The Case for Widening the MLB Foul Lines
And the forgotten history of an obscure proposal that might finally be ready for its call-upThe Case for Widening the MLB Foul Lines
And the forgotten history of an obscure proposal that might finally be ready for its call-up
“A hit along the foul lines is the most damaging of any. It is nearly always good for two bases, and often for three, for the fielders are away off and have a long run to field the ball.” —Charles A. Comiskey, 1910
In the bottom of the sixth inning of a July 6 game between the Twins and Astros, Twins third baseman Jose Miranda came to the plate poised to do something unprecedented. Miranda had started the day 2-for-2, after hitting safely in his previous 10 trips to the plate over the past three games. With one more single, double, triple, or home run, he’d become the first big leaguer ever to record a hit in 13 straight at-bats.
With a 1-2 count, Miranda, protecting the plate, swung late on a 98 mph sinker from Astros starter Hunter Brown and poked it down the right-field line. “Just foul,” exclaimed Cory Provus on the Twins TV broadcast and Todd Kalas on the Astros TV broadcast, an instant apart. The Minnesota crowd groaned. “That close to a major league record,” Kalas added.
How close? This close:
Two pitches later, Miranda flied out to left, ending his streak. The 26-year-old was forced to settle for a share of a four-way tie atop the consecutive-hits leaderboard, to the great relief of fans of the unlikely trio of Johnny Kling, Pinky Higgins, and Walt Dropo.
But—bear with me—what if he hadn’t been? What if the foul lines weren’t bound to the baselines all the way to the outfield fences, but instead were free to flare out toward the stands? What if Miranda’s foul—and hundreds more like it—had been fair?
Record chase aside, Miranda doesn’t need extra help: He’s batting .325. But collectively, major league batters are having a historically hard time getting balls to fall (which makes Miranda’s near-record hit streak all the more impressive). At the All-Star break, with roughly 60 percent of the regular season complete, MLB players are batting .243, almost 20 points below the cumulative .261 AL and NL average since the founding of the National League in 1876. The batting average across the minor leagues this season also sits at .243. Not long ago, guys who batted .243—the career mark of, for instance, Alex Gonzalez, Jose Valentin, and B.J. Upton—were routinely described as “low-average hitters.” Now, that “low” average is just … average. As commissioner Rob Manfred said in May, “That’s not necessarily a good thing if you’re looking for action in the game.”
The leaguewide average has warmed with the weather, creeping from .240 in March and April and .239 in May to .246 in June and .250 in July. Typically, though, there isn’t a sizable first- and second-half split in batting average; what you see before the break usually isn’t too far from what you get thereafter. (On, um, average, batting average has been less than one point higher after the break than before; of 121 seasons from 1901 through 2023—excluding the shortened 1994 and 2020 campaigns—it fell or stayed the same in the second half in 62 of them.) So let’s compare how this season’s mark at the more-than-halfway point stacks up to the annual MLB baselines going back to the beginning:
Over long time frames, batting average fluctuates widely, with more than 70 points separating the lowest-average season from the highest. However, only four AL and NL seasons in the majors’ 148-year history have finished with lower averages than this season’s so far: 1888, 1908, 1967, and 1968. And low averages aren’t a new feature of 21st-century baseball: This is the 16th straight season with a batting average below the previous historical standard. Those three-digit staples of the backs of baseball cards have sunk so precipitously that even hoops sportscasting icon Dick Vitale has logged on to lament their decline.
Why is baseball stuck in a batting-average rut? The culprit is partly a lack of contact; the league’s strikeout rate remains near its all-time high. But not at its all-time high: This year’s strikeout rate is the lowest in six years. The universal designated hitter has helped corral Ks by preventing pitchers from hitting, but even among position players, strikeouts seem to have plateaued. This year’s K rate is also the lowest since 2018 if we limit our look to “real” hitters only. (Among other factors, maybe banning sticky stuff helped.)
In other words, the problem isn’t just strikeouts, but also how few balls in play are falling for hits. MLB restricted infield shifting last season in a bid to boost batting average on balls in play (BABIP), but as was widely predicted, the measure had at most a modest effect. Both batting average and BABIP are as low as (or lower than) they were before those restrictions. If this season’s .289 BABIP holds up—or, rather, holds down—it will be the lowest since 1992.
