The 2023 Rule Changes Are Here, and They’re All Good
After more than a century of a deistic laissez-faire attitude toward the sport, Major League Baseball made a remarkable announcement on Friday: Next year, for the first time, baseball will have a clock. The introduction of a pitch clock at the highest level of the game is merely one gourd in a cornucopia of rule changes approved late last week by the league’s competition committee, but it could revolutionize the sport. You can find the full list here, but rather than delve into the minutiae, I want to give a brief précis of the most important highlights and deliver a remarkable conclusion.
Bigger Bases
- The bases will increase in size from 15 inches square to 18 inches square.
Banning the Shift
- All four infielders must have both feet entirely on the infield dirt when the pitcher is on the rubber.
- Two infielders must be entirely on either side of second base.
- Failure to comply will result in an automatic ball.
Pitch Clock
- Once the ball is ready for play, the pitcher must begin his motion within 15 seconