Are too many strikeouts hurting the game of baseball?

That's great.

When I covered baseball, I would tell my wife, "Buehrle's pitching tonight, so I should be home pretty early."

 

For that reason I hated Steve Trachsel.

 

No one called Bob Gibson boring because he could stick a fastball in your earhole just because he felt like it.

 

Wonder how Jim Kaat's time per plate appearance stacked up.

 

I guess I'm not the only one who has been thinking about this. Here's Rob Neyer's piece the other day, expressing many of the same sentiments as this thread:

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/is-game-due-for-rule-change-to-cut-down-on-too-many-k-s-022814

More balls in play would make for a better game, both to play and to watch. This strikes me as so elementary that I’m actually surprised, just a little bit, that Commissioner Bud, with all his God-given powers, hasn’t made even the smallest effort to address the Scourge.

He says they should lower the mound and deaden the ball.

 

The strikeout rate unquestionably slows down the game. It is directly related to the increased use of relievers, particularly situational ones. And it deepens pitch counts dramatically. Anecdotally, it seems like high-velocity pitchers take longer between pitches. I would like to see a survey on that. But it suffices to say that a 25-strikeout game, not infrequent these days, is going to take some time.

 

The attendance doesn't reflect this - yet - but I think that it makes the game particularly hard to watch in person. On TV, it's not so bad to watch the pitcher and hitter do battle. Live, particularly if you aren't sitting close, long at-bats can be a real slog.

 

The game has never been better to watch.
If you don't like it go watch something else.
Now I can see how the soccer fans feel.

 

Of the "big four" sports, baseball by far is the best to see in-person as opposed to on TV. Among many other reasons, the view and the perspective of what's happening is much better at the stadium than on the tube.

And as others said, hitters will adjust to the higher number of strikeouts ... hopefully by swinging earlier in the count. Especially against relievers.

 

Dennis Martinez was notoriously slow too.

 

There were times in some of the Yankees-Red Sox games a few years back where Papelbon was taking almost a minute between pitches.

 

Last year the league average was 1,224 strikeouts per team -- 18 teams had fewer than that, 12 had more.

The 12 teams above the line scored an average of 4.02 runs a game.

The 18 teams below the line scored an average of 4.26 runs a game.

Boston was the huge exception -- led the league in runs while finishing eighth in strikeouts -- but the other three teams to make the LCS (Stl, Det, LAD) all finished in the bottom eight in strikeouts. Even the A's have figured out the advantage of putting the ball in play, dropping from first to 20th in strikeouts and improving from 15th to fourth in runs.

The game itself will catch up.