Boston’s Tzu-Wei Lin plays left field in front of the scoreboard that has the Red Sox playing as the visitors to the Toronto Blue Jays in the second game of a doubleheader on Friday at Fenway Park in Boston. Winslow Townson/Associated Press
I have seen the future, and it lasts only seven innings.
We have seen a lot of strange things in 2020, including baseball games not scheduled to go the traditional nine innings. The Red Sox played their first pair of seven-inning games in a doubleheader last Friday. The road team won each game.
In another byproduct of the bizarre 2020 baseball season, the Sox were actually the road team for the second game of the doubleheader, a makeup of a postponed home game for Toronto.
There was nothing particularly noteworthy about either game. The Jays won the opener 8-7 before the Sox answered back with a 3-2 win at night. Yet we might look back on those games as the starting point for the future.
A seven-inning future.
For years now, we’ve been hearing that baseball is having trouble connecting with its young fans. We’ve heard numerous rule changes being discussed, all to speed things up and get the average length of a game under three hours.
The simplest way to do that would be to make the games themselves shorter. You wouldn’t have to tweak and cajole the rules if the games were 29% shorter.
Seven-inning games would be a dramatic break from tradition. The very idea would rankle purists. Players would be unhappy about a new limit on their ability to reach milestones. After all, the game has been played over nine innings for more than a century.
But times change. The game has, too. For the better part of the game’s history, starting pitchers would go seven or more innings. A couple of relievers would come in to bridge the gap to a closer who would nail it down.
Now, it’s rare for a starter to go six. Not one of the four starting pitchers in Friday’s doubleheader made it through five innings. That left the bullpen to take it from there. Boston’s bullpen pitched as many innings as the starters.
I’m not the first to suggest shortening the length of MLB games. Two years ago, before these doubleheaders were hatched, former MLB pitcher and current TV analyst Jim Kaat suggested that nine innings was too long for the current game.
“Seven is the new nine,” Kaat told Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic.
Kaat is 79 years old and has been around the game his whole life. This isn’t some radical trying to do away with the game’s great history. He spent a quarter-century playing the game one way, but has seen it become a very different game now. And, like the rest of us, he has seen the shrinking attention span of a once-captive audience.
Other sports have survived, and thrived, after fundamental changes. The NBA didn’t have a 3-point line until 1979, when it was ridiculed as a gimmick that would never last. Now the entire sport revolves around the 3-point shot. The 2-point conversion has only been in the NFL since 1994. Hockey introduced the shootout in 2005 and has tweaked its overtime rules several times since.
If Major League Baseball shifted to seven-inning games they would get well under the three-hour time frame most sports covet. Friday’s seven-inning games lasted 2:42 and 2:49, respectively. Not particularly crisp for seven innings, but can you imagine how long they would’ve lasted if they had to play two more innings in each game?
Games would be played, and managed, with more urgency since there would be less time to rally from a deficit. Teams may play small ball again, bunting and trying to manufacture runs because they have fewer innings in which to score.
The normalcy of nine innings returned for the remainder of the weekend, and it wasn’t pretty. Boston’s 10-8 loss Sunday lasted 4:23, roughly the time of two hockey or basketball games. It was the longest nine-inning game in Blue Jays history, and no one was celebrating the feat.
For most casual fans, it was a reminder that many of these games take far too long. Making them two innings shorter would be a step in the right direction.
Tom Caron is a studio host for Red Sox broadcasts on NESN. His column runs on Tuesdays in the Portland Press Herald.
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