2020 in 20–20
By: John Thorn
Tags: 2020, Baseball, Change, World Series, Sabermetrics

The dilemma for owners and players and fans may be understood as The Paradox of Progress: we know the game is better, so why, for so many, does it feel worse? I submit that while Science may win on the field, as clubs employ strategies that give them a better chance of victory, Aesthetics wins hearts and minds.

That message was brought home with a thunderclap in Game Six of the 2020 World Series, in which Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell exited with a 1–0 lead with one man on and one out in the sixth inning. He had allowed only two hits, walked none, and fanned nine, including twice each for the next three batters he was at the point scheduled to face. These same three batters later, after reliever Nick Anderson had replaced Snell, the Rays trailed by 2–1 and did not recover.

Those attacking manager Kevin Cash’s decision to pull Snell acknowledged that this was the way he had managed all season, relying upon his artfully constructed bullpen, but said that in what could be his team’s final game of the season it was story, not stats, that should have ruled. With an ace barreling through the lineup, having thrown only 77 pitches, the second-guessers held, the manager should have gone with his heart not his head.

That this game was not a masterpiece scientifically or aesthetically was noted as well. The Rays struck out 16 times against seven Dodger pitchers while the Dodgers fanned 11 times. Combined, there were four walks and two home runs. The “Three True Outcomes” style of play had produced a three-hour snooze.

This game epitomizes the inescapable truth that the game is played differently today from what it was when some of us were kids, let alone differently from the game of the deadball era. Starting pitchers who can’t or won’t complete games requires more ready relievers (and a shorter bench of position players, who must resemble Swiss Army knives rather than merely being able to hit). To the long-known advantage of pitchers against same-side batters we have added differing arm slots and pitch arrays; the batter may feel he is on the way to extinction if he does not swing for the fences — what manager any longer tries to mount a barrage of singles and doubles?

Add to this long-stewing development this year’s need, because of COVID-19, to start the season in July, to wrestle with regional realignments and periodic outbreaks and resultant quarantines and testing regimens … well, some things had to be done if we were not to write off the season, and MLB and the MLBPA did them.

Traditionalists fretted about the innovations born of the need to preserve health and safety for players and fans alike. But somehow we completed a 60-game season, without fans in the stands, with seven-inning doubleheaders, extra innings commencing with a runner on second, the three-batter minimum rule for a pitcher entering the game, expanding and contracting rosters, a universal designated hitter, and 16 of the 30 clubs reaching the playoffs.

Some or all of these wrinkles may endure because the game has changed. Eighteen-inning games no longer seem a two-for-one bargain, if they last seven hours. Exhausted pitchers shuttling to the Injured List to make way for cannon-fodder prospects seems a bad idea, too. Pitchers who can’t hit .100 or bunt, well, let’s retire them once and for all.

Despite preseason cries for a liberal sprinkling of asterisks in the record books for all things 2020, MLB presented the totals as it always has, since 1876: with no symbolic annotations that would send the casual fan to the footnotes section. In fact, every season has its footnotes, its special circumstances, and except for its length — the first 60-game season since 1878 — this season had peculiarities no more eye-popping in the record books than 1894, or 1930, or 1968.

And because MLB officially makes no distinction between 19th-century and later records, all seasons are, despite their oddities, alike. This may one day make it easier to comprehend and accept the special circumstances that made Negro League seasons so short.