Innovation should be celebrated!

... then again, here are 10 failed experiments

This piece, in slightly different form, was published by The National Pastime Museum website/museum approximately eight years ago. There have, of course, been many innovations in the game since 2016. But most of them have been successful, by my lights anyway.

As a baseball fan, I crave innovation. And if the innovation that actually gains a real foothold in the sport? Makes it more entertaining? Even better.

Baseball, at least on the field, has existed in approximately its current form since ... oh, since about 1920?

Or if you like, pick 1947. Or 1958. Pick any year (and remember, Banana Ball is not baseball).

Which is fine! One of the appealing things about baseball is that if you hopped in a time machine and returned to the 1932 World Series, everything would make perfect sense (except for the lily-white players and all the cigar smoke in the stands). But there is a certain ... sameness in baseball, which is partly because baseball people are wildly conservative but mostly because all the easy, effective innovations were figured out a long time ago by men like John McGraw and Connie Mack.

Which is why it’s so thrilling when something new happens, and it actually sticks. Remember when Tony La Russa started batting his pitcher eighth and everybody said he was crazy? Well, he might have been crazy but now a bunch of National League managers do it. (ed.—Actually, nobody does it. When did you WRITE this, anyway?)

Most things don’t stick, but those are some pretty interesting stories, too. What follows aren’t the 10 most important failed experiments in major league history, but rather the 10 that I most felt like writing about. I’m sure I missed a few good ones, and I’d love to hear about your favorites in the comments.

Shorts!
Everybody remembers when the Chicago White Sox wore shorts in the 1970s, but that was just one of Bill Veeck’s promotional gimmicks rather than a sincere experiment, as the Sox wore the pants in only three games.

But in the 1950s, a few minor-league teams wore shorts and it wasn’t just a gimmick. Most notably, the Pacific Coast League’s Hollywood Stars wore them, if irregularly, for five whole seasons, 1950 through ’54. At least initially, Stars manager Fred Haney was a big fan. "It stands to reason that players should be faster wearing them, and that half step going down to first alone wins or loses many a game," Haney told the Los Angeles Times. "These outfits weigh only a third as much as the old monkey suits and when both are soaked in perspiration the difference is greater yet."

The Stars reportedly drew big crowds when they wore short pants in road games, although we might assume the novelty quickly wore off (and of course there wasn’t actually a “half step” advantage; maybe a twelfth of a step?).

While the Stars are the most famous pre-White Sox shorts-wearing club, they apparently were not the first. According to at least one source, the Texas League’s Houston Buffaloes wore shorts in select games—to improve attendance, mostly—in 1949 and ’50. And around this same period, the Miami Beach Flamingos, Bisbee-Douglas Copper Kings, and Phoenix Stars all wore shorts, at least, at least briefly.

But all that was more than 60 years ago. Since those Stars, I can find just one other minor-league team that wore shorts, as the Texas League’s Austin Braves apparently wore them once in 1966.

So what happened? It’s mostly about tradition. Many thousands of softball players have proved you can play hard and get dirty while wearing shorts, but there’s no doubt some notion that men just don’t look dignified enough in shorts. And that prejudice is so strong that when the White Sox donned 1976-style uniforms in a 2015 turn-back-the-clock game, players refused to wear the shorts. Even in batting practice.

Which was when I realized the union had become too powerful.

The College of Coaches
By 1960, the Chicago Cubs had long been one of the weak sisters of the National League. Owner Phil Wrigley decided to try a bunch of different things. One of them—using a shiny new IBM computer to tabulate data on the Cubs’ opponents—was way ahead of its time. But another was sui generis, never to be repeated.

In 1961, Wrigley created the infamous College of Coaches, a group of (approximately) eight men who would rotate between the majors and the minors, ideally teaching everyone in the organization the same approved principles. In ’61, four different coaches officially served as “head coach” during nine different stretches, although El Tappe did hold that job for 78 games later in the season.

The rotating system lasted for a couple of months in 1962, at which point Charlie Metro took over as head coach for the rest of the season. Metro was fired, and Bob Kennedy had the job in ’63 and ’64.  In the middle of the ’65 season, Kennedy was replaced by Lou Klein, a longtime coach. Throughout this period, the “college” still existed, with the non-head coaches shifting back and forth between the majors and minors.

When the Cubs hired Leo Durocher after the ’65 season, he was real clear about things: “I’m the manager. I’m not a head coach. I’m in the manager.”

In the five years of the College, the Cubs finished seventh, ninth, seventh, eighth, and eighth in the 10-team National League, never closer than 17 games from first place.

In Ron Santo’s memoir, he wrote, “Even today, when mention is made of the College of Coaches, it brings out the laughter and disrespect that was immediately associated with the Cubs teams I played on in the early 1960s.”

