Changes to the game...thoughts?

[Guardians]

Stark: There are outside-the-box ideas for changing baseball… and then there is The Samson Plan

By Jayson Stark 1h ago 13

Imagine you could rewrite the rules of baseball to produce the ultimate drama. Now imagine this:

Mike Trout leads off the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 2018 ALCS with a double. The Angels trail the Yankees, 4-3. The tying run is now in scoring position. Yankee Stadium is throbbing. And heading for the plate is …

Uh, Mike Trout?

Wait. Would this be the same Mike Trout who just hit that double? Why, yes, it would.

And what is he doing heading back to the batter’s box? We’ll let David Samson explain that.

But first …

A word about David Samson. You might remember him. He spent 18 years working in baseball, the last 16 as the president of the Marlins. He lost that job when his team got sold and Derek Jeter immediately kicked off his quest to render the entire Jeffrey Loria era invisible.

So Samson now works as a baseball analyst for CBS Sports HQ. But in his previous life, he was a member of baseball’s competition committee – where he developed a reputation as an energetic outside-the-box thinker whose creative brainstorms generally went where most outside-the-box baseball brainstorms wind up. Right. That would be nowhere. Until we came along.

Just last week, we surveyed people across the baseball landscape on what this sport could do to produce more balls in play. We included Samson in that survey because of his past work on the competition committee. But it turned out he had much, much bigger ideas in his head than whether this sport should, say, tweak the strike zone. They were ideas like this:

— Once in a game, and only in the ninth inning, a team could do what the Angels did in the scenario we sketched out earlier – send up its best player to hit in any situation if it’s trailing, even if that player had already hit in that inning.

— To DH or not DH? That would be a question decided by the home team every day before the game – in the AL and the NL. If it’s MadBum Night, the pitcher obviously hits. But if it’s a Wei-Yin Chen start (2 for 62, with 24 whiffs), what better time for an NL game to feature the DH?

— Or how about a Designated Fielder? Samson thinks that’s worth a try, too. Does your team have an Alcides Escobar kind of guy, whose bat doesn’t match his leatherwork? Or maybe a backup catcher who hits .153 but has a special rapport with your ace starter? Perfect candidates for a Designated Fielder – also the home team’s decision.

— A two-pickoff-throw limit – for any runner at any base? That’s another of Samson’s proposals. Would it speed up the game? Would it be likely to make baserunning a bigger part of the action every night? He would say: Yes and yes.

— If you hate the idea of minor-league games that put a runner on second base to start every extra inning, you’ll definitely need an antacid for Samson’s companion plan – to combat blowouts by allowing every team that gives up a crooked number in one half-inning to start the next half-inning with a runner on second. He’ll explain!

— And finally, he sees one more way baseball could mirror the other sports – with a nightly “halftime.” That would dictate shorter between-inning breaks to keep the flow moving, but also a 12-minute “halftime” in midgame that could be used for entertainment, pizza-stand runs, selling ad time, etc. You know that drill.

These weren’t the topics on the table when we reached out to him last week. But these were the big thoughts he found floating around his brain. So why not fire them out there?

“You asked me to think about the game,” he told The Athletic. “So I thought about the game. I’ve got time now that I didn’t used to have. I’ve got a distance (from baseball) now that I didn’t used to have. So I spent time running through in my head all the things I’ve learned in baseball and all the things I’ve seen. And I came up with a list of things that could be done to make baseball better, that are actually not impossible.”

No, they’re not impossible. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re real likely, either. But here’s why Samson thinks it’s important for people in the game to at least start kicking around bold ideas like these – because there is a generation of fans it’s in danger of losing if it doesn’t.

“These are things that could help make the game better and more exciting for a new generation of fans who demand excitement in small doses and 30-second clips,” he said. “And that’s an issue. The way people are digesting baseball in those little clips hurts attendance and hurts ratings.”

So what he’s aspiring to create, he said, is a sport that will “get people involved in the experience” of going to a baseball game, not just luring them there once with Dollar Dog Night. And that means trying stuff that’s not just different but dramatically different. So how different is it all? Let’s run through his big ideas.