There’s no single factor keeping BABIP and batting average down. It’s a perfect storm of hit suppression. Thanks to optimized player development and usage, pitchers are fragile but fearsome wizards who throw harder fastballs and more breaking balls than ever, in such short bursts that hitters have few chances to see the same arms in a given game. The baseball itself is less lively than it was several years ago, or even last year—pulled barrels have traveled fewer feet, on average, than in any previous season in the Statcast era—albeit far from “dead” by historical standards. And hitters and teams are no longer prioritizing singles or strikeout avoidance: They’re looking not just for hits, but for high-value hits, particularly the kind that go over the fence. (That the home run rate remains fairly robust helps explain how scoring is still sitting right around the AL-and-NL-era average even with batting average near its nadir.)
Perhaps most important, outfield defense has gotten good. While MLB was worried that shortstops or third basemen would stand on the “wrong” side of second, outfielders were surreptitiously positioning themselves in the path of more fly balls and line drives. It’s been clear for some time that those improvements in the pasture have had a huge effect. While BABIP on ground balls has hardly ticked down from its highs in the pitch-tracking era, BABIP on balls in the air (excluding pop-ups) has steadily decreased.
“There are times where I’ve felt like there’s one big glove in the outfield,” the Brewers’ Rhys Hoskins told The Athletic last month. “We’ve got guys out there now that run all over the place. Plus, they know where I’m going to hit it.”
Well, why not give those guys more ground to cover?
There’s still no precedent for a big league batter getting hits in 13 at-bats in a row. But there’s plenty of precedent for proposing that the foul lines be moved to help hitters.
In fact, coloring outside the lines—or, more accurately, moving them—may be the most enduring idea for a baseball tweak that hasn’t yet made the majors. There’s ample evidence that this abiding but obscure prescription, which long predates the recent rise in strikeouts, would effectively treat an ailing offensive environment’s undesired symptoms. And there’s never been a better time for the concept to get the call.
There are almost no new complaints about baseball, whose imperfections have frustrated fans for as long as its apparent perfections have charmed them. Thus, there are almost no new suggestions for fixing the sport. However clever your solution to a perceived problem, somebody probably beat you to it, maybe by more than a century.
I relearned this lesson last month, when Effectively Wild listener Brendan Pulsford emailed me an idea that he said had been “bouncing around in [his] head for a few months.” The proposal—“widen the angle of the foul lines to increase the size of the field”—sounded intriguing. Too intriguing to be new, it turned out: It had already been bouncing around baseball for a few centuries (the 19th, 20th, and 21st).
“The concept of foul territory is one of baseball’s distinguishing characteristics,” wrote Peter Morris in A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball. Few bat-and-ball precursor sports featured foul territory at all, let alone foul territory where balls were still playable. But in baseball, foul territory goes way back, though it wasn’t always clearly indicated. The game’s familiar “diamond” was well established by the 1830s, but by one later account, as late as 1860, “the playing ground was a mere waste field, punctuated by white bags on three corners of a square, and by an iron plate (very rusty, no doubt) on the other.” Without clearer indications of the boundaries of fair territory, the umpire “naturally made more mistakes in deciding fair and foul balls than was comfortable to him or agreeable to the players and spectators.”
And so, the same year the Civil War first pitted North against South, chalk lines first divided fair from foul. Ten years later, in 1871, the chalk lines were extended to the foul poles. In a short time, the same account concluded, the mostly unmarked field of baseball’s formative decades had developed a “net of charming lines restful to the eye, forming an attractive frame to the green diamond with its gleaming white corners.”
The rest was history—but it didn’t have to be. “There is no reason apart from habit that the foul lines and the base lines need to be the same,” says baseball historian Richard Hershberger, author of Strike Four: The Evolution of Baseball.
Habit, of course, can be a powerful force, but hear me out. Or, rather, hear Harry Wright out. Wright wasn’t the first to suggest rejiggering the field’s dimensions, but if anyone can be credited as the first foul-line disruptor, it’s him, the Hall of Fame manager, player, and pioneer known in his time as the “father of professional baseball.”
I mentioned above that 1888 was the first year to feature a major league batting average lower than .243. Not by coincidence, it was also the first year known to have featured a suggestion to widen the foul lines. That September, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch related Wright’s idea to start the foul lines from home plate, as usual, but “instead of following the base paths, let them branch off independently, passing first and third bases, say three or four feet away.” The change “would not only increase the size of the fair ground territory, but also necessitate a slight change in the position of the men,” such that “many hits now handled by them would then be safe.”
Wright was the brains behind innumerable innovations—including the rule that to be deemed fair, a batted ball had to be in fair territory until it passed first or third—so when he spoke, people listened. Two years earlier, a newspaper had noted, “Mr. Wright is not infallible, and he is apt to err, just as any other person in his particular profession will blunder, but Mr. Wright will make 49 good ones to every bad one.” Not everyone was convinced that moving the foul lines was one of the good ones. Eight days after the Post-Dispatch piece, Sporting Life noted that the idea was “likely to encounter considerable opposition.” Yet a week after that, The Indianapolis News reported that the plan had “met with the approval of a large number of managers and players throughout the country. All seem to think that this is the only answer to the great question of the day.”
It wasn’t to be. In 1889, the number of balls required for a walk was reduced from five to four, and offense spiked enough to quiet calls for sweeping change—temporarily. (This pattern will repeat.) By 1892, scoring had subsided again, fostering fear, Hershberger says, that “numbers were down and were going to go lower unless something were done.” The ensuing “rules debates lasted all winter,” Hershberger adds, encompassing proposals ranging from banning fielders’ gloves, to allowing second and third bases to be overrun like first, to rolling back changes that had done away with four-strike strikeouts, the practice of calling for high or low pitches, and the requirement for pitchers to throw underhand.
Naturally, Wright’s idea resurfaced, courtesy of Tim Murnane, a former major leaguer who became an accomplished baseball writer and editor. “Give us more batting and base running, has been the cry of the public for many seasons,” began Murnane’s column in The Boston Globe on December 4, 1892. (Sound familiar?) The former infielder and outfielder reasoned, “Men can cover more ground now than before the introduction of the big glove, as the latter is often used to block a ball where it would be impossible to stop hot grounders with the bare hand. For this reason the men should have more ground to cover.” Among other alterations, Murnane’s rearranged diamond would include foul lines—or, as he dubbed them, fair lines—that would pass 5 (or, according to his diagram, 3) feet wide of first and third.
But again, any momentum toward the Wright-Murnane method fizzled once a different fix was adopted: in this case, moving the pitcher back by 5 feet to the modern distance of 60 feet, 6 inches. Both batting average and runs per game climbed dramatically in 1893, and 1894 was the highest-scoring season ever.
The never-ending battle between batters and pitchers, with the rule writers presiding as refs, exerts a gravity on the game, ensuring that when scoring goes up, it must eventually come down. Ten years after that 1894 peak, it did, as baseball embarked on a dead ball era that would see scoring squat below four runs per team, per game, in 13 of 16 seasons before the lively ball buoyed offense in 1920. That lasting slump came with occasional mentions of foul-line tinkering. A 1905 column called it a “radical change advocated by some … that does not appeal to the majority.” A 1908 allusion to the long-dead Wright’s advocacy conceded that “the general public would not take kindly to any change in the shape and appearance of the diamond.”
Another 1908 item noted that Norris O’Neill, president of a high-level minor league called the Western League, had proposed widening the foul lines by 6 or 8 feet, an idea that “may, in time, become popular.” And in 1909, John Heisman (of Heisman Trophy fame) endorsed a “splendid suggestion” by another Western League operator to widen the lines by a few feet. “All would like to see more bingles,” Heisman asserted, and this measure “would result in many more safe hits, which means men on bases and plenty of base-running, and higher scores and more exciting plays and moments in the game.” If baseball’s authorities weren’t willing to embrace the bold proposals that were already circulating—such as, say, banning the spitball—then “why not give this new one a trial; it at least has the merit of originality.” Not exactly, but Heisman was far from the last to mistakenly believe that the foul-line idea hadn’t dawned on anyone else.
