BOSTON —Â If Bryce Harper thinks baseball is “tired,” then Bill James has a pretty simple solution to wake it up.
The writer and baseball statistics guru said Friday at the 2016 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that while he hadn’t heard Harper’s comments from ESPN The Magazine, he believes making Major League Baseball more accessible comes down to nixing a rule that has existed since 1898.
“I’d get rid of the balk rule,” James said as part of the conference’s “Moneyball Reunion” panel. “You think that’s a silly answer, but it’s not. The balk rule interferes with the way baseball should be played … the game constantly stops, and you ask, ‘Why does it stop?’ It all goes back actually to the balk rule.
“If the pitcher could just stand on the mound and do anything he wanted, which he should be able to, then you wouldn’t have to take a set position, the batter wouldn’t have to be ready. What the balk rule does is the same thing you’d do to basketball if you made a rule that you couldn’t have a fast break.”
James did say there would need to be rules in place to prevent the pitcher from constantly throwing to first base — he suggested letting the runner advance if the pitcher can’t pick him off by the second try — but otherwise, the pitcher could do what he wants.
“People think that you can’t play baseball without (the balk rule), but, in fact, you can,” James said. “And what I envision is a kind of live ball baseball where the ball is always live because you don’t have to constantly stop the game to restart it for the next pitch because the pitcher can do what he wants to on the mound. If he wants to have a fake double move, all right, there’s no reason you can’t — we don’t ban fakes anywhere else in the sports world.”
But, regardless of how MLB decides to adapt to modern fans, James believes young players calling it out is a positive step.
“Our last commissioner really did a great job making baseball a better commercial product, but the project is not finished, and to have a 23-year-old outfielder recognize that is probably a good thing,” James said.
Thumbnail photo via Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports Images
