"STRIKEOUTS"

The final game of the playoff series between the Houston Astros and the Minnesota Twins on Wednesday lasted only two hours and 38 minutes. It was a crisply played game — which the Astros won, 3-2 — that highlighted Major League Baseball’s biggest accomplishment this season. Thanks to a 15-second clock that prevents players from dawdling between pitches, the average game lasted just two hours and 40 minutes this season, down a remarkable 24 minutes from last season.

Major League Baseball has trumpeted this change with television commercials. Journalists have praised it for speeding up a hidebound sport. Fans seem to have noticed, too: Attendance rose 10 percent, to its highest level in six years.

The shorter game times will help more fans enjoy the sport’s semifinals, known as the League Championship Series, which begin tonight with an intra-Texas rivalry between the Astros and the Texas Rangers. Tomorrow night, the other series — between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Philadelphia Phillies — begins.

There will be plenty of good stories over the next couple weeks. The Astros could become the first repeat champions in more than two decades. The Rangers have never won a World Series. Neither has Bryce Harper, the Phillies’ star. The Diamondbacks’ best player, Corbin Carroll, is a 23-year-old rookie. If you like watching only a few baseball games a year, now is the time to tune in.

But the sport still has a basic problem that the celebration over the pitch clock has obscured: Major League Baseball, which can already seem slow compared with football and basketball, includes less action than at any almost any other point in its history.

Baseball executives tried to address this problem with a package of rule changes before this season, including not only the clock but also larger bases (to encourage steals) and restrictions on where fielders can stand (to allow for more hits). They didn’t solve the problem, though.

This chart tells the story:

 

For most of baseball’s history, hits were much more common than strikeouts — and hits are exciting. They can score runs, as a home run always does, or can put a runner on base who creates game action. Strikeouts, by contrast, involve a batter walking back to the dugout after failing to hit a pitch.

“The idea that there would be more strikeouts than hits would have been a crazy idea even 20 years ago,” Joe Sheehan, a longtime baseball writer, told me. “Well, strikeouts surpassed hits in 2018 and there have been more strikeouts than hits in every year since.”

(The small recent decline in strikeouts you can see in the chart is the result of pitchers — who tend to be weak batters — no longer hitting for themselves in any game. That change happened two years ago, and it had a one-time effect.)

Going to 11

Why have strikeouts increased so rapidly in the past two decades? Pitchers have become stronger and can throw harder. Computer analysis has taught them how to spin pitches even more effectively than before. And teams have jammed their rosters with pitchers so that many need to throw only one inning at a time, allowing them to throw as hard as possible to just a few batters each night.

As a result, the late innings of games often resemble a procession of strikeouts. During the Astros-Twins game on Wednesday, six of the Twins’ last seven batters struck out.

There are reasons to think that fans would prefer a livelier game. Attendance, despite the increase this year, is still about 10 percent below its 2007 peak. In polls, baseball has slipped to be the country’s third most popular sport, behind both football, which it has long trailed, and basketball. “Baseball, in its design, was a game of baserunning and defense, and there’s less baserunning and defense than ever before in the game’s history,” Sheehan said.

Baseball has more promising ways to address the problem than it has tried so far. It could limit the number of pitchers on a roster to, say, 11; that was a normal number a few decades ago, but teams now often carry 13. Baseball could also lower the mound, as it did in 1969, or shrink the strike zone.

Some of these changes might sound radical, but most successful sports — and successful businesses of any kind, for that matter — make significant changes over time.