Yankees/Red Sox And Arguments For Reform

Yesterday’s generally excellent game provides a good illustration of rule changes baseball very much needs:

• I would write more about the drama, except that the series for all intents and purposes didn’t mean anything, with the only thing at stake a nearly-meaningless nominal division championship.   So I will reiterate that while I generally agree with opposition to expanded playoffs adding one wild card team to each league and forcing them to play a one-game playoff would substantially enhance the value of regular season pennant races.   Paradoxical, yes, but it’s really a no-brainer.    And, yes, the AL East runner-up would get a less valuable spot than the winner of the AL Central despite being a much better team.   But — leaving aside the fact that if the only goal of professional sports was to ensure that the best teams won, you’d dispense with the post-season altogether — since the third-best AL East team will almost certainly be better than the AL Central winner the status quo isn’t necessarily more equitable, in addition to which if you don’t like facing a one-game playoff there’s always the solution of winning your goddamned division so you have nothing to whine about.
• Smilin’ Bobby Valentine, I must concede, has proven to be an excellent analyst.   And he was right to emphasize that the tools to ensure that relatively tight, low-scoring games don’t go on for four hours are already in the rule book: namely, 1)enforce time limits on pitchers, and 2)tell the umpires not to call time unless there’s an actual reason to call time, hence forcing batters to stay in the box.    This would eliminate an enormous amount of dead time, with no net downside whatsoever.  And as Bill James has repeatedly emphasized, as it happens this would be substantially more consistent with the way baseball has traditionally been played than the everyone-is-Mike-Hargrove status quo.