Whitey Herzog turns 90 years old soon. With that anniversary approaching, he talked with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the current state of baseball:

“None of that is going to shorten the games at all, until we can lower the amount of pitches that they throw. I watch every game at home. I generally don’t go to bed until 11 at night when I’m watching the West Coast games and when the teams throw 340 to 360 pitches every night, there’s no way you can shorten the games.

“I sit and watch an 0-2 pitch — a perfect pitch on the black — (the umpires) never ring anybody up. It’s always a ball.

“And now the count is two strikes and a ball but the power pitchers can’t throw a ball three inches off the outside of the plate where a hitter might get himself out. They can’t pitch three inches off the inside corner. They’re two feet or a foot-and-a-half out of the strike zone. Now, its 3-2. Then the batter fouls off a pitch and fouls off another one and the announcer says, ‘We’ve got a quality at-bat’ when the hitter should have been on the bench after three pitches if they ring him up and call the pitch on the ‘black.’

StLToday.com

It sounds like Herzog wants a bigger strike zone, although he didn’t really come out and say it. He does feel that calling more pitches strikes will force batters to swing earlier.

The whole discussion is worth the read, although sometimes Herzog does come across as the typical, “We did it better in my day,” old-timer.