Bats thawed slightly over the next several seasons, but in 1916, scoring cratered again. On cue, the “break foul lines in case of emergency” option reappeared. “If there ever comes a time when the pitching so far overreaches the batting that a change is necessary,” The Ottawa Journal remarked, “it is pretty well agreed among competent authorities that the best way to increase the batting would be to widen the foul line.” Not only would this amplify offense “in a perfectly legitimate manner,” but best of all, if the balance of power swung back the other way, then the lines’ newly obtuse angle could simply be made more acute, gobbling up balls as it closed like Pac-Man’s mouth.
Half a century passed before pitching overreached batting to such an extent. But 50 years after the dead ball died, batting average bottomed out, and the cult of the foul line had its closest brush with the bigs.
In 1963, the strike zone was expanded from the space “between the batter’s armpits and the top of his knees” to the space “between the top of the batter’s shoulders and his knees.” How do you hit pitches at the top of your shoulders? Mostly, you don’t. Offense sank in ’63 and kept plummeting until the Year of the Pitcher, 1968, when batting average reached an all-time low of .237.
Early that season, summoned by the malaise, the long-dormant idea of expanding the foul lines stirred from its slumber. An April article listed several action-promoting measures that were making the rounds. One of “the more far-out proposals” was “widen the foul lines to 120 degrees from the home plate instead of the present 90 degrees.” (That much widening would have been far out, and not just in the ’60s slang sense.)
But the big breakthrough came in a January 1969 issue of Sports Illustrated, which contained a letter from a mechanical and industrial engineering PhD student named J. Temple Black. With appropriately mechanical precision, Black broke down where the hits had gone, in terms that still sum up the state of play today:
In baseball, the area into which the ball is hit determines the percentage or probability of a hit being scored. This area is determined not by the pitcher but by the foul lines (90° apart). Today’s fielders, however, are also bigger, faster, stronger and smarter than their predecessors, and they are equipped with bigger and better gloves. Therefore, they cover more of the hitting area than ever before. The net result is that, while the total area into which the ball can be hit has remained about the same, there is less area into which a batter can hit safely. Wee Willie Keeler, for instance, would have a tough time “hitting ’em where they ain’t.” About the only place today’s fielders ain’t is over the fence. So quite naturally (and perhaps without really realizing why), the batter has been gunning for the fences with ever increasing regularity.
Black suggested enlarging the angle between the foul lines from 90 degrees to 96 degrees, thus increasing the size of fair territory by around 7 percent and returning to the batter “some hope of getting a hit.” All of which would have remained in the realm of the theoretical, had the letter not been seen by one person with the power to implement the plan: baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
In 1969, the league lowered the pitching mound and shrank the strike zone. Offense rebounded, but not enough for MLB to pronounce its work done. So in February 1970, Kuhn announced several rule changes—all designed to aid offense or speed up the pace of play—that would be tested in exhibition games or in the minor leagues. Certain spring training games would use a livelier ball, and one game would use a ball with yellow-stitched seams. One minor league would try automatic intentional walks, while another would continue a 1969 experiment with “‘wild card’ pinch hitters,” which would come to be called the DH (another concept that can be traced to the 1880s). But there was one more initiative, which was “the result of a fan letter to Sports Illustrated, with modifications”: widened foul lines. “There is no question but that the wider foul line will increase hitting,” Kuhn declared, trumpeting that the idea had the committee’s unanimous approval. “I will not be unhappy if there is more hitting.”
The “modifications” were significant. Unlike the Wright-Murnane plan, the Kuhn version left the lines alone until they reached first and third base, beyond which each line would flare out by 3 degrees. According to the commissioner’s office, this more modest difference would shift the fair-foul boundary 12 feet at the fence in a park with a 320-foot distance down the line, which would add 2,771 square feet of fair territory, an increase of 2.8 percent. “Outfielders may have to guard the foul lines in such a way as to leave a wider gap for balls to go through in the power alleys,” Kuhn explained. “And if they don’t open the alleys, there will be more space to hit safely down the lines.” Many of the syndicated accounts of this change were accompanied by an AP wirephoto in which Kuhn brandished a diagram labeled “FOUL LINE RELOCATION” that showed shaded-in slivers of newly fair outfield.
