The Managerial Revolution

Two days ago, I was in the car and had the radio on as the Giants played the Dodgers. In the seventh inning, Lamonte Wade (whom I saw many times when he was a Maryland Terrapin) stole second base on a close play; looking at the replay, Mike Krukow opined on the radio that the Dodgers should not ask for the play to be challenged. Dave Flemming replied that the Dodgers couldn’t challenge even if they wanted to, since they had already used their challenge, to which Krukow responded that he thought that from the seventh inning onward teams could ask the umpires to look at the play rather than using the challenge system. Flemming said that he thought that that rule applied after the seventh inning, and went searching in the rule book for an answer. Jon Miller added that he, too, was unsure. Eventually it was suggested that maybe the rules were different for seven-inning games than for nine-inning games, and that was what was causing the confusion.

A decade ago, no part of this confusion would have been an issue. Major League Baseball had not clumsily adopted a replay challenge system (the main argument for which seemed to be that it’s what the NFL uses), and all games were nine innings in length (in other words, the length of baseball games). From this incident we can see the defining characteristic of the Rob Manfred era of Major League Baseball: nobody has any idea what is going on.

In addition to the innovation of shorter games, Major League Baseball has decided to create baserunners ex nihilo to extirpate the scourge of extra innings. These innovations were allegedly public health measures, but that was an obvious lie; the public health angle never made any sense (nobody has been able to actually explain how this would be safer) and the innovations have continued into this year even though the pandemic is effectively over. They won’t ever go away. Given that these rule changes strike serious fans as deeply offensive and casual fans as ludicrous, it’s worth inquiring whom exactly they’re for.

The boss of the San Francisco Giants, Farhan Zaidi, helped answer that question in March when he claimed that all games should be seven innings long on the grounds that “you kind of just got to the late innings and the drama built up really quickly.” This lends itself to an obvious reduction to the absurd: if the purpose of games is drama, which only exists at the end of games, why bother playing seven innings? Why not maximize drama by reducing the game to a single inning? This is a powerful argument without any good rejoinder, but it’s not really the way I want to look at things. To me, the question is why baseball fans for a century and a half have gotten normal-length games but fans now are told that they have to accept less.

The obvious response among intelligent people is to blame analytics, and it’s easy to see why. Fifteen years ago, analytics were an article of faith in baseball: drive out the retrograde general managers making moves on gut instinct in stereotype and replace them with data-based decision-making and a golden age would surely follow. Now that analytics has triumphed, what we see on the field is unwatchable baseball driven by batters minmaxing their way into uppercutting in hopes of hitting a home run on every pitch and striking out most of the time instead. Off the field, baseball teams’ sophisticated analytical operations have given them more statistical data than ever to be deployed against individual players in their war to destroy the union forever. The result is that baseball is worse in every way than it was before Moneyball. In this particular case, though, the culprit isn’t really analytics; rather, it’s what we might refer to as baseball Taylorism.

The first relief pitcher (in the sense of a pitcher who was seen as a valuable part of the team while appearing in relief rather than just a temporarily embarrassed starter) was Firpo Marberry, who pitched effectively in relief for the Washington Senators as they won the American League pennant in 1924 and 1925, but he had no immediate successors. The story of the relief pitcher really begins in the ’50s and ’60s, with the likes of Hoyt Wilhelm and Dick Radatz; they were the forerunners to the firemen of the ’70s, who pitched plenty of innings (often as many as a starting pitcher would) and were called constantly by their managers at the first sign of danger and enjoyed as much fame as any starter. Then, in 1979, Chicago Cubs manager Herman Franks invented the closer, the star relief pitcher who would only be used in the ninth inning and only when his team was leading by one to three runs. A decade later in Oakland, Tony La Russa was using Dennis Eckersley as his closer, and by the ’90s there wasn’t a team in baseball that structured its relief pitching any other way.

