The Stupidity of Baseball’s ‘Artificial Runner’

Major League Baseball playoffs are in full swing (pun intended), solidifying October as the best month for sports. The NFL is in its second month, and college and high school football are in the air everywhere, including with Homecoming festivities.

I could give a nod to the National Hockey League, which began this week. But the hockey season is so damned long as to become a collective North American farce. It starts with pre-season in early September and ends with a post-season that runs into mid-June. That’s with merely an 82-game regular season schedule. The season is extended to ridiculous length by too many teams permitted to qualify for playoffs and then saddled with interminable best-of-seven round series. Whichever team wins the Stanley Cup is wiped out by late June, emotionally as well as physically. Eight weeks later, the whole thing starts again.

Speaking of ridiculous, the baseball playoffs are mercifully being spared this October of one of the stupidest rules ever imposed by what suffices as the MLB brain trust. That would be the so-called “artificial runner.”

The great thing about baseball is that it was never meant to be sped up. We call it America’s National Pastime for good reason.

This spectacle was created by MLB in 2020 — one among many outrages committed under COVID Commish Rob Manfred, famously labeled “Man-fraud” by our George Jean Nathan. The rogue commissioner’s politicization of baseball and embrace of wokeness have done irreparable harm to the sport. His Manhattan office of cultural revolutionaries has repeatedly hoisted their left-wing ideology and cultural-sexual insanity upon fans who beg to escape that junk when they go to the ballpark. If I go to a Dodgers game, it’s to watch Clayton Kershaw or Shohei Ohtani, famous for their pitching and hitting; it’s not to watch the hairy-legged, high-heeled, bearded weirdos in the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” famous for pole dancing on crosses and for holding “Hunky Jesus” and “Foxy Mary” contests. (RELATED: MLB’s Rogue Commissioner Must Resign)

Maybe certain voyeurs in baseball’s front offices enjoy staring at that stuff, but as for me and my family, please just let us watch baseball.

Among the worst innovations of Manfred and friends is the artificial runner. It works like this: Once a tied game goes into extra innings, an automatic runner is artificially placed at second base. Yes, you heard that right. This is now an actual rule in MLB games. I’m not making it up. How could I make it up? What clown would make it up?

And why is this being done? In order to “speed up” the game. Or put more accurately, so today’s lords of the sport may pay homage at their altar of “speeding up” the game.

If the team takes the lead at the top of the extra inning, the home team at the bottom of the frame also gets its shot with an artificial runner leading off at second base. If the home team scores and ties the game, then the game goes into, well, more innings. In that respect, the game actually isn’t shortened at all.

Here’s MLB’s official explanation for this travesty: “The automatic runner was initially instituted as part of MLB’s health and safety protocols during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. It was kept in place in 2021 and 2022, and the Joint Competition Committee voted to make it a permanent addition to the rulebook prior to the 2023 season.”

Health and safety protocols? Bunkum.

We’re now well beyond COVID. Nonetheless, the league has made the rule permanent, so it may continue to bow at that sacred altar: speeding up the game.

And yet, here’s a key question to ponder: if this is such a grand idea, then why does MLB not extend this stroke of brilliance into the postseason?

Yes, you read that correctly. The artificial runner doesn’t apply to the postseason. The rule only applies to the regular season. And why is that?

Perhaps MLB officials fear seeing their spectacle played out before a huge TV audience on the national stage. Fans would see what a mockery the whole thing is. Imagine last year’s epic 11-inning game seven between the battling Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” Dodgers being ruined with the insertion of these dubious artificial players. Or likewise for game six of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Big Red Machine of Cincinnati. That game ended in the 12th inning with Carlton Fisk’s incredible walk-off home run over Fenway Park’s Green Monster.

That game was four hours long. Were people bored?

The artificial runner would ruin contests like these. The watching world would gasp at the stupidity. When scratching their heads for answers, they would be reassured that this magnificent adjustment was implemented to “speed up the game.”

Well, okay. Wonderful!

Of course, that purpose is the problem. The great thing about baseball is that it was never meant to be sped up. We call it America’s National Pastime for good reason. You pass the time with baseball. You pass it at a park. Baseball is meant to be played in a park; not in a stadium or arena.

In college, I would catch the bus from campus to downtown Pittsburgh to quietly enjoy a game by myself, sometimes with headphones or a small transistor radio or even a newspaper. I didn’t expect to be hanging on the edge of my seat, demanding that I be entertained every minute.

Some of the greatest games in the history of the sport were extra-inning marathons. I recently wrote about the 16-inning battle between Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal on July 2, 1963. Marichal’s San Francisco Giants beat the 42-year-old Spahn’s Milwaukee Braves 1-0 in 16 innings. Both pitchers went the distance. Today, that epic duel would be obliterated by the artificial runner. I suppose MLB officials would smile a big grin of satisfied relief as that game was artificially ended 1-0 in the 10th inning, with the winning runner not even a player that Spahn or Marichal had let on base. (RELATED: MLB’s Pitching Craziness Continues)

I also recently wrote about Harvey Haddix’s May 26, 1959 bid for a perfect game that went into 13 innings. I noted that today’s “pitch count” obsessed coaches wouldn’t dare permit such a game, yanking Haddix once he hit their predetermined pitch limit, regardless of his perfect game. Well, his scoreless bid could also be blown up by MLB’s artificial runner. (RELATED: Baseball’s Increasingly Rare Complete Game)

Alas, what’s worse is what MLB is catering to with this insistence on speeding up games. It’s catering to people who aren’t baseball’s dedicated fans. We live in a frenetic culture where no one wants to wait for anything. We need constant stimulation. If we don’t get it, we moan. I’m soooo bored! This game is too long for me!

Those demanding that baseball’s pace be artificially amplified for their viewing pleasure ought to look at themselves rather than the field in front of them. The problem is them and their culture; not the sport.

If you demand something faster, go watch NASCAR or roller derby. If you can’t appreciate a slow-paced but masterful pitching duel that ends 1-0, then go play video games. Maybe baseball’s just not for you.

The artificial runner is an act of idiocy. The fact that Rob Manfred and his fellow MLB wokesters ditch it for the postseason suggests they know that, too.

“October baseball is different,” states MLB, “and that includes some of the rules.”

Yeah, no kidding. If it’s special in October, let’s keep it special from April to September, too.

End the artificial runner.

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