Rule Changes
There are many
If you turned on any baseball over the last six weeks, you’ve heard that Major League Baseball made some rules changes. Going into 2023, there’s three that are gathering all the attention. But since the delayed start to the 2020 season, there’s been several game-changing updates.
I love almost all of the changes, and I don’t hate the other ones, just not as moved by them. Overall, they do a great job of tidying up the sport with some under-the-hood modifications for more speed and more action. The rule changes fall into two categories: those that make the game better for fans, and those that either save or make the owners money. I’m not sure how many new fans these changes will bring, but they vastly improve the quality of life for fans and stadium employees.
The Pitch Clock: This is the big one. Starting this season, pitchers have 15 seconds to deliver a pitch or get charged with a violation and an automatic ball. If a hitter isn’t in the box and ready to go with 8 seconds left, it’s a free strike to the pitcher. If runners are on base, it goes to 20 seconds. This is my favorite rule, and it’s been in beta testing in the minors and development leagues for a few years now. It’s not just the dead time saved, which is fantastic and like hitting the “skip cutscene” button in a video game to get to the action quicker, but it’s also the rhythm. The steady creep of recent years into games well over three hours and at-bats that lasted five-plus minutes (I’m looking at you, David Ortiz), turned games, especially the latter innings, into a mess of step-offs, batters calling for time, pitching changes, batting glove adjustments, in-game commercials, and sometimes… a swing and a line drive.
Now we get to watch baseball players play baseball. It felt recently like between pitches, and especially between batters, we’d get walkup songs that went on way too long while the camera panned between players that were busy reading scouting reports on their wristband and to fans scrolling through their phones if they weren’t caught yawning.
Games are already drastically quicker. The A’s and Angels scored a combined 14 runs on Saturday the 1st (well, the Angels scored 13 of those) and finished 9 full innings in 2:24. Remember the Yankees-Red Sox games in the mid-2000s that ended 5-2 but still lasted 3 hours and 36 minutes? This is better.
To be fair, 30 minutes of those games involved people beating up A-Rod. And I’m good with that. The Shift Limits: Again, another rule that had to be instituted because of analytics, all infielders must be on the infield dirt or closer when a pitch is delivered, with two players on each side of second base. The outfielders can do whatever they want. This is a good start. It doesn’t bring back the single up the middle (the shortstop is still standing there, just on the proper side of the bag now). But it does bring the athleticism back to the infield. The middle infielders have to have range again, and no more absurdity like when “third baseman” Manny Machado recorded flyouts in deep right field. It will be fun to see the wizards do their thing again while also bringing back the seeing-eye single.
Bigger Bases: I’ll be honest, I don’t see the big deal here. All the bags are 4” bigger. Although that immediately had an impact on stolen bases and attempts (70 steals this year compared to 33 last year in the first 50 games), I’m sure the analytics departments and coaching staffs will find some way to counter the increase in thefts. Maybe not this year, but with robo-umps coming, maybe teams start looking for catchers that can gun down runners instead of a premium on pitch framers.
Okay I guess 4” is bigger than I’ve been led to believe Universal DH: This one was put in place in 2022 after a trial run in the 2020 season. There is no longer anywhere to watch a pitcher hit. I’m okay with that now, even though I used to be against the DH. Pitchers got more and more specialized, and also pitched fewer innings, meaning they were getting at most two plate appearances to fumble through. My biggest problem with the DH is that baseball is a game with offense and defense. If you’re hitting, you should also be on the field. I would add a rule that no player can DH more than 50% of their games played, so it becomes more of a role to get a player a rest from the field and not a career extender to someone who can’t catch a fly ball. If you want to keep David Ortiz on your roster for his offensive production, you’re gonna have to put up with 60 games of him scooping short-hopped throws at first. The only exception would be a medical one, like with Bryce Harper coming back from elbow surgery. If there were no DH we’d never have last postseason’s heroics from him.
Why deny the fans this entertainment? Extra innings ghost runner: I feel like this rule is the one baseball people hate the most. And in principle, I don’t like it either. Sure the runs are unearned, but if a team is going to win a game, they should win based on merit and not because a bloop hit scored a runner from second that wasn’t there the first nine innings. But then, I’ve watched many baseball games that went to extra innings that, as a rule, I felt obligated to finish watching even as it dragged into the 14th inning and past midnight. They end much quicker now, and I’m now at peace with that. If you don’t like the ghost runner, just score more runs in regulation.
This lets the seagulls have the stadium earlier and get the trash picked up faster Three batter rule: This is the rule that any relief pitcher has to face a minimum of three batters, unless the inning ends or he gets hurt before that happens. I don’t know if this rule sticks around, now that the pitch clock is having a bigger impact on pace of play. This rule was the original attempt at speeding up the game, when the 8th inning of a Cardinals game became a 45-minute episode of watching Tony LaRussa repeatedly walk to the mound for a new pitcher after each hitter. I think now these specialist relievers have to work quicker, there’s no real need for the rule. If you need a lefty-lefty matchup, go for it. Plus I’d love to get paid to be a LOOGY with these new rules. Just warmup, strikeout a batter on three pitches in 60 seconds and then hit the showers. Thanks for playing.
He had to get his 10,000 steps in and the dugout to the mound round trip is only like… 600? Expanded playoffs: This is the change I hate the most. I was fine with the original Wild Card. The three division winners advanced and then the best of the rest. It was a good way to reward those teams whose record was better than other division winners, but just happened to share a division with that year’s super team. Now there’s three wild card teams, which means 12 of 30 teams a year are playing in the playoffs. So an 87-win team like the Phillies last year, who would’ve finished 14 games behind of the top wild card team, gets in and almost wins the World Series. I know this is all about money, so the genie will never go back in the bottle. But I liked the original wild card system, you were rewarding a great team. Look at the last six seasons of #1 wild card teams, compared to the team that finished third:
So you can see that the top wild card is almost always an elite team just trapped in a tough division. But when you go to the sixth best team in each league, you’re looking at a team that barely played over .500 usually. A 90 win team is good, an 86-win team should be hungry to get better next season, not rewarded with a chance to get hot and knock off a truly elite team. Also, this is my way to keep the Cardinals out of the playoffs more often.
So there you have it, 7 new rule changes from the beginning of this decade and how they impact the sport. I’m glad baseball is acknowledging the problems and being proactive in addressing them now. It was getting stale even though the players are now as good as they’ve ever been, and doing it naturally ;-)
Now I’ve gotta turn the Phillies game on and listen to John Kruk try to tell stories in these new smaller windows.