Analytically minded people have always hated the closer, because it doesn’t actually make any sense to take your best relief pitcher and put him in a glass case until the ninth inning (or, if Farhan Zaidi has his way, the seventh inning). The culprit here isn’t analytics but baseball Taylorism (or scientific management, although in the baseball context there has historically been hardly anything scientific about it), which we see in the notion that pitchers must have a specific role from which they never deviate. Once the closer was created as a ninth-inning guy, it followed that there had to be an eighth-inning guy and a seventh-inning guy, and by the time I became aware of baseball twenty years ago it was accepted that this was the only acceptable arrangement for players psychologically, even though it had been unknown for the sport’s first century.

For all the obvious issues with the closer as a concept, the closer does offer something to fans. He is typically good at what he does, which typically makes him famous. Often when he enters the game it is an event, accompanied by his own special music. When fans pay to attend a game, part of what they pay for is the experience of seeing the closer. The same cannot as easily be said of the eighth-inning guy or the seventh-inning guy, and certainly not of the ever-expanding constellation of other guys in the bullpen, each of whom must have his own role.

The proportion of pitchers to position players on major-league rosters keeps increasing; not so long ago it would have been unheard of for a team to carry more pitchers than position players. In practice, this means that middle relievers have been replacing pinch-hitters, so that now the pinch-hit specialist has all but vanished from baseball. This is a shame. The job of pinch-hitters is to make something happen. They appear in the most critical situations when teams need a hit, which makes their successes particularly memorable when they occur: no baseball highlight is more famous than Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit home run in the 1988 World Series. Middle relievers, by contrast, are faceless men, who by definition only appear when nothing much is happening. They never appear in pivotal moments, and a successful appearance for a middle reliever consists retiring three batters in a row while nobody is really paying attention. There are no memorable moments in baseball history that involve a middle reliever doing his job.

With major league teams now routinely carrying more pitchers than at any previous point in the history of baseball, one would think that together those pitchers would be able to pitch more innings than ever before, or at least that they would be able to pitch as many innings as required by the 162-game schedule, which has not changed in length in almost sixty years. But modern bullpen management, with its all-important roles for every relief pitcher, turns out to be supremely inflexible. So, once we discard the ludicrous public health excuses, we get to the only baseball argument for the idea that fans shouldn’t be allowed to have normal-length games: bloated contemporary pitching staffs are simply unable to deal with having to play a thirteen-inning game maybe four times a year. If they have to face even a few more innings then planned, then they will simply run out of pitchers, an outcome so unthinkable that any amount of violence to the rules of the game is justifiable to escape it.

The classic example of scientific management is in factories, where scientific principles can be used to maximize productivity. Suppose that you had a factory in an industry where temporary small upticks in demand were fairly common, much like extra innings historically have been in baseball. Suppose, then, that you applied management principles to this factory in such a way that, rather than meeting these increases in demand, the factory instead became increasingly unable to function every time. This is scientific management of relief pitchers.

One would think that, given the failure of their management techniques to anticipate and deal with very basic rules of baseball (specifically, the existence of extra innings), the people who run baseball would maybe reconsider those techniques. That would, however, run afoul of the central principle that these scientific management techniques cannot possibly be wrong. Instead they have hacked up the rules of baseball to make themselves right.

I am reminded of a previous rule change prompted by managerial incompetence: the designated hitter. In that case, the problem was that American League teams had fallen significantly behind National League teams in the ’50s and ’60s because of their lack of interest in signing black and later Latin American players, and fans had responded to the lack of quality on the field by failing to show up. (Of course, the difference was that the designated hitter led to increased offense, which attracted fans, whereas now it’s difficult to imagine a single person deciding to show up to a game when they wouldn’t have in the past because now there’s no chance of it lasting thirteen innings.)

In Five Seasons, published in 1977, Roger Angell described the designated hitter as “the [American] league’s shiny new thingummy, which was officially proclaimed a success almost on opening day,” and that seems to be relevant here, too. Fans may universally hate the new rules, but they’re already successful, judging from the permanent impact they’ve had on the conversation. The predominant tone now is bargaining, saying that matter shouldn’t be created out of nothing before the twelfth inning or that it’s perfectly fine to have ties. Everyone seems to have given up the obvious point, which is that extra innings were not a problem to anyone before Major League Baseball stepped in to solve it. Ultimately Farhan Zaidi and Rob Manfred will always win, and if some radio broadcasters are left just as confused as fans, it’s their own problem for being behind the times.