Other papers published their own charts to convey the foreign concept:
Other papers published their own charts to convey the foreign concept:
The testing ground for this new vision for baseball was to be a single field in Florida, in the rookie-level Gulf Coast League, where the lines would be widened during the 60-game season that July and August. The president of the GCL was instructed to assign a “special representative” to track how many batted balls fell for hits in the new area, which would inform a report presented to the league’s rules committee in October.
The ballpark in question was McKechnie Field at the Pirate City complex, which had opened the preceding season. It was home to the GCL Pirates, Reds, and Expos that summer, and it continued to be used during Florida Instructional League action after the minor league regular season. Former baseball executive Murray Cook, who went on to serve as general manager of the Yankees, Expos, and Reds in the ’80s, was the Pirates’ assistant farm director in 1970, so he spent a lot of time at McKechnie and remembers the tests that were conducted in both the GCL and the FIL. “We were kind of the guinea pigs,” he says.
Widened foul lines were one of a few innovations Cook recalls being put into practice, along with walkie-talkies stationed behind the mound for pitchers to get pitch calls from the dugout (a precursor of PitchCom) and a double first base to cut down on collisions (a precursor to the bigger bases installed in MLB last season, the wider runner’s lane enacted this year, and the double bases being used or tested in college softball and baseball).
If anything, the flared foul lines were the least noticeable of the bunch. “It was pretty minimal,” Cook says. “You couldn’t really tell.” According to Cook, the players didn’t mind, if they even noticed. The foul lines, he says, “were where they were. The umpires reacted accordingly. Ball was inside the line, it was fair, outside the line, it was foul. It wasn’t very discernible.”
It didn’t make much of an impression on future MLB MVP Dave Parker, who’d been drafted out of high school that June and led those GCL Pirates with a .314 batting average. The Cobra recalls “setting Rookie League on fire soon as I got acclimated to the next-level pitching,” but as to whether he remembers the atypical foul lines, well: “Can’t say that I do. … I was too concerned with learning the pitchers to be focused on league stuff.”
We don’t have home and road splits for that league, but the wider lines probably didn’t have a huge effect: Both the teams based in Bradenton and those in Sarasota collectively batted .243. (There’s that number again!) On the plus side, it didn’t cause any problems. “We thought that had some merit,” Cook concludes.
MLB’s rules committee disagreed. At the Winter Meetings in December 1970, the committee decided to suspend all of that season’s minor league experiments and nixed a proposal for a 20-second pitch clock. “I was never privy to the consultations by the commissioner’s office, but they rejected everything,” Cook says. “They didn’t want to mess with it at all.”
None of the contemporary coverage cites a specific reason for the rejection of what had been Kuhn’s pet project. An AP report noted that future Hall of Famer Joe Torre, who’s now a special assistant to the commissioner, sat in on the committee meeting as a player representative. But 54 years later, Torre says he has no recollection of the foul-line rule. Perhaps the league simply lost its appetite for further changes after scoring in 1970 climbed further from its ’68 lows.
In the next two seasons, scoring sank again, which led to the DH’s introduction to the AL in 1973. It was yet another new rule that reinforced offense, while the configuration of the foul lines stayed the same. “It was an interesting experiment for us that were involved in it,” Cook says—but nothing more than that.
J. Temple Black, the author of that influential letter to SI, died in 2019. He was a professor emeritus, a family man, and a lover and maker of music, poetry, textbooks, and tennis courts … but not of a new MLB rule.
Just as each low tide exposes the same stretch of seashore, each major ebb in batting average reveals a glistening, seemingly fresh solution: widening the foul lines. Yet time after time, other measures moved the needle enough that the problem was considered addressed, and everyone forgot about futzing with foul lines. Virtually every alteration tested in the ’60s and ’70s has since been adopted, but the foul lines have stubbornly stayed put. Yet the idea has been passed down, often unwittingly, from Harry Wright and Tim Murnane, to Norris O’Neill and John Heisman, to J. Temple Black and Bowie Kuhn, to Brendan Pulsford and Ben Lindbergh. Things have been quiet lately on the foul-line front—aside from a physics professor’s proposal of a 10-degree adjustment in 2011—but what would a low-average era be without another attempt?
