It’s time to shrink home plate, apparently

I don’t think so, but what do I know? Someone no less well-known and respected than Frank Deford feels differently, however:

It’s time to make home plate smaller. I know: That’s heresy; that’s sacrilegious. But there are simply too many strikeouts in baseball now, and that hurts the game, because if the ball isn’t in play, it’s boring . . .That’s too broad for the pitchers today, especially when so many strikes are on the corners, or even “on the black,” the small fringe that frames the plate. If you cut, say, an inch and a half off each side, pitchers would have a 14-inch target. Batters would have a more reasonable chance to try to connect. They’d swing more, put more balls in play. It’d be more fun, a better game both to play and to watch.

He explains it more in the audio version, to which you can listen at the link. Somehow he doesn’t acknowledge that making the plate smaller would lead to more walks which also don’t have the ball in play, but never mind that.

Never mind it because Deford knows better and this is not to be taken seriously. Evidence that he knows better is contained in his own essay, as he notes that, in the past, offense and pitching have fluctuated historically. That baseball has, in the past, made rules changes such as lowering the mound or -- though they don’t admit it -- juicing the ball in order to juice offense. There are ways to deal with this if baseball wanted to that fall short of shrinking the plate, and if baseball chose to do something they’d do any number of them before shrinking the plate. And, really, they’ll probably do nothing because this is just cyclical stuff the sort of which has always happened in baseball.

But Deford is getting my attention with this and now yours, so it’s not worthless. And he has given me a blueprint for my next essay about how we should legalize steroids in order to cut down on the strikeouts. Maybe that’s controversial, but it’s far less of a radical change than shrinking the plate. I mean, heck, we had such an environment a mere decade or two ago and baseball survived. Even thrived!

Honestly. It’s the more conservative approach to the problem.