This past summer I was among those musing about alternative formats to the standard All Star Game in Major League Baseball. Noting that the superstar players always tend to be taken out after an inning or three – which meant that when the game was on the line in the later innings, you had second or even third tier players coming up in the most dramatic moments. I posited a sort of “town ball” format to be used in the later innings. This would give an incentive to keeping players in longer, if you actually wanted to win the game.

Thinking on it some more, I wondered what it might be like if you just went with the town ball format for the entire game.

There would be some major changes to the format…..

First, let’s clarify what we mean by “town ball”. As I understand it, this goes way back to before baseball was organized and standardized. Two large teams (like one town / village against another) would face off in a large field. Everyone on one team would be out in the field playing defense, and everyone on the other team come to bat. The “inning” would go on, regardless of the number of outs, until each player on the batting team got a chance to hit. Then they’d switch sides. Whichever team scored the most runs won.

Obviously, that won’t work today. You’d need commercial breaks, for one thing. And in an All Star Game, you’d want to have more than one pitcher per team. You’d also want to do something to keep the interest going – if Team A manages to score over a dozen runs when they’re at bat, not many people will want to stick around and see if Team B can match it, especially if most of their batters start making outs.

So let’s try this:

In regular games, you typically have four or five batters come to the plate each inning. So let’s have breaks after every five batters. And at the break, change the pitcher. And, swap sides while you’re at it. So it goes Team A sends up five batters, go to break, teams switch sides and Team B sends up five batters, go to break and switch sides again and put in a new pitcher, Team A sends up five batters, etc. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING is that when you go to a break and switch sides, the runners on base are NOT cleared away! For example, Team A’s inning goes like this: Strikeout, flyout, single, walk, ground ball double play (yes, the number of “outs” doesn’t matter!) with the runner on second moving to third. The next time Team A comes to bat, that runner goes back out to third base! Got that?

The next thing to decide is how many of these “innings” are in a complete game. It determines the roster sizes and compositions – five batters and one pitcher per inning. Many people will, no doubt, want a lot of innings to include a lot of pitchers; but you’ll have to have a limit on the number of batters, because otherwise you’ll be filling the roster with merely average players instead of “Stars”.

It won’t be easy limiting the number of pitchers, but making those tough calls is why they pay me the big bucks. I’m going to limit it to six innings – but I’ll also say that if the game is tied after six, we’ll add extra innings (where a team can make ONE pitching change in an inning) until the game is decided. And in extras, the batters just restart the lineup again.

That gives us six pitchers (plus a few extras in case of injury or extra innings) and thirty batters per team.

I’ll go more into roster construction and fan voting next time.