THE BEST OFFENCE IS A GREAT DEFENCE
Sporting cultures tend to privilege offence over defence. We prefer sport when it is attacking, scoring and making something happen. In football, strikers command higher salaries than defenders and while you might hear the crowd at Liverpool chanting, “attack, attack, attack,” you won’t hear the reverse. In the US, televised highlights of basketball will always favour a mediocre slam-dunk over a great rebound. And Twenty20 cricket is just the most recent reformatting of a game that has tried to shift the emphasis to scoring. The North American national hockey league, for example, introduced a slew of new rules last season to try and raise the number of goals scored in ice hockey.
But baseball is a game whose structural balance between offence and defence privileges the latter. As the cliché goes, “Good pitching will beat good hitting.” It is a problem that major league baseball (MLB) has wrestled with for over a century. In the 1920s, the arrival of Babe Ruth and his high-risk, big-swing style of batting shifted the balance to offence. It stayed there until the 1960s, when an enlarged strike zone and a generation of brilliant pitchers closed the game down. MLB responded by lowering the pitcher’s mound to tip the balance back to the hitters. In the 1990s, in the aftermath of the disastrous baseball strike of 1994, owners and officials went into overdrive in an attempt to raise the number of home runs: balls were wound tighter, tax-funded stadiums were made smaller, bats were made stronger and a widespread culture of steroid use developed.
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