As long as Rob Manfred is announcing [1] that extreme shifting will be a thing of the past in 2023, let’s retroactively get rid of double plays. In the spirit of the pitch clock that will redefine the imposition of time within the confines of the once-timeless game of baseball, let’s turn the overall clock back 24 hours and declare that any ground ball fielded by an infielder with at least two runners on base and one of them on third can result in no more than one out. Since there’s no time to test it in the Atlantic League, just apply it to the geographically southernmost game played in the majors Friday night. Explain that it’s for competitive reasons or necessary to appeal to an action-oriented youth market that won’t tolerate rally-killing. “The best of interests of baseball” is a dependable chestnut. Whatever flimsy rationale Manfred manufactures will suffice. The bottom line is you can still have double plays, just not from a ground ball inside the parameters of the infield and not with a runner on third.
According to the Manfred Revision, which has just been ratified by unanimous vote in my head, if a team is up in the top of, say, the third inning, with a runner on first and a runner on third and one out, and the batter grounds to the first baseman, once the first baseman throws to second to force the runner coming from first, that’s it. No more throwing. The runner from third scores.
Another example: It’s the top of the seventh with one out. The bases are loaded. A sharp ground ball is hit to third. The third baseman throws to second and records one out. That’s it again. The runner from third scores.
On the other hand, in the hypothetical bottom of the seventh, a team has one runner on, on first with one out. The batter hits a ground ball. Go nuts, defense. Get two outs if you can.
Under this scenario in a not so hypothetical game I might have watched last night, the Mets, who trailed, 4-3, after completing a 1-6-4-3 double play to end the seventh, would be ahead at least 5-4 after seven. Then, in the bottom of the eighth inning, another of Rob Manfred’s new rules — so new it hasn’t even been committed to press release — could be invoked:
Never use Joely Rodriguez late in a one-run game again. That one pretty much explains itself.
So we exchange an out for a run in the top of the third…and exchange another out for another run in the top of the seventh…and we get over this fetish for spreading Joely too thin…and, hey, look, we just won, 5-4, and the Mets are still in first place.
Nice going, Commissioner!
Alas, the rules for which I am lobbying after the fact do not exist, not yet, anyway. Perhaps if a gambling consortium sponsored them and branded them with élan — the Lucky Ball; the Lefty Sit — they’d be MLB law. Instead, we have the ability to ground into double plays with runners on third and we have the unfettered compulsion to deploy shaky southpaws, and we don’t have a Mets 5-4 win over the Marlins. We have, instead, a 6-3 loss in Miami [2], which, when coupled with a 6-4 Braves win in Seattle, places the erstwhile division-leading Mets second in the National League East.
Which, in turn, doesn’t mean all that much with more than three weeks to go in the regular season and means only so much in light of almost everybody and their uncle going to the playoffs provided they don’t out-and-out suck for 162 games. That’s right: Rob Manfred has essentially legislated crashing and burning from perilous heights out of our Septembers. Seven teams meet the bare minimum standard of winning more than they’ve lost in the National League this year. Four of them are postseason locks, including (and you’re not going to believe this) the Mets, who, appearances to the contrary, aren’t going to blow their date in October. They may have it pushed up, but the Commish ensured their participation by making Wild Card qualification practically blowproof for any team whose sucking has been, at worst, intermittent, episodic and fairly recent.
Thanks, Rob!
Francisco Lindor, who hit into one of the two peskily legal double plays that made Friday night too steep a hurdle to clear versus a supposedly lesser opponent, framed the Mets’ difficulties after the game. He’s too polite to say “we shouldn’t have used Joely Rodriguez to go from being behind by one run to go to being behind by three runs in the eighth inning” and he wasn’t specific about his own seventh-inning double play or Jeff McNeil’s in the third. Instead, he posited, “I think it’s just baseball. I think it’s that time of the year, you know? A lot of us kind of hit the wall. We’ve got to find ways to break through the wall, and do it together. That’s what good teams do, and I’m sure we’re gonna do it.”
That’s a reasonable assessment in September, if an alarming one when set against the experience of a rival that burst through its wall in June and never stopped bursting, but that’s OK. It gives Rob Manfred a chance for more creativity.
Let’s remove walls!
Retroactively by 24 hours, of course. That way the two two-run homers the Marlins blasted over walls — one by Garrett Cooper off David Peterson in the first, the other by Charles Leblanc off the theoretically ineligible Rodriguez in the eighth — might have been caught. As for Pete Alonso’s own two-run dinger in the sixth, nobody can run down a Polar blast!
I’m using a surfeit of exclamation points in this essay to convince myself that any of what I’m suggesting is remotely workable. On the off chance it’s not, here are two final suggestions before tonight’s game and the fresh energy I will devote to suddenly contemplating the Mets’ potential opponent in a 4-vs-5 best-of-three first-round matchup (if we play the Phillies three times at Citi Field, Noah Syndergaard presumably plans to use the occasion as an opportunity to gather extra rest):
1. If you have to put Starling Marte on the IL, which from more than a thousand miles away seems like the healing move, promote Triple-A bopper Mark Vientos [3] already. I don’t usually join minor league savior choruses, generally figuring seasoning is what makes a prospect well done, but every time I turn around, he’s hitting a ball out of Syracuse and into Canada. Besides, give or take other roster machinations, it’s a three-week window, not to see “what he can do” (the song of Septembers far sadder than this), but to maybe, just maybe, catch lightning in a bottle. Three-plus weeks of Tidewater callup Mike Vail helped keep the Mets viable into September of 1975. And you know who has the same initials as “Mets viable” and “Mike Vail”? Mark Vientos, who could prove most valuable. Also, Mo Vaughn, and he injected some pretty distant mood vaccinators into our bloodstream, too. Either way, it’s not like there’s no room in our offensive inventory for bottled lightning.
2. The Doors graciously furnished us with the Mojo Risin’ refrain in 1999. Thanks to Francisco, they’re being called on again. We tried to run (away from the Braves); we tried to hide (from the Braves). Now?
Break on through to the other side [4], fellas. Use your bats. It’s quicker that way.