Clearly we’re stuck in some dystopian future. An era where words don’t mean anything, or at least the meaning has been changed. Opening Day used to mean the first day of the baseball season, now we have it spread out over two days. But because of marketing you can’t call it Season Opener or Opening Days that will just be too confusing. Anyways, yesterday was just the appetizer. Today’s the main course, a full slate of baseball. 13 games in all, running from 1pm eastern and likely wrapping up past midnight. So today I’m taking a page out of MLBs book and splitting the travesty that is today’s baseball into two parts. Yesterday was just a taste, but the main problem with the rules changes is the Extra Innings rule. The Ghost Runner.
I haven’t been able to figure out which side of the CBA negotiations was pushing so hard for this rule to remain. I’m betting it was from the owners – pushed by Manfred’s fight against tradition. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Players Union wanted it – because what union would support unpaid overtime and that’s really what extra innings are for players. Either way, it’s a travesty on the game.
By adding the Ghost Runner you’ve now created phantom stats – and in a sport that loves stats to such an extent that nearly every GM is a mathematician rather than a former player, this just seems wrong. Sure over recent years front offices, sports writers, and fans have all started to shift away from classic measurements and have moved to advanced analytics. The one thing they’ve missed is, while advanced analytics might tell you more about a player or team to gain the slightest edge, they also take away the fun that brings in their audience. Balls in play are more exciting than walks. Double plays are more exciting than strike outs. It’s not hard to see, but these egg heads just care about finding the perfect algorithm to get a win – not to bring in the most fans, even if you lose. But gone are the days that Saves matter or Wins and Losses on a pitchers record. The only ones that matter are WIP, Ks, ERA, and WAR – I’m sure there’s more that some stat geek will try to tell me is even more important but I don’t care. The point is these metrics are terrible for the game. It used to be that stats could tell you the story of the game, you would be able to read the box score to know what happened. Not so with the Ghost Runner. You’ll see a 10-9 win in the 10th and have no idea how the player scored. There was no earned run, no hits, no walks, and somehow they managed to score a run. Phantom stats.
The argument that it saves time is a load of garbage too. If you’re really concerned with pace of play and the average game going over 3 hours 10 minutes now you’d get rid of those GMs using saber-metrics to nickel and dime every base runner they can. Ghost Runner emphasizes the worst kind of plays. Now having a ground ball pitcher in the 10th is a hazard, not a benefit. You’re now looking to strike out the side, which will add to the time of those innings. It’s counterintuitive. If you want pace to go faster you want pitchers to throw fewer pitches. You need to have the ball in play. You can get a half inning finished in 3 pitches or you can strike out the side in 9 pitches. Which is going to take longer? It’s pretty obvious. Manfred and his belief in a pitch clock to speed up the game isn’t going to do anything. There’s two ways to make the games go faster – reward balls in play and reduce commercial break lengths.
Not counting pitching changes, injuries, and other stoppages of play there are 18 commercial breaks. If you reduce each of those by just 10 minutes you’ve now dropped the average game to 3 hours 7 minutes. Reduce it by 30 seconds and you’re nearly under 3 hours again. We’re in a Tiktok era where people only have an attention span of 30 seconds anyways, who do they think is paying attention to a 3 or 4 minute commercial break? The short version, to speed up play you need to reduce the time the ball isn’t in play – the best part to start is reducing pitches and cutting down on dead commercial time.
Getting back to the extra innings though, when something lasts longer than 3 hours there’s a certain point that people just become invested and want to see the end. I haven’t seen the data, and don’t know if MLB has released any to begin with, but are ratings dropping drastically after a game goes to the 10th inning? Does it drop significantly for each inning after? If that was the reason, I’d maybe consider the Ghost Runner rule halfway decent. But either the data doesn’t exist, or they have it and it doesn’t really have an impact. So this rule is just window dressing for a problem that can be solved with other mechanisms. Not by changing the fundamentals of the game once you get to bonus baseball.
Baseball used to have the purest form of extra play. Basketball is a close second. Hockey is trying some different things, some work and some don’t. Football though has the worst overtime rules. For some reason baseball decided that it should take the best extra play format and take notes from the worst. That’s what the Ghost Runner is to me. It’s basically saying we’re now playing sudden death – you make one mistake, allow one little bloop single and the game is over, you lose. That makes the margin for error that much smaller, which means every ball thrown needs that much more care, which means that the pitch is going to take that much longer to be thrown, which means the game will last that much longer.
Now let’s add one more thing about the Ghost Runner – the way that player is chosen. No matter how you chose that player it’s a dumb way to do it. You can’t win. Currently they give it to the player who got the last out. So really what you’re doing is awarding them a double with no outs for screwing up and getting the last out. Make the next person up take second and you’re potentially taking away the bat of a slugger – though it is better than rewarding a player for failing. Make the opposing team select the player from the bench? That might be the best solution and have it truly be a Ghost Runner solution – but what if all the bench players are gone? Re-admit a player, that changes the game too. Every solution to this glaring problem of the rule is just a bad tradeoff.
The Ghost Runner rule is a symbol for a once great game. Baseball once had the best extra time rule, it was played fast, it was about creating action. Now it’s about mitigating risk. The game is pretending they’re trying to solve the game’s problems, but the game didn’t need to be solved. The Ghost Runner doesn’t need to exist to speed up play. Real incentives for creating action and speeding up the game need to come up, not fake solutions that only help 1 out of every 20 or so games. The Ghost Runner needs to be banned, pitchers need to hit, minor leagues need to play by the same rules as major leagues. Someone new needs to be in charge of baseball.