TalkNats reviews a number of historical rule changes that came about due to the action of players and imbalances in the game taking baseball in the wrong direction.

The rocky shores of business are littered with the detritus of behemoth vessels sunk by the refusal to leave the comfort zone of familiarity.  RCA was a mammoth corporation built upon the bedrock of Vacuum Tubes.  The electronics world changed with the long-delayed deployment of transistors.  The company never adjusted despite several attempts at diversification including the ill-fated 8-track cassette format.  In 1987 it entered dinosaur space.  Then there’s Eastman Kodak (EK).  Few companies ever dominated a single product more than EK did with photographic film and paper.  It’s easy to imagine the Board of Directors guffawing at the notion of digital photography.  Fast forward: When is the last time you went and purchased film?  The hole opened in Rochester by the hyper-contraction of EK is still there.  At the end of the day MLB is a business.  Driving the business ship through wind shifts and rough seas is a task best suited for a steady hand at the wheel.  A good helmsman makes the subtle turns needed at the proper time.  Baseball had a long history of doing just that until about thirty years ago.  Since then the “Afterguard” has been asleep at the wheel…until now.

TalkNats.com

Nomar Garciaparra comes in for some criticism, but Mike Hargrove was doing the Nomar Shuffle long before the Red Sox shortstop popularized it. Hargrove was described as the human rain delay, and the game slowed down enough by the 1990s that start times were moved back an hour, from 8 PM to 7 PM so that fans could watch a game and still get a decent night’s sleep.

The one thing the article fails to mention, however, is the introduction of collective bargaining in the 1970s. Once that came into being, baseball could no longer unilaterally change the rules. They had to be negotiated. Given that there was so much acrimony over other issues, it seemed a waste of negotiating capital to go after rules.

When the new rules were voted on this season, all the players on the committee voted against them. The players are the ones who game the system, and they don’t want al the work they did to exploit the rules taken away.

One of the strengths of Rob Manfred as a commissioner is his willingness to talk about changes in the game. I very much like that he throws ideas into the public forum. From pitch clocks to ghost runners, he doesn’t have ideas come out of a vacuum. He throws out an idea to see how the players, press and fans react. He experiments and reviews feedback. Even the ghost runner had been tested in the minors before a crisis forced it into the game.

Every game needs adjustments because eventually everyone figures out the best strategy for winning and all teams move toward that point. That’s what makes the game boring. With luck, the new rules will upset the current equilibrium.