CC Sabathia has strong roots to the “older days” of baseball, beginning his career in 2001, but he isn’t afraid of making some big changes within the game he was a part of for 19 big-league seasons.
Talking on Jalen & Jacoby on Friday, Sabathia said that he wouldn’t be opposed to decreasing all games to seven innings, not just during doubleheaders. In a time where MLB is experimenting with a number of changes to the game, including moving the mound back a foot in the Atlantic League, a switch to seven-innings would easily be the most significant change.
But even Sabathia, who threw from a mount 60 feet, six inches from home plate for his entire career, wouldn’t be opposed to moving the mound back to halt the historic rise in strikeouts and increase balls in play.
“If it’s going to create more action, then I would be fine with it,” Sabathia said. “I don’t know, I just feel like there’s other things you can do besides pushing the mound back before we go to that extreme.”
Sabathia took it to an even bigger extreme when he brought up cutting games to seven innings.
“I’m not opposed to moving things around,” Sabathia said. “Other leagues move things around all the time and it makes the game better. We need to do some things to speed the game up. I’m not opposed to making games seven innings. The game would be two hours long. You start a game at 7:00, it’s over at 9:00. You start a game at 1:00, it’s over at 3:00.”
Sabathia is a rare case of a player who experienced two different eras of baseball, breaking into the league just before Moneyball began to take over, and retiring after the rise of advanced analytics led to increased velocity, more home runs and longer game times. When Sabathia made his debut, MLB games took an average of two hours and 54 minutes. In 2019, it had reached a record-long 3:05:35.
In 2005, Sabathia’s fifth year in the league, games took just two hours and 46 minutes.
Of course, seven-inning games would have a significant impact on the job availability for relief pitchers and bench players, who wouldn’t be needed as often in shorter games. But based on the benefits of decreasing the length of the game, Sabathia wouldn’t mind seeing it tried out.
“The game we grew up watching is not there anymore,” Sabathia said. “Just because guys throw so hard, there’s so many 3-2 counts, the game just takes a long time. You cut the game down to seven innings, there’s your two-hour product right there.”
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