A lot of smart people are toying with lot of new ideas to improve Major League Baseball. To make it a more exciting product. To keep old fans and attract new ones, to put the game back in the national spotlight. Faster pace, higher action, all that good stuff.
Theo Epstein left his longtime job with the Cubs this offseason to become a consultant for MLB on on-field matters. Basically, Epstein was hired to fix what's ailing baseball.
Maybe he should give Jim Leyland a call. (Maybe he has.) Leyland played the game for seven years in the minors, then spent 22 years in the majors as a manager. He's had a front-row seat to more than 3,500 big-league games and he still serves as a special assistant to the Tigers.
And if you want to make the game better, Leyland says "you can make one simple change to take care of a lot of problems. And it's not one of the changes that they're making."
Like instituting a pitch clock or banning the shift, two of several ideas being tested this year in the minors.
"I think the biggest problem is that the hitters don’t get in the box," Leyland said Friday on the Stoney & Jansen Show. "When a guy hits a pop up to the shortstop, the next hitter should be walking up to home plate. What is he standing over there for with his donut on the bat, swinging the bat, waiting for his walk-up music? That’s ridiculous. It’s not the pitchers that slow the game down, it’s the hitters. We need to get the hitters in the box. That would take care of a lot of issues if they would just do that."
This does fall in line with the idea of a pitch clock, only it directs more of the the burden to the hitters. No matter what happens when a ball's put in play -- assuming a runner isn't barreling toward home plate -- Leyland is insistent the next batter should be walking up to the dish.
"He shouldn’t be standing over there in the on-deck circle fooling around with his batting gloves, fooling around with the donut on his bat, can’t get it off the bat, then he stands there and waits for his walk-up music. If (MLB) would just (change) that, that’s one simple thing, you’d be surprised how much faster the pace of the game would go," Leyland said.
As for overshifts on defense? Leyland has no problem with removing them from the game. And he says "we've been asking the wrong questions" about the matter for the past few years.
"This is just an opinion, I don’t know if I’m right or wrong," he said. "We always ask, do you like the shift? Some people say yes, some people say no. Then we say, does the shift work? Yes, in a lot of cases the shift works. But those aren’t the two questions we should be asking. We should be asking, is the shift good for baseball? And in my opinion it’s not. Other opinions might say, yes, they think it is, but in my opinion it’s not good for the game.
"And I think that’s the question that needs to be answered by owners, players, general managers. Everybody involved in the game should sit down and talk about this and decide whether it’s good for the game and then go forward."