When I was much younger, I happened across an Atari 2600 video game system, cheap! There was a baseball cartridge, and I loved baseball, so my buddies and I played it repeatedly. We discovered that any apparent single to right field could be turned into an out with just the right reflex. Ditto singles to left field, though in that case the out needed to be a force play at third, which is the nearest base to left field. Soon the game devolved to a home run contest. “Meaninglessball,” we called it.
At about the same time, I became an early fanatic of Bill James, one of the few baseball writers who was asking the pivotal questions: what does it take to win games, and which measurements of success are more meaningful to wins and losses? Mr. James is not a statistician–his approach was more basic modeling combined with trial and error. He approached his projects as experiments. I was a math minor at the University of Illinois, and I found topics I could use to get great grades—in downstate Illinois, there was a divide between Cubs and Cardinals fans that I could exploit.
Mr. James developed so many great ideas that it is impossible to list them all here. In the early 1980s, though, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of on-base average, as opposed to batting average. Quite often a .240 hitter created more runs than a .300 hitter did, simply by drawing more walks and being on base more often. I was intrigued, and I began to follow walks as a category and on-base percentage as a statistic.
I think differently now. Walks take time, sap the opposing pitcher’s endurance, and are not exciting to watch–unless we are in the late innings of a close game. Mr. James’ ideas have been refined and improved so exhaustively that last year’s baseball was hard to watch. Batters waited on pitches to crush. Pitchers rarely attacked the strike zone. Infielders shifted to where the data showed “pull” hitters would hit the ball. If a fast runner made it to first base, the pitcher would make repeated pickoff throws, trying to make the out on the basepaths. It was all optimal play, but it was boring. Innings would often last 20 minutes or longer, and there are nine of them! This was “meaninglessball” in actual form, and I went from watching eighty games a year at the ballpark forty years ago to maybe twelve a year now.
Major League Baseball (MLB) had been listening, and though I was never welcomed into a focus group of theirs, the changes made for the 2023 season are mostly changes that I had been hoping for. The shifting of infielders is banned, there is a clock for both pitchers and batters to follow before every pitch, neither pitchers nor batters may call time-out at will, and pick-off throws to runners on base aren’t banned, but the third one advances the runner one base automatically. Games are about thirty minutes faster as a result.
I’m not back at the ballpark just yet. Other forces have been working against meaningful baseball, and I am confident MLB will never fight them: expansion, television, and playoff formats.
Way back in the day, there were eight- or ten-team leagues, playing a 154- or 162-game season to determine a champion, and the World Series commenced after the season was over. When the races went down to the final weekend this produced amazing drama, but baseball had two problems: championship races were not usually that dramatic, and the bottom half of the league, effectively eliminated by late July, weren’t drawing fans. MLB decided to split the National and American Leagues (NL and AL) into two divisions and have a five-game playoff series between the division winners before the customary seven-game World Series. This created more playoff games, which meant more money from television. The leagues could continue to expand, adding franchises (with the existing teams pocketing their share of the franchise fee), so that now there are fifteen teams in both the NL and AL. The structure of these leagues changed as well, with divisions expanded to three, necessitating the inclusion of non-division winners into the playoffs (“wild cards,” as they were called in other leagues). It isn’t just “meaninglessball” anymore; it’s now “MeaninglessSeason.”
Why has the season become meaningless? There are far too many levels of playoffs. This year, six teams from each league will make the playoffs. The two division winners with the best regular season records will skip the first round of the playoffs, which is a three-game series. The bottom four teams will play in that series, and the winners of those series will play a five-game series against the two teams that received the bye. Finally, the two teams remaining will play a seven-game series to determine the NL or AL champion. Three levels of playoffs make it unlikely that the best teams make it through–there is bad luck in baseball, and matchups between pitchers and hitters are at least as meaningful as won/lost records. It’s exciting–but then, why play a 162-game regular season? Oh: the money. How silly of me to forget the money.
Even after all that enlargement of the playoff field, there are still six to eight teams in the NL or AL that have no chance at a World Series appearance–an informed fan can name them every year.
I wrote earlier that MLB would not fight the forces of expansion, wild card playoff entries, and TV revenue. But, if they cared to, I have a few suggestions:
Don’t play ball on Mondays and Tuesdays. Save those days for make-up games of rainouts. The season would become some 20 games shorter as a result; but, as any fan knows, those Monday and Tuesday games are the least-attended. Two consecutive off days means more rest for pitchers.
Eliminate the Wild Card. Sixteen-team leagues can be re-arranged into divisions of four teams each. Four division winners still need two levels of playoffs to determine a league champion, but two levels of playoff are far superior to three.
I think relegation to the minor leagues is a very good idea, though I can’t imagine the details as yet. If the last two teams in every league were demoted to the minors and two excellent minor-league teams would take their place, there would be drama both at the top and at the bottom of the standings. Otherwise, what reason is there to care about regular-season basement dwellers?
I doubt any of these ideas will be implemented. “MeaninglessSeason” is probably here to stay.