Real grass indoors
When the Houston Colt .45s became the Houston Astros in 1965, and moved into the Astrodome, nobody seems to have worried much about the playing surface. Of course it would be grass, just like every other playing surface ever.

How do you grow real grass indoors? Easy! Transparent roof panels, plenty of Texas sunshine, and—voila! Photosynthesis.

Except once they started playing games, the fielders immediately began complaining about the glare coming off those roof panels.

How do you eliminate the glare? Simple! Paint the panels white.

Except with the panels painted, there goes your photosynthesis and there goes your grass, and so most of the ’65 season was played on dirt and dead grass. Painted green.

In 1966, the Astros covered the infield with a new product called ChemGrass, soon renamed AstroTurf. But the outfield remained painted dirt until after the Astrodome hosted the ’66 All-Star Game. Finally, in late July the outfield was converted, too.

(There are football/soccer stadiums where natural grass grows outdoors, then is wheeled inside for games. Baseball has not, as far as I know, tried this.)

Charlie Finley’s pinch-runners
You’re probably well-familiar with Herbie “Hurricane” Washington, famous for getting into 92 games with the 1974 Oakland A’s ... solely as a pinch-runner. But what nearly everyone forgets is that Washington was just one of four players utilized almost exclusively by the A’s as pinch-runners. In 1973, they used Allan Lewis, “The Panamanian Express.” In 1974, Washington. And in 1975, Washington and Don Hopkins and Matt “The Scat” Alexander. Washington got released by the A’s in early May, but Hopkins and Alexander both spent the rest of the season on the active roster.

Did all those pinch-runners hurt the A’s? Well, they won the World Series in both 1973 and ’74, and in ’75 they led the American League with 98 wins (before falling to the Red Sox in the playoffs).  But in 1976 the A’s did it again, this time with Alexander and Larry Lintz, and in ’76 the A’s finished the season just two-and-a-half games behind the first-place Kansas City Royals. While A’s owner Charlie Finley’s beloved orange baseballs remain an amusing sidebar, Finley’s infatuation with pinch-runners might have cost his club their sixth straight division title. And no team since has employed pinch-runners with anything like Oakland’s abandon.

GWRBI
It’s always been exceptionally difficult to create a new “official” statistic; that is, a statistic that appears in baseball’s official record books. It’s probably even more difficult to kill an official statistic after it’s been introduced.

And then there’s the Game-winning RBI (GWRBI). Introduced in 1980, the GWRBI was supposed to accomplish an admirable goal: Credit players for their “clutch” hitting. In practice, though? A player was credited with a GWRBI when they drove in the run that put his team ahead for the last time in a game. Which meant that if you led off the game with a home run and your team eventually won 13-0, you got credit for a GWRBI. Or 13-12, assuming your team never actually gave up the lead.

Which was (and is) pretty ridiculous. Granted, the rules for getting credited with a save or a win can seem pretty ridiculous, too. But not as ridiculous. So the GWRBI did something that’s almost never done: it died after the 1988 season, leaving Keith Hernandez as the all-time leader with 129. Which somehow still hasn’t gotten him into the Hall of Fame.

Collusion
In this era of $30 million salaries and $250 million contracts, it might be hard to believe that it wasn’t that long ago when a million dollars actually seemed like a lot of money, and when the owners really, really didn’t like spending it.

Just after the 1985 World Series, Commissioner of Baseball Peter Ueberroth began a campaign to reign in the usual spending on free agents. And somehow it worked. That winter, not a single team lost a free agent unless the team wantedto lose him. Superstars Carlton Fisk and Kirk Gibson didn’t receive meaningful offers. The next winter it happened again, with stars Jack Morris, Tim Raines, Andre Dawson, Ron Guidry, and others essentially shut out. Dawson, desperate to get away from the Expos and their artificial turf, did sign with the Cubs after announcing that he would sign a one-year contract for anything.

Clearly, the owners were colluding and would continue to collude for one more off-season. Ultimately, the players’ union filed a series of grievances—since 1977, collusion among the teams was forbidden—and ultimately the owners settled the affair by paying $280 million to the affected players.

And the collusion cases would have long-lasting effects. They created an extra dimension of enmity that might well have contributed to the disastrous strike in 1994 and ’95, and the owners’ need for extra cash might have encouraged both rounds (1993 and 1998) of expansion in that decade.

Carlton Fisk, LF
Late in 1985, Chicago White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn fired general manager and universally respected baseball man Roland Hemond, and replaced him with ex-player and current White Sox broadcaster Ken “Hawk” Harrelson.

Harrelson quickly hired a new hitting coach and a new co-pitching coach—a first, as far as I know—and fired all his minor-league managers and replaced them ex-major league players. But the most shocking change came when Harrelson announced that 38-year-old catcher Carlton Fisk would become, for basically the first time in his life, 38-year-old left fielder Carlton Fisk.