THE 9TH INNING WILD CARD AT-BAT

There is an epic moment from the 2003 World Series that is stuck in Samson’s memory bank. It happened in the final inning of the final game of that World Series. As he watched Josh Beckett eliminate the mighty Yankees at Yankee Stadium that night, Samson’s eyes stopped at the sight of Derek Jeter – because you know what Jeter wasn’t doing in that moment? He wasn’t playing. Or hitting. Or even fiddling with a bat in the dugout.

“I looked at Derek Jeter, leaning on the rail, and he was watching the game – the same way I was,” Samson said. “And I was totally struck by that. I thought, ‘What a crazy game. It’s Game 6. His team is about to be eliminated. It had one last chance. And their best player was doing what the team president (of the opposition) was doing. Watching.’”

Most people in the game would have seen that and said, “Well, that’s baseball.” What David Samson thought to himself, however, was: Why are we just accepting that? Why can’t we change it?

He reflects on what makes the other sports so magnetic in moments like that. It couldn’t be clearer. What sells crunch time in the NBA finals? The ball is in the hands of LeBron or some megastar like him. What force pulls you into the final minute of the Super Bowl? Tom Brady has one last opportunity to drive the Patriots up the field.

Now think about baseball. Nobody sees the downside of having the World Series come down to the 7-8-9 hitters in the ninth? All right, maybe there’s someone out there who does. But this is the first we’ve heard of anyone trying to address it.

“This came up in the competition committee, but only as an outlier,” Samson said. “Impossible. Never could happen. Let’s dismiss it before we dive into it. It wasn’t originally my idea, but I loved it. I couldn’t get any conversation generated about it, and I was very serious about it from the moment I heard it.”

Before you write it off as crazy, do Samson a favor. Try to envision the scene as Aaron Judge hops up the dugout steps in that spot. Or Bryce Harper. Or José Altuve. It’s the equivalent of giving LeBron the ball – except with a whole new strategic debate attached.

“The level of excitement would be staggering,” Samson said. “And you’d get something the NBA doesn’t get, because in the NBA, you expect that if the game is tied at the end, LeBron is getting the ball. But in baseball, imagine the conversation. Imagine the strategy. When will you pull the trigger on that one wild-card at-bat you’d have? It would be unbelievable.”

HOME TEAM PICKS THE DH RULE

What fueled this idea, Samson said, is his concern that the home team doesn’t have enough of a home-field advantage in baseball, compared with the other sports. Sure, it’s cool that the home team gets to bat last. But if you want to give it a whole ’nother sort of advantage, why not give it a chance to choose the rules it wants to play by that day?

“Every game,” he said, “we’d let the home team decide if it wants to use the DH or not. Maybe the other team has a big-time DH you want to get out of the lineup, and that puts them at a big disadvantage. Maybe you have a pitcher who can really hit…But my idea was, what can we do to make the home team’s advantage stronger?”

In an era where very few teams have a Nelson Cruz or Victor Martinez, almost full-time DHs who play the field as little as possible, this idea actually might have less impact than in the past. But Samson would spice up the drama by allowing the home team to keep its choice secret until the exchange of the lineup cards. So the road team would actually have to prepare two different lineups, one for each set of rules.

And in the meantime, he would pair this concept with …

THE DESIGNATED FIELDER

We’ve already explained this idea. But in essence, it would create a lineup with two DHs – one hitting for the pitcher, another for the Designated Fielder.

“I just feel like it’s a fun concept that helps with action,” Samson said. “And it’s lack of action that’s hurting the game. It’s just one more idea to try to have more people in the game with the ability to put the ball in play.”

THE TWO-PICKOFF LIMIT

This is an area that the competition committee once explored extensively to streamline pace of play. But it mostly talked about a four-pickoff limit, not two, before the whole notion died.

“The reason it was dismissed,” Samson said, “was that, with any number we chose, the impact on the game was that no one would ever get to within one (pickoff) of the limit, because once you got one away, everyone would know – the runner included – that you wouldn’t throw over anymore. So he would be able to take larger leads. And I said, ‘What’s wrong with that?’”

The more he thought about it, the more he thought that unleashing the running game is a jolt of energy the sport could use. So his goal with this proposal was to pretty much eliminate all pickoff throws. By setting a limit of two, “it was really like zero,” for the reasons we just laid out.

If the result is that runners can take longer leads because they have virtually no fear of being picked off, he wondered, why is that inherently a bad thing for the game? It could mean more base-stealing (which is at an all-time low). It could mean more runners going first to third on singles. It could mean closer plays at second on what are now routine force-outs.

Yes, it penalizes the defense. But in the bigger picture, with the rise of shifting, the defense is now at a greater advantage – in virtually all other respects – than ever before.

“So this is not even about the stolen base,” Samson said, “as much as it’s about putting the game in motion. And that’s exciting.”

THE CROOKED NUMBER RULE

We’re not sure how many folks out there are on board with any of this. We’re guessing there aren’t many of you. But if there is anyone left who loves it all so far, there’s an excellent chance this is where you’ll be leaping off this roaring train ride up the slopes of Mount Innovation.

Samson’s proposal would go like this: Any time you allow a team to put up a crooked number of any size or shape (in other words, two runs or more) in any half-inning, your hitters would start the next half-inning with a rally already in progress. Runner on second. Nobody out.

Before you yell “Blasphemy,” at least listen to his logic. His thinking is that nothing is less entertaining than a blowout. So theoretically this is an idea that could keep the game interesting, even after a team starts to blow it open.

“Ask yourself this,” Samson said. “What makes people leave the ballpark? It’s when you give up five runs and a 3-0 game becomes an 8-0 game… So what this does is give a team the ability to score runs after giving up runs.”

When we objected to the whole concept of penalizing a team for scoring runs, Samson responded: “It’s not unfair. They only get one runner on second, whether you scored eight runs or two. And if the other team scores two runs, then you get a man on second yourself.”

But the real selling point, he said, is that “it’s must-see TV. There’s stuff happening. You don’t have to worry about starting a rally. You’ve got a rally as soon as you come to bat. It keeps people watching.”

Of course, it wouldn’t just keep people watching. It also would keep people screaming – about gimmicking up the sport to tweak ratings or sell a few more hot dogs. But Samson said he’s ready for all the screaming and all the criticism that he has no doubt these deep-thinking ideas will inspire. Heck, he can probably already hear it.

“Look, any time you say something different than most people say or you think something different than most people think, you’re susceptible to criticism,” he said. “I’ve been down that road for 18 years. I’ve never shied away from that.”

Hey, it’s a good thing. Does he expect people to agree with all of this? How could he? Does he expect the sport to act on any of this? It never did when he was actually working inside baseball. Why would people in the sport listen to him now?

“For me,” Samson said, “my issue with the game is a lack of desire to change. Rob (Manfred) has done an unbelievable job of trying to start that process. But too many people in the game are too worried about making significant changes from what’s been done in the past. They’re so busy wanting to save baseball as the National Pastime that they’re missing the fact that they’re in danger of losing it as the National Pastime.”

In a world where change has to be approved by a three-fourths vote of 30 owners (i.e., 23 votes) and then has to be negotiated with the players’ union, there are already built-in obstacles to clear that are taller than the Green Monster. But one of these days, Samson believes, baseball needs to summon the will to make the kind of significant changes the other sports make on a regular basis.

“What baseball needs,” he said, “is 23 (owners) who realize that change is inevitable and who also have the courage to be wrong. What’s wrong with making real change and then realizing, three or four years down the road, that it didn’t happen the way you thought and fans aren’t happy, so you change back or adjust back? Baseball is very worried about never being wrong.”

But if there’s one thing Samson proved in his time running the Marlins, it was that he wasn’t afraid of being different, wasn’t afraid of expressing his opinion, wasn’t afraid of taking positions that often unleashed an avalanche of blowback. He’s convinced that sometimes, good things came from taking those stands and absorbing that heat. And that’s his hope here, too.

“I’m not saying this is a panacea,” he said. “I’m not saying this will save baseball. I’m just trying to foment conversation and thought…That’s my sole motivation.

“If enough people want change,” David Samson said, “you get change. But how can you agree on anything without a conversation?”

[Cardinals]

Sounds like fun stuff for Little League.

[Dodgers]

Goofy, there are certainly changes that can be made to make the game better but those ideas are too out there.

[Astros]

You'll forgive me if I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to hear ideas from a guy that ran the Marlins