SO...as the baseball media's fall foolishness festers in its annual lockstep with Halloween, here at BBB we rise from an elongated bout of lethargy to show you yet another pre-embargoed future that, in a world where imagination truly reigned, would be a natural "strap-on" for a sport still desperately in need of a new form of foreplay.
No one other than us would ever propose such an obscenely overwrought overlay, but all that gestation time in a series of wayward wombs has once again led us gloriously astray...we envision you continuously shaking your heads in disbelief as we proceed. (It's the curse of our legacy--or will this be the legacy of our curse? We'll leave the curse words to you...)
WE all know that the game needs something both miraculous and malevolent in order for it to transcend its ever-increasing torpor. The old style of play, pooh-poohed by the quants but still visible in the embers being intermittently emitted from the game's funereal pyre, needs to be resurrected somehow. But doing so is increasingly elusive, due to the power-on-power imperatives that have foregrounded the action.
So, to save the game from its ongoing ouroboros moment, we will rip a page from the playbook of our execrable overlords and "flood the zone" with a patently egregious "strap-on" that some will call "baseball porn" (following in lockstep with the after-farce manifestation of "history as porn" that we are currently witnessing).
WHAT are we talking about? We propose that the game go inside its own anatomy and overlay a version of itself that can bring back a greater frequency of its now long-maligned one-run strategies. The two editions of the game can co-exist in a "strange attractor" form of simultaneity that will allow the contrast between them to ameliorate the flaws within each style of play.
The central insight about the added games (and you wonder... how the F can BBB propose adding 108 games to the current bloated schedule?) is that they will not be the same length as the long-sacrosanct nine innings we take for granted. What we call micro-baseball could also be termed "sudden death baseball" (though such a tern will likely be anathema in our currently fraught collective state of mind).
--Games are at least two innings long, with "extra innings" ensuing after that point.
--A trailing visiting team can invoke the ghost runner rule in the second inning in order to have a better chance to move the game into "extra innings." But, as in our current extra innings, it then applies to the home team as well...
--All innings after the second will use some variant of the ghost runner: the third inning will place the ghost runner at first base, the fourth will place it at second base. (The fifth inning will up the ante by adding in our dreaded "190-foot rule" to hamstring the outfield defense and create a more favorable run-scoring environment.)
THESE micro-games will be played as the opening contest ahead of the standard nine-inning game in two-thirds of the scheduled contests. Thus each team will play 108 "micro-games," the standings for which will be tabulated separately from the standard games. The two teams with the best records in "micro-league" games who are not otherwise in the playoffs will advance to the post-season.
And post-season play will incorporate "micro-baseball" by integrating the results of micro-games into the overall results. In a wild card series, for example, a team that wins two micro-games but loses two standard games is still in the hunt--the series would be tied 2-2 with a decisive standard game left to determine the winner. Similar approaches for the old three-of-five and four-of-seven series would also be put into play...
The recent bout of nostalgia about extra-inning games briefly ignited by Game 5 of the Tigers-Mariners series doesn't seem to have created a new wave of enmity for the ghost runner (an innovation that is routinely maligned but is, in fact, one of the more intriguing wrinkles for a game usually willing to marinate to the point of drowning in tradition). And that gives hope that we can build around it...
WHAT "micro-baseball" does is take the "sudden death" aspect of the extra innings as they are now constituted and push it to the front end of the (micro-)game. Fans will get a taste of tension right from the start as teams have to decide what strategies to employ to put runs on the board in a more focused way.
And the usage of pitchers--particularly starting pitchers--could very well become a significant feature of this conjoined competition. Right at this time we are seeing a transition to a six-man rotation, which will continue to stretch the bullpen on a nightly basis. Micro-games, which will mostly be decided within three innings, might prove to be a way to safely expand starting pitcher workload so that a teams best pitchers will be more visible: instead of five or six days off, we might see them after three or four days of rest for a couple of innings at the beginning of a "micro-game," followed by a full-fledge start two or three days later. Instead of 150 innings, we might more safely get them up to 190-200 again.
Such an addition will create a surge in strategies that go beyond the scope of what has been described here. Those who continue to hope for the game to organically transcend the flaws created by the neo-sabe/analytic incursion are whistling in the dark--baseball should seize upon the "strategic social engineering" that it's possible to insert into the game without rendering it unrecognizable in order to add previously untapped elements that can add texture, tension and nuance.
FEEL free to scoff--we're long since used to that. But having a doubleheader two out of every three days and evenings at the ballpark is going to be incredibly popular. (Eighteen innings of baseball is too much even for a segment of highly-devoted fans--but eleven to fourteen innings split between a micro-game and a full nine-inning contest is going to be bonus time...something that gives folks more for their money.)
So let's recap. While stats for micro-games count (and make possible some new, asterisked records...), we can still keep a separate log for nine-inning games, so that the traditional approach is still retained as part of statistical lore. The results of micro-games are separate but have a modest effect on the post-season. (Fear not, feckless ones--there will be no micro-games in the World Series!)
Micro-games will often end after two innings, but many will continue into additional innings, with escalating features and constraints that will keep players, managers and fans engaged in a more pressing and immediate way than is often the case in a nine-inning game (refer to the specific examples noted above). They will add something unique and tantalizing to a baseball landscape that is sorely in need of greater variety.
CHANCES of it happening, of course--as with most of the meta-utopian schemes we devise here--are beyond slight. But if the Ivy League cabal should ever decide to test this idea, we are certain that it will catch on, and ultimately prove to be one of the pivotal innovations that will help restore baseball to the forefront of American sport.
