Tyler Duffey had a pretty quiet inning last month in Gwinnett County, Ga. Called upon to relieve, Duffey struck out the first two hitters he faced, got a hard ground ball that sneaked through the hole at short for a single and ended the inning on a tapper to the first baseman. "About as smooth an inning as you could ask for from a pitcher," Duffey said. "But I gave up a run."
Yes, Duffey was pitching the 14th inning of a Rochester 7-6 victory over the Stripers, and it was being played under the new rules being used at all levels of the minors: Each inning beyond nine begins with a runner standing on second base; in Duffey's case, Gwinnett shortstop Sean Kazmar Jr., who made the final out of the 13th, sprinted home to score on the only hit of the inning.
"Doesn't seem fair," said Duffey, the Twins righthander who is currently back at Class AAA. "Doesn't seem like baseball."
That's a common complaint as minor league baseball implements the experimental rules, designed to address what some consider a scourge and others view as a blessing: extra innings.
Ballparks empty and viewers tune out when games drag into the night. Baseball's great quality is that there is no clock on the game — but that doesn't always feel like a benefit when the Twins and Indians play 5 hours, 13 minutes to decide a 2-1 game, as they did in San Juan, Puerto Rico, last month. "I know fans get tired. It's funny, to us on the field, the game is actually more exciting when it can end at any moment," Duffey said. "But you can tell fans don't always feel it. Or just don't want to watch a game that long."
Broadcast partners can grow antsy, too, knowing that unlike football or basketball, their audience shrinks, not expands, when a game goes longer than expected. "For us in the booth, extra innings are a lot of fun. Things get a little zany, really informal," said Jessica Mendoza, an ESPN analyst on "Sunday Night Baseball" who was on the air for nearly five hours last Sunday because of a couple of rain delays and a 14-inning game between the Cubs and Cardinals. "But I know that the programming [department] would prefer nine-inning games."
Even Paul Molitor, whose team played the Cardinals the next night, felt his attention wane. "I stayed with it for a while," Molitor said. "What time did it end, anyway?"
It's an issue that other sports have tackled in years past, some of them by altering the playing style of their games. Until 1996, college football leagues traditionally declared a tie rather than play overtime; when fan discontent grew too big to ignore, the sport implemented a sudden-death rule that turns a game of field possession into showdown of short drives.