There’s a fundamental tension at the heart of any effort to modernize an antique game. In 2015, The Hardball Times author Steve Treder contradicted the idea that all aspects of the sport are cyclical and that trends in offense and defense will revert to the norm if left alone. “Indeed,” he wrote, “the historical record indicates that reversal of long-scale dynamics occurs only through imposition (whether intentionally or not) of significantly new conditions.” Yet as Malcolm McLean observed in Collier’s in 1913, “Every innovation in base ball has been bitterly fought until adopted.”
Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive VP of baseball operations, declined to comment on whether the league has discussed the idea recently, or whether he thinks it would work. But before you cry foul, let’s review the possible benefits:
It’s simple and easy.
One of the virtues of the foul-line fix, as stated in 1888, was that it would “bring about more batting without affecting the pitching and fielding departments of the game too seriously.” Kuhn struck the same tone in 1970, saying, “It opens possibilities for increased hitting without changing anything fundamental to the game.”
That’s still true. Compared with other potential solutions I’ve endorsed (and still support)—moving the mound back, for instance, or further restricting the number of pitchers on the active roster—moving the foul lines is low risk and fairly low effort. Players wouldn’t have to alter their mechanics, teams wouldn’t have to overhaul their player development practices or roster construction, and fans wouldn’t have to learn any new rules. You could re-chalk the lines tomorrow, say “Play ball,” and immediately reap the rewards. Consider this: The correlation between the area of a field’s fair territory (according to ballpark chronicler Andrew Clem) and the degree to which it enhances hits (according to Statcast) is .48. Remove Fenway Park, an outlier whose high wall in left leads to lots of hits despite its small field, and the correlation rises to .62. Shocking, I know: The larger the target, the easier it is to hit.
It doesn’t impose any arbitrary, unsightly restrictions.
“If MLB wants to go all in on batting average, then they need to address how hitters produce batted balls and how defenses catch them,” wrote Baseball Prospectus’s Russell Carleton this month. Last year’s infield-shift restriction was one swing at the latter, but it didn’t do enough. More meddling may be needed, and it may be more onerous than simply banning infielders from touching grass or crossing second base.
MLB could ban players’ pocket positioning cards, which might help undo the defensive gains of recent seasons, but players could still memorize where to stand or be directed from the dugout. To really slow down defenses, literal lines would have to be drawn. Dating back to the 19th century, various sources—most famously infielder Bob Unglaub in 1907—have proposed that outfielders be boxed in: either enclosed in a circle or prevented from crossing certain arcs before the pitch is thrown or contact is made. MLB tested such a system in the Complex League not long ago, drawing circles on the grass that players had to stand inside. It’s also experimented in the minors with the so-called pie slice rule, in which lines on the infield denote a no-standing zone in the vicinity of second.
Philosophically and aesthetically, that seems suboptimal. Simply enlarging the field is an elegant alternative, one that would force outfielders to spread out and open up gaps without scrawling additional lines on the surface or preventing players from moving freely.
It could incentivize contact and promote player variety.
Baseball has a biodiversity problem: The three true outcomes and the players who produce them reign supreme. Increased uniformity in player evaluation, development, and skill sets may make sense, but it’s not necessarily spectator friendly. In another article, Carleton concluded that to convince clubs to take fliers on the types of players that don’t fit the modern mold, “There will need to be some nudge event that tips the scales back.” Moving the lines could be just the nudge that’s needed. In theory, increasing the payoff of batted balls that aren’t crushed could encourage a more contact-oriented plate approach. And embiggening the outfield—while potentially increasing the number of balls in play—would place added emphasis on defense, putting a premium on fleet fielders who, on offense, might be less equipped to swing for the fences (and also swing and miss). It’s a virtuous circle of contact cultivation.
Foul balls are boring.
“Fouls are the true scourge of televised baseball, just absolute momentum killers,” Sam Miller wrote last month. They aren’t aesthetically pleasing. They lead to longer delays between pitches. They rarely resolve at-bats. Almost 40 percent of them don’t even affect the count! Worse, there are more of them than ever. As a percentage of pitches and a percentage of swings, fouls have never been more frequent. Relative to 2010, this season is on pace to produce more than 10,000 extra foul balls.
