Mookie Betts has spent the summer thinking about how to make baseball games shorter, and he came up with the most Mookie Betts solution possible. If a team uses a position player to pitch, that team should forfeit the game.
Betts said this on a recent podcast appearance, and while he was half-joking, he was also mostly not joking. His argument is simple. Managers use position players to pitch when a game is out of hand, and everyone in the ballpark, from the players to the umpires to the fans, would rather just go home.
He is not wrong. Position player pitching has become an epidemic in a sport that already spends too much time talking about pace of play. In 2015, there were 21 such appearances all season. Last year, there were more than 150. Managers are burning them like timeouts.
Betts’ pitch is that the current setup incentivizes the wrong thing. If you are down eight runs in the seventh, throwing your utility infielder is a signal that you have quit. Baseball should not reward quitting, and it definitely should not force the winning team to keep playing when the game is over in every practical sense.
The forfeit angle is what makes it a Mookie Betts idea. He is not saying you cannot use a position player. He is saying that if you do, you lose. Immediately. Full stop.
The MLB Players Association would never agree to that. Forfeits mess with individual stats, service time, and money. But the fact that a superstar of Betts’ standing is even floating the idea says something about how tired everyone is of these blowout games grinding on for another 45 minutes.
The current rule already tries to nudge managers away from position player pitching. You cannot use one unless you are down six or up ten. It has not slowed things down at all. Managers are just more willing to burn through arms in high-leverage games because they know they have a fallback.
There is a smaller, more workable version of Betts’ idea. If a position player takes the mound, the losing manager should be forced to declare surrender and end the game on the current score. That gets everybody home without penalizing anyone’s stats. It also stops the ninth-inning position-player-vs-position-player games that turn into total farce.
Betts is a Dodger. The Dodgers rarely need to use position players to pitch because they run out to seven-run leads and win. He has skin in this game more as a fan than as a competitor. That is what makes his take interesting. He is speaking as a guy who watches baseball, not just plays it.
MLB is not going to add a forfeit rule. But if Rob Manfred is serious about game-length reform, he could do worse than listening to the guys who play the game every night.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
