing away with flat warm beer in floppy plastic cups, spilling on everyone in your row while they pass your round down, is by far the most underrated catalyst of baseball’s swelling attendance. Ballpark beer doesn’t suck anymore. Real men of genius—take your curtain call!
So with just five landmark innovations, we should all give baseball some credit for carrying tradition’s torch. But what of the future? Can innovation return baseball to its former glory?
Here are two ideas we think just might get the game back on track.
The Mandatory Pitch Count.
Every pitcher’s on a hundred-pitch-count these days. We say, if you want to take steroids out of play but give fans the football scores they love, just flip the numbers. Turn that maximum pitch-count into a minimum—that’s right, no relief until you’ve thrown a hundred. You’ll add three or four runs per game to the offense, and reconnect the fan to the pampered millionaire by making the pitcher who’s having a rough day at work stay out there and keep sucking—just like the rest of us. I mean, does the hung-over guy driving a backhoe get to knock off early just because he hasn’t got his “best stuff?” As Yogi Berra used to say, “No.”
A League of Their Own.
The only real surprise in the Mitchell Report was the number of players fingered by just two informants. It is not unreasonable to assume a few more sources could have pushed the list into the hundreds, and the latest news about the 2003 tests say that’s not a stretch at all. Now, since the fans are clearly loving the long ball, and the ethical debate pivots on how juiced-up cheaters create an uneven playing field, why don’t we just split up the whole darn game—HGH one whole league and park the organic guys in the other. With appropriate respect for tradition, the leagues would still be called the NL and AL but for one wee tweak: The Mets would play in the Natural League. The Augmented League gets the Yanks.
Mark Payne was once a third baseman who couldn’t hit a slider. He’s now President of Fahrenheit 212.