Think Major League Baseball has a lot of strikeouts? Go to a minor-league game
By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer
RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif. — One minor league’s new pace-of-play clock was introduced Tuesday at LoanMart Field.
There were to be no more than 15 seconds between pitches, counting down digitally from boards beyond the right-center fence and behind home plate. This week is the grace period before umpires enforce the limits.
At 2 hours, 9 minutes, Tuesday’s game between the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes and the Inland Empire 66ers was the shortest played here so far this season.
How about that pace of play, huh? Except the clocks lasted only one awkward inning. They stopped and skipped and generally failed to function like clocks should. The Quakes turned them off. Up close, experimentation isn’t always as clean as it looks from afar. It can be just as sloppy as the on-field play in the minor leagues’ 2021 return.
A Major League Baseball technician arrived Wednesday morning to fix the wiring, and the clocks were back on for Wednesday’s game between the minor-league affiliates of the Dodgers (Quakes) and Angels (66ers). The teams again breezed through their nine scheduled innings in 2 hours, 51 minutes. Inland Empire won 6-4. The teams combined for five home runs and 27 strikeouts.
Minor league baseball is back, and it is different. Some of the problems are the same, as the Oakland A’s postgame meal controversy demonstrated.
On the field, the effects of the pandemic-induced layoff are obvious, especially in this setting, which once hosted a higher level of baseball. The high-A California League is no more. It’s Low-A West here now, and most participants are playing their first full season of baseball after receiving no formal training in 2020. These two teams met for the May 4 season opener and set a new league record with 35 combined strikeouts. The next night, they matched it — while scoring 18 runs.
Hitters are making a little more contact now than they were a month ago. The pitchers’ advantages aren’t quite as pronounced.
But the logistics are still strange. Teams are playing six-game series, with Mondays off. Players are tested for COVID-19 twice each week. To accommodate distancing protocols, they pile into three buses for road series. Pitchers and position players rotate clubhouse access periods. Umpires are instructed to fine players who fraternize with the opponent. This week, the 66ers are setting up their workout equipment on the concourse, between the beer and Dippin’ Dots stands. When the Quakes play at Inland Empire, 20 miles east, they work out at LoanMart Field, then bus over.
But after a year away from organized baseball, involved parties are willing to overlook the inconveniences and oddities. "When the game starts, it’s just like it always was: It’s baseball," said Quakes manager John Shoemaker, a 64-year-old in his 45th year in the Dodgers’ organization.
And modern baseball, at that. On Wednesday, a Quakes coach wore a T-shirt that read, "90 mph is slow." Two 66ers, Caleb Scires and Braxton Martinez, launched stately home runs over the stadium’s sizable batter’s eye. Those two also struck out five times in their other seven plate appearances. The extremes on display in the major leagues are even more visible here, in front of triple-digit crowds.
Two weeks into the minor-league season, according to Baseball America, 40% of all plate appearances had ended with a strikeout or a walk. Strikeouts were up to 28% of plate appearances, compared to 24% in 2019.
"Pitchers nowadays are throwing a lot harder than they did years ago, and they're throwing pitches in locations that make it tough sometimes to hit," Shoemaker said. "There's such a big emphasis now on players trying to get the ball into the outfield, trying to put the ball in the air and drive the ball, that some players are struggling more than others. But it's still a game, it's still baseball, and we're happy to see that everybody's back out there and staying safe, and we're looking forward to a good year."
Shoemaker noted that the Quakes soared past the 85% COVID-19 vaccination rate. California’s coming June 15 reopening could relax some of the protocols many local teams are facing.
Things are changing quickly across the minor-league landscape. Playing in their inaugural season, the Low-A Fredericksburg Nationals lost their first 15 games by an average margin of, somehow, 7.6 runs per game.
Then the Nats won five of nine games, settling into the state of being only bad, rather than historically so.
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Before this week, a 20-second pitch clock had been used at the minors’ upper levels.
There are more changes underway or experiments being undertaken. In Triple-A, the bases are growing from 15 square inches to 18.
In Double-A, four infielders must remain positioned on the infield dirt, reducing defensive shift possibilities. There are rules governing stepping off the rubber before attempting a pickoff and rules limiting pitchers to two step-offs per encounter. In another low-A league, there will be robot umpires for the first time in affiliated baseball.
Partner independent leagues are attempting a sudden-death home run format, designated pinch-hitters and pinch-runners, a hook rule that removes the designated hitter when the starting pitcher exits and moving back the mound.
But all or most of these attempts are secondary to the central issue of too little contact within young hitters’ swings, as they aim for the fences and pitchers aim for strikeouts. Five years ago, longtime private hitting coach Craig Wallenbrock became a hitting consultant for the Dodgers, first with their major leaguers and now increasingly with minor leaguers. He lives near Rancho Cucamonga, so he visits often, meeting 20-year-olds in the cage to counsel them on their swing paths the same way he did with Ryan Braun 15 years ago.
Of course, the ubiquity of strikeouts predates the pandemic. Some teams were starting to change their coaching emphasis when baseball shut down in March 2020. "We’re behind, not in terms of ignorance but in terms of time allotted to make these changes," Wallenbrock said. The ensuing year simply delayed any implementation. But now the prospects are playing again, and they have the time. It’s a matter of how meaningfully they can reduce strikeouts over the next few months.
"I’m not worried about it," Wallenbrock said Wednesday, steps away from Rancho Cucamonga’s batting cage. "But I will be if we’re getting toward the end of July and it’s about the same."
Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.