Flaring the foul lines could help. Not only would every ball that landed in newly fair territory mean one less foul, but it would usually mean one more double or triple—precisely the two types of hits that fans say they like the most, and precisely the two types of hits that have grown the most scarce. (The past five seasons have featured the five lowest rates ever of triples per game, and this year’s rate of doubles per game would be the lowest in a full season since 1992.)
In other words, widening the lines would convert some of baseball’s most boring occurrences into some of its best.
To be, um, fair, let’s acknowledge the idea’s drawbacks:
Traditionalists might be mad.
Although Cook found the 3-degree expansion “quite unobtrusive,” he concedes that the 1970 test was inherently low profile. “What do people care about what’s going on in the Rookie League?” he says. “If it was done in Triple-A, it might be a bit of a different matter.” Let alone the majors! But even in the bigs, he believes, the backlash “wouldn’t be a big, big thing.”
Maybe. In 1970, The New York Times said the concept of widening the lines was simultaneously “radically new and least disturbing to tradition.” Radical because “the geometry of a baseball field has been essentially unchanged for 125 years,” but “traditional because it does not tamper with the established proportions of three strikes, four balls and basepath distances.”
It’s not as if the amount or ratio of fair and foul territory is fixed; every MLB park possesses a uniquely configured field. Still, 93 degrees is not 90, and crooked isn’t straight, so some people would probably complain.
Some certainly did in 1970. More than one critic bridled on the grounds that bending the lines would desecrate the sacred works of Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright (which they didn’t actually create) or that no one else had ever entertained such heretical, dangerous ideas (which, as we’ve amply demonstrated, wasn’t true either). The legendary Dick Young called it a “stunt” and decried Kuhn’s assertion that this wasn’t a fundamental amendment. Another newspaper legend, Shirley Povich, called the plan a “product of ninnies” and warned that disrupting the “sanctity of the playing field as a 90-degree quadrant” would constitute “a defilement of the eternal” that would make a “tragic shamble” of the stats and produce a sport that “won’t be baseball.” (Is that all?) A third winner of the BBWAA’s Career Excellence Award, Harold Kaese—writing in The Boston Globe, where Murnane’s 1892 piece appeared—envisioned a future where the fields had no foul lines, the outfield fences had holes, and defenders wore 10-pound lead shoes.
Povich fretted about asterisks and inconsistencies with the era in which Babe Ruth generated records, as if every other rule and condition had stayed the same since Ruth’s day. He also scoffed about “synthetic base hits,” like another columnist who bemoaned “more cheap base hits of every kind” and concluded, “Bradenton is right where this idea belongs. … It’s strictly bush league.”
Yes, some hits just inside the redrawn lines would look strange, just as slow rollers through huge holes did during the reign of the infield shift. And sure, moving the goalposts foul lines might seem like a concession to weakness—an unearned batter bailout. But couldn’t we say the same thing about any other measure designed to throttle pitchers or hamstring defenders, including last year’s rules to restrict where fielders can stand, limit pitchers to two pickoff attempts, or make the bases bigger? “Most any innovation of this character would seem strange at first,” Heisman wrote in 1909. But in principle, giving hitters a break on balls close to the traditional lines “would be no more singular than was the introduction of the foul strike rule in its day, nor the cutting down of the number of balls on which a batsman would be permitted to take his base from five to four.”
In some parks, widened lines might not fit.
One 1908 item noted that widened lines would strike some managers as revolutionary—“especially those managers whose bleacher fences already merge with the extremity of the foul lines.” Yeah, you’ve got me there. As Kuhn acknowledged in 1970, there’s no space to spare down the lines in Fenway and Wrigley, and some other outfield corners are almost as cramped. Foul territory has waned over time—as have fair territory and fence distance, slightly—so some fields would get squeezed; there wouldn’t be enough room for even Phil Cuzzi to call a ball foul. So yes, a little light construction work could be required, and some seats might have to be sacrificed. That’s OK: If you can build a ballpark, surely you can claw back a bit of real estate from the stands.