Harrelson said he was doing it to clear a spot for a young catcher named Joel Skinner. Fisk wasn’t happy, but reportedly did his best.

Well, through the 9^th of May, Fisk batted .210 with only two home runs, Skinner batted .157 with no homers, and White Sox pitchers struggled.

On the 10^th, Fisk reassumed his role as the White Sox’ regular catcher—a role he filled until he was 44 years old—and a couple of months later Harrelson traded Skinner to the Yankees.

That was probably Harrelson’s least productive experiment, but it was hardly his biggest mistake. Even before he traded Skinner, Harrelson fired manager Tony La Russa. And you know how that one turned out.

Kenny Williams, 3B
What is it about the White Sox?

In 1987, rookie Kenny Williams put together a pretty good season for the ChiSox. He batted .281/.314/.422, stole 21 bases, and played well in center field. That was a great hitting season around the majors, and Williams’ numbers were actually below the league average. Still, he was just 23 and his season seemed a fine foundation.

But after the season, the White Sox signed free agent Dave Gallagher and traded for Dan Pasqua, both of them outfielders. With Ivan Calderon in right field and Harold Baines DH’ing, one of the outfielders would have to move.

Somehow, the White Sox elected to mess around with Williams, the youngest of them all. On Opening Day in 1988, Williams was at third base, a position he’d never played professionally. The results were disastrous. After a game in Cleveland on the 18^th of May, Williams was batting .143 and had made 14 errors in 32 games. On the 19^th, manager Jim Fregosi finally, mercifully shifted Williams back to the outfield. But after just a few more games, Williams and his terrible hitting stats were sent back to the minors. While Williams would get back to the majors, his career would never recover. Traded to the Tigers after the ’88 season, he lasted just three more seasons in the majors and batted just .201 over that span.

On the plus side, shortly after his playing career ended, Williams joined the White Sox front office. In 2000, he took over as general manager, and in 2005 the Sox won their first World Championship since 1917.

Tony La Russa’s three-inning starters
For roughly 120 years, the evolution of starting-pitcher workloads followed a fairly straight path. In the beginning, teams would essentially use one pitcher: all game, every game. Which of course took a terrible toll on the pitchers, few of whom lasted for more than a few years. So then it was two starting pitchers, then three, and (by the early 20^th century) finally four. Finally, in the late 1970s, nearly every team was deploying a five-man pitching rotation. Which is where we’ve been ever since.

Except, that is, for a few days in 1993 when future Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa tried something completely different.  Just after the All-Star break, La Russa’s Oakland Athletics lost three straight against the Yankees in New York. Worse, the A’s were outscored 32-14. So La Russa, known then (and now) as one of the more cerebral men in uniform, scrapped his five-man rotation and went instead with a nine-man “rotation,” backed by a four-man bullpen. It was a rotation in name only, as each of the nine men were assigned to pitch in every third game, with each ideally throwing between 40 and 60 pitches.

How long did La Russa’s revolutionary experiment last? Five games in which the nine “rotation” pitchers gave up 23 runs in 35 innings. At which point La Russa gave up on his scheme. Which he never really seemed all that excited about anyway, since he never used the supposedly assigned trio of pitchers, in order, in one of those five games.

The Baseball Network (1994-1995)
Speaking of MLB’s blunders, has anyone ever lamented the demise of The Baseball Network, the short-lived television venture between Major League Baseball, ABC, and NBC?

From 1990 through ’93, CBS was MLB’s national broadcast partner and lost hundreds of millions of dollars. In the wake of that fiasco, MLB created its own network with the idea of producing and marketing national broadcasts.

And it was an utter disaster.

Granted, from this distance it’s difficult to understand why it was such a disaster, as ratings for the national slate of broadcasts—which were actually regionally oriented broadcasts, with the local network affiliates allowed to choose its game, based on local interest—were quite a bit better than they’d been with CBS in 1993.

But if you were in New York and The Baseball Network was showing the Yankees, you simply could not see the Mets anywhere, because of exclusivity rules. What’s more, there wasn’t any national coverage at all until after the 1994 All-Star Game; thanks to the strike in August, there were only six weeks of national coverage.

With the strike settled in ’95, the network resumed its coverage after the All-Star Game and this time it lasted all season. But still nobody liked it, especially in October when postseason coverage was “regionalized.” And so The Baseball Network was summarily dissolved after only two seasons, with ABC and NBC both publicly declaring they wouldn’t be getting into the baseball business again for a long, long time (and 20 years later, they still hadn’t).

It probably wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened. But when both Tom Verducci and Bob Costas describe something as an abomination, you have to wonder if a bunch of guys wearing suits made a big mistake.