As a 20-year baseball man, Corey Ragsdale was fully prepared to do the noble thing last year as a minor league manager and absolutely abhor the extra-inning rule.
A runner at second to start the inning? Why, this is an outrage! This isn’t baseball. It’s an abomination. Judas Priest, what will they think of next?
All that jazz.
The funny thing is that once he experienced a couple of games at Class A Down East, he, well, um, don’t know how to say this … kinda liked it.
“I really wasn’t sure about it,” said Ragsdale, who joined the major league staff this season as first base coach and base-running instructor. “But I loved it. If you think about it, you get to extra innings and baseball can kind of come to a standstill waiting for something to happen. This actually allows for more strategy. We were hesitant at first, but we found it to be really fun. Our guys enjoyed the moment and the intensity that came with it.”
They were pretty good at it, too. The Wood Ducks were 9-4 in extra innings last year. The entire Rangers system was 32-12.
MLB has temporarily instituted the same rule for extra innings this season. The purpose: Bring about resolution more quickly. It’s more about managing rosters than killing time off baseball’s ever lengthening average time of game.
Even with expanded rosters, a 12- or 13-inning game, or heaven forbid, a wacky all-nighter, can destroy a bullpen for multiple days. A four-hour game makes for an eight-hour day at the park. That’s a playground for a very contagious virus.
Even with social-distancing rules in place, bullpens tend to be the area where more players congregate in a small space than anywhere else. Translation: more communal spread. If COVID-19 hits a reliever, a team could find itself without a handful of players in the snap of a finger. Put the two situations together and a team could have its entire bullpen wiped out.
Rangers manager Chris Woodward understands the thought behind the reasoning. In a season with so many more obstacles to getting to the finish line, the extra-inning wrinkle doesn’t really raise his ire.
It does, however, raise his awareness. The Rangers played 13 extra-inning games last year, going 7-6. That accounted for 8% of the schedule. In a 60-game season, a similar percentage equals five games. Winning three of five might be the difference between playing in October or not.
“I can hate it all I want, but it is what it is,” Woodward said. “It’s not going to change based on my opinion, so I might as well learn to love it.”
And learn to exploit it.
The Rangers have spent significant time over the last week discussing strategy and roster construction related to extra innings. During simulated or intrasquad games, they’ve set up extra-inning replicas to evaluate pitchers, base runners and situational hitters.
“I don’t want to take it lightly,” Woodward said. “There is a lot that goes into it. I want them to understand what I’m thinking so the mentalities match the strategy and the game-planning. If that happens and we fail, there’s not much you can do.”
There are roster construction riddles. With a 30-man roster for the first two weeks of the season and a 28-man roster for the two weeks that follow, the extra-inning rule creates the possibility of temporary specialists. There might be room for a speedy pinch runner to start the 10th on second, such as prospect Leody Taveras. The Rangers have already put Taveras in that situation several times in the last week.
Also: To bunt or not to bunt, that is the question.
On the road, it’s pretty much a resounding “no.” It still comes down to applying the most pressure. Bunts minimize run expectancy. At home, when a run would end the game, it makes more sense to move a runner to third with one out. But the Rangers’ minor leaguers didn’t bunt often in extra innings.
What Ragsdale found was that the extra runner tended to ramp up heartbeats. With that came mistakes. In Down East’s first extra-inning game, the first pitch of the 10th was a wild pitch, putting the runner at third. The first batter received a five-pitch walk. A sac fly, though, turned into a double play when the trailing runner tried to move up, too. In the bottom of the 10th, Demarcus Evans wild pitched home the tying run.
Granted, this was Class A, but the 10th tended to be full of four-pitch walks, errant pickoff throws, fielding errors and the occasional run-scoring balk.
“It was a great learning experience because it forced guys to have to slow it down and just execute,” Ragsdale said. “If you don’t handle the pressure, you work yourself into a bigger situation very quickly.”
If the Rangers can do that to opponents, they might just learn to love the extra-inning experiment as much as Ragsdale.
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