I went to my second ever Long Island Ducks game last week. It was a Thursday afternoon game. I’m definitely a fan of day baseball as long as it’s not too hot. The forecast was good and we were sitting in the shade the whole game anyway. My dad and I got there right before the national anthem so that was well timed. It was the Ducks against the Staten Island FerryHawks. The FerryHawks are in their first year and they play where the Staten Island Yankees played when they existed.
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| A lot of the 2,503 fans listed in attendance came dressed as empty seats. |
With the Atlantic League, you’ll get some familiar names. The Ducks are managed by Wally Backman and the FerryHawks are managed by Edgardo Alfonzo. I am aware of who Wally Backman is, but I don’t have any memory of him as a player. He played for the Mets from 1980-1988 and then for five more years after that on four different teams. I definitely remember Edgardo Alfonzo. He played for the Mets from 1995-2002 and then for four more years after that on three different teams. He hit .292 with 120 home runs in almost 4,000 at bats for the Mets. He was really good in 1999 and 2000.
As for players, there were a few names I knew. The Ducks have eight players on their roster who reached the Major Leagues. The only ones that I had much memory of were Lew Ford and Alejandro de Aza. Lew Ford had a pretty good year for the Twins in 2004 and didn’t do much other than that. He’s 45 years old now. He’s listed as a coach and a player on their roster so I was wondering if he’s actually playing games. I checked the stats and he’s only played in five games, but he’s 7 for 19 with a home run. He’s played for a bunch of different teams since his last year in the Majors in 2007, but he’s played games for the Ducks in every year since 2009 except for 2010 (he was playing in Venezuela and Mexico) and 2020 (pandemic). Since playing some winter ball in 2016-2017 in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, he’s only played for the Ducks. He’s hit 79 home runs as a Long Island Duck. Alejandro de Aza played in the Majors in ten seasons from 2007-2017 (he didn’t play in the Majors in 2008). He wasn’t all that noteworthy as a Major League player, but he had six seasons with more than 100 games played. The Ducks list the highest level of baseball for each player on the roster on their website. The FerryHawks don’t do that, so I’m not sure how many of their players had been in the Majors, but the one name that I recognized was Dilson Herrera, who played for the Mets in 2014 and 2015. As I’m writing this on Wednesday night, he’s not listed on their roster anymore, but he was listed in their starting lineup on Twitter five hours ago. So I’m guessing that’s just a mistake on their website.
Anyway, the game was a pitchers’ duel. The FerryHawks started the second inning with three straight hits to take a 1-0 lead, but that’s all they got in the second inning. And that’s all anybody got. It was a 1-0 victory for the FerryHawks. The Ducks came close to winning in the bottom of the ninth. They got a runner on with a one-out walk. The next batter hit a long fly ball to right field. I thought it was gone. It was caught at the wall and was probably a couple of feet from going out (go to 3:08:20 in the video below). The next batter flied out to center to end the game. The teams combined to use just five pitchers with Ducks’ starter going eight and the FerryHawks’ starter going six. Fourteen combined innings from the two starters is a good thing, but it is very rare these days. It’s one of the reasons that the game was only two hours and 42 minutes. I’ll have some thoughts about how we can make starters going deep into games less rare at the end of this post.
The box score says that attendance was 2,503. Considering that the capacity of Fairfield Properties Ballpark (the new name of the stadium) is 6,002, I would say the actual attendance was nowhere close to that. I’m saying maybe there were 1,000 people at most. It was a weekday afternoon three days after the Fourth of July so people might have been returning to work or still away on vacation so it’s not surprising it wasn’t a big crowd. The Ducks are actually leading the Atlantic League in attendance at over 4,400 per game (second place is just over 3,000 per game). The FerryHawks are last in attendance at fewer than 1,200 per game. I hope the FerryHawks can survive because that stadium has such a cool location.
I had a hot dog and a Brooklyn Lager at the game. There wasn’t a huge food selection, but a hot dog is all I wanted at my first professional baseball game of the year. The problem was that they only had yellow mustard. As Cosmo Kramer knows, that's bush league. This is New York, not the Midwest, you need some real mustard. I would have preferred a Sam Adams Summer Ale, but since my ancestry as a baseball fan goes back to Brooklyn, Brooklyn Lager would be my second choice for a baseball game in New York. But the beer was not well poured. So I could have had a better food and beverage experience, but I was just happy to be having a hot dog and a beer at a baseball game again.
The Atlantic League has partnered with Major League Baseball on experimental rules for the last few years. My favorite one is that you have to have two infielders on both sides of second base. Let’s get this in the Majors already. I was watching the Dodgers and Cubs the other day and I saw the Cubs’ shortstop nearly record an unassisted force out at first base. The third baseman should play third base and the shortstop should play shortstop. Batters would be rewarded with more hits for putting the ball in play so it would give them an incentive to not strike out as much. Another rule is that the batter can try to take first base on any ball that gets away from a catcher, not just a third strike that isn’t caught. This one is just silly. We saw it in the game we went to. And it gets scored as a single if you make it. How do you get credit for a hit without hitting the ball? Scoring it as a walk would make more sense, but it would still be stupid because the pitcher doesn’t deserve credit for a walk if he didn’t throw four balls. The rule is so stupid that Rob Manfred must love it. But the most interesting experimental rule is the double hook rule. The rule is that the DH is tied to the starting pitcher. If you take out the starting pitcher, the DH’s spot in the lineup becomes that pitcher’s spot. That was the rule last year, but this year they modified it so that you don’t lose the DH if the starter goes at least five innings. So let’s look at the good and bad parts of this rule.
Good:
This would immediately kill the opener. I’m pretty sure the Rays started the nonsense of having relievers start games. Third basemen should play third base, not short right field, and your starting pitcher should be a starting pitcher, not a reliever.
We would have the possibility of pitchers hitting again.
It increases strategy. Do you put your DH at the top of your lineup to get as many at bats as possible before you lose the DH? Or do you put the DH at the bottom of the lineup so that you minimize possible at bats for the pitcher’s spot (the number 3 spot in the order comes up a lot more over the course of a season than the 8 or 9 spot)? Managers would also possibly have to deal with the pitcher’s spot and pinch hitting and double switches late in the game. This is much more interesting than just setting a lineup at the beginning of the game and not thinking about it at all except for maybe sending up a righty to pinch hit for a lefty against a tough lefty reliever.
Bad:
It uses the DH.
Pitchers would almost never hit. We would never get the Clayton Kershaw home run in the bottom of the 8th to give the Dodgers a 1-0 lead again. Even when the DH’s spot becomes the pitcher’s spot, it’s almost always going to be a pinch hitter in that spot. But there would still be the possibility of the Daniel Camarena grand slam off of Max Scherzer.
It gives the visiting team an advantage. Your DH could hit in the top of the fifth and then you could take out your starting pitcher in the bottom of the fifth. But the home team would need their pitcher to go five innings for their DH to hit in the bottom of the fifth. This problem could be fixed by requiring the starting pitcher to face at least three batters in an inning for the DH to be eligible to hit in that inning. So if the visiting team had their DH hit in the top of the fifth, the starter would need to face at least three batters in the bottom of the fifth. On the other hand, if the home team took out their starter after loading the bases in the top of the fifth, their DH would still be eligible to hit in the bottom of the fifth.
There is no incentive to have a starter go beyond five innings. If the DH was tied to the starter for the whole game, there would be an incentive to have starters go as many innings as possible, not just five. Sure, having a starting pitcher go five is better than having an opener go one inning or having a starter go four and a third, but it’s not as good as having a starting pitcher go seven, eight, or all nine. One of baseball’s problems is too many pitching changes. If you get the starter to go deeper into games, you get fewer pitching changes.
So there are problems with the rule, but it’s definitely better than what we have now. I just don’t get how people think having the DH is more interesting. Yes, pitchers are generally bad hitters. But there’s no rule that they have to be. Shohei Otani is definitely my favorite non-Dodger these days because he can pitch and hit. If your logic for liking the DH is that pitchers are bad hitters, then why not make baseball like football and have nine guys play the field and nine guys hit? Then you don’t have to watch bad fielders or bad hitters anymore. I mean, did anybody enjoy watching Hanley Ramirez play the field? I certainly didn’t when Clayton Kershaw had his perfect game turned into a no-hitter. But nine designated fielders and nine designated hitters would make baseball much less interesting. There’s so much less strategy involved with the DH and there’s nothing interesting about a DH hitting. When you get the rare Clayton Kershaw home run or the Daniel Camarena grand slam, it’s an unforgettable moment. I fear that abolishing the DH is like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. But if implemented correctly, having the DH with the double hook rule will actually fix one of baseball’s biggest problems.
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