Crazy Baseball Idea

[seawolf17]

So this discussion came up in a baseball Facebook group I'm in: "What if every team was given 4,374 outs to spend in a season and at the beginning of every inning had to declare how many outs they would be using."



I thought that idea was completely bananas, because that'd be horribly unwieldy over the course of a season. And someone raised the question of what would happen if both teams decided to just use a handful of outs on a getaway day and you paid full prince for a 30-minute game. But the more I thought about it, outs are really the defensive team's responsibility, right? And in order to keep the "sanctity" of nine innings...



...what if each team was given 27 outs to record over nine innings, but they had declare at the start of each inning how many they wanted to get that inning? You'd still have a full game every game, but you'd have to have a little foresight around lineups and matchups. Got the middle of the order coming up this inning? Well, we're only giving you two outs to play with; we'll get four next inning when we've got the pitcher in there.



I don't know. Obviously, this whole idea is completely bananas, but I thought it was interesting to toss around.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

I'd suspect you'd wind up with the same number of runs, just radically redistributed by inning

[A Boy Named Seo]

I'd take 27 outs in the first inning, hope to run up a nice, big cush, and hope my pitchers don't need "breaks" to hold that lead.

[Edgy MD]

What if the first three guys to bat in an inning were the guys who got the putouts and assists the previous half inning?



You'd be bending over backwards, moving your best player to first with two out, or to the outfield if you're facing a flyball hitter.



If the catcher wasn't a particularly good hitter, you would encourage him to drop the ball on the third strike so he could throw it to first. If he was an outright bad hitter, you wouldn't want to strike out the last hitter at all, and hope to get him to put it in play instead.

[G-Fafif]

My father's one modestly serious suggestion was the run bank. You only need to win by one, he reasoned, so you should be able to put aside your extra runs for another game. No, I'm not certain how that would play out, but I occasionally think about it when someone inevitably says during a blowout, "hey, save some of those for tomorrow."

[batmagadanleadoff]

Was your father a fan of the 1960 Yankees?

[G-Fafif]

=batmagadanleadoff post_id=7044 time=1555017615 user_id=68]
Was your father a fan of the 1960 Yankees?

[Lefty Specialist]

So if you were the home team and took 27 outs in the first inning, rolled up a huge cushion that the visiting team couldn't surmount, would you have to give back those 3 outs that you wouldn't have needed?



I'm guessing this would be murder on pitching staffs.