Foul Balls are killing baseball


Major League Baseball has a problem… there are too many foul balls. For the past two seasons (with 2019 continuing the trend) for the first time ever there has been more foul balls than balls in play.

That is clearly a problem and other than fundamentally changing how many foul balls can occur during an at-bat—finding a work around to this problem will be extremely tricky. The new way of playing the game where strike outs are as penalized and a ground ball up the middle becoming a ground out instead of a base hit, foul balls have incrementally changed the game as well. More players are trying to create a launch angle to produce a home run instead of just getting on base. Naturally more fly balls will happen that way. Add the increased velocity hitters are seeing on a daily basis, and the weaker fly ball contact will be produced. The analytical era was an overcorrection to the way the game has been played since the dawn of time so, the game needs to over correct itself again. This trend is proving the dominance of the three true outcomes in the worst possible way.
Incentivizing getting on base by all means necessary will hopefully change the amount of foul balls or at least make occurrence of the three true outcomes more random. There is no amount of cool commercials and you can only bank of the tradition of the game so much before the game of baseball becomes obsolete. The viewing experience in the stadium might be affected because the result of so many fly balls is an increased number of souvenirs, but at home once you cannot believe how many balls reach the seats every at-bat. 

Another fundamental flaw in finding a solution to change this trend is how we teach the game. When a batter has two strikes against him, you are taught to foul the ball off to get another hack. The extreme of this is a drill that the Red Sox used in Spring Training where they cranked a pitching machine up to triple digits and told their players that they had two strike and to do whatever they could to foul the ball off. What ensued was a season that saw Boston have the best team average with two strikes. 

Maybe this trend is just a blip that is a product of every team transitioning to the analytical way of playing baseball, but with pace of play at the top of the list for commissioner Manfred, the foul ball epidemic needs to be adding to one of the many problems affecting pace of play and the future of the game.  

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