It would also make more home runs.
Yes, more balls would fall fair in front of the wall. But unless the baseball itself were further deadened or outfield fences were raised, more balls would also fly fair over the wall. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, especially now that the ball is less incorrigible than it was late last decade and the home run rate is down. But it does distract (and detract) from the “This would increase contact!” message.
It would probably be a partial solution.
Weeks after Wright’s proposal circulated in September 1888, one writer objected on the grounds that it didn’t address the root of the problem: “The only way to increase the batting, if this must be done, is to handicap the pitcher in some manner, either by regulating his attitude and delivery, or by moving him back.”
That’s not the only way, but it would be the maximally effective one. Contact can increase only so much when pitchers are inherently unhittable. (As Young put it in 1970, “You can spread the lines out to 180°, so that all the ground in front of home plate is fair and all in back of it is foul, and the guy who misses a pitch is still going to miss it.”) Cook is similarly skeptical that hitters can be swayed from their power-first mindset: “Something like that would be of benefit if you would increase contact,” he says, but “you’re not gonna increase contact as long as you’re thinking like they’re thinking today.”
Another 1888 naysayer noted, “It is difficult to see how this is to accomplish the desired result when it is considered that comparatively few balls are hit along the present foul lines.” Comparatively few, yes—but the league is on track to total about 125,000 balls in play this season. Given volume like that, marginal differences add up, and we can quantify how much they might amount to.
Public Statcast data doesn’t include “spray angle,” or the horizontal trajectory of batted balls. It does include landing locations eyeballed by stringers … but not for fouls that weren’t caught. That means we can’t simply look up how many balls landed in the strips of field in question. We also can’t perfectly anticipate how teams would align their overstretched defenders.
However, we can math our way to an estimate—or, at least, Matan K. can. I asked Matan, an analyst whose work appears on Medium and in the newsletter Down on the Farm, whether he could calculate the approximate impact on batting average and run scoring per additional degree of outfield fair territory. Extrapolating from the data we do have on fair balls down the lines, Matan determined that roughly 1,100 batted balls would enter the affected areas per season. Batting average on balls down the lines tends to be high because fielders tend to be far away. Accounting for that, and for the fact that not all of those hits would be “extras”—if those newly fair batted balls had been foul, some of the players who produced them would have gone on to get hits anyway later in the at-bat—Matan estimated a marginal gain of 550 hits. In a season of approximately 160,000 at-bats, that’s a difference of about 3.4 points of batting average. Applying the average run values of the (mostly extra-base) hits you’d expect to get in those regions yields a leaguewide boost of .122 runs per game, per team.
That’s for a 1-degree difference. With a 3-degree difference, we’re talking 10-plus points of batting average and almost .4 runs per game, enough to boost batting average to .253 and scoring to slightly less than 4.8 runs. Those are significant gains. If you told MLB that it could bring back close to the level of offense from 2019, but with the current, well-behaved ball, a less extreme home run rate, and a slightly lower strikeout rate, and all it had to do was widen the foul lines in the outfield almost imperceptibly ... well, Manfred might jump at that deal.
There are plenty of levers to pull in the eternal effort to fix baseball: the ball, the strike zone, field distances, and so on. There are almost too many options to settle on just one. But as Heisman said in 1909, “Something must be done.” And I don’t think the answer is Povich’s 1970 prescription: “Get some of those indolents who have no time for more batting practice back into those cages, before and after the game, and get their minds on hitting instead of their other affairs.”
At the very least, there’s little downside to giving Wright’s evergreen suggestion a more modern audition. One could make the case that an idea considered and discarded this many times should be permanently mothballed: It’s baseball’s Harold Stassen, a perennial candidate that’s run its race repeatedly and never garnered enough votes. But look at it this way: There must be some merit to a solution that’s been independently proposed in at least eight different decades, from the year of Vincent Van Gogh’s ear injury to the year of Donald Trump’s. Baseball has marked the time in between—and 136 years later, fans still want to see more bingles, whether they call them that or not.
Thanks to Matan K., Dave Jordan, Richard Hershberger, Emma Baccellieri, and Jason Bernard for research assistance.
