Many-team ballgame

Baseball, lacking both the continuous clock and territorial premise typical of many team sports, seems amenable to many-team play. And former MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti, in a thoughtful essay on the game, even noted the motifs of three- and four-fold structure which pervade the game -- a pattern perhaps marred by mere duality of competitors in each typical game. So why not make it truly 'anyone's ballgame', and introduce three-team and/or four-team play?

The basic structure of the game would stay: each team fields - one- irreversibly substitutable lineup of 9 players, who jointly try to score as many runs as possible in 9 innings (or less), at which point lead ties are played out in 1-inning sudden death installments. However, innings would now be split into thirds or fourths, rather than halves; each team would pitch and bat exactly once (i.e. for 3 outs) in each inning. Rosters could be expanded to allow for the extra pitching and catching demands of many-team play.

In three-way play, visiting team A would bat first, against visiting team B, in innings 1-4 (and 10-13, &.); visiting team B would bat first, against home team C, in innings 5-9; home team C would bat last in each inning. Thus, one visiting team gets the advantage of pitching to home team C only four times (versus five), but pays for that advantage by having only three outs of pitching rest (versus nine) between innings 4 and 5. Purist fans of today's game will point out that long delays between pitching stints actually hamper pitchers, but I'd counter that longer average pitcher idleness then just becomes another strategic factor for players and managers to adapt to.

Wildcard, shmildcard...game-speedup, shmame-shmeedup -- just think of the exciting matchups and scorecard pencil sales opportunities here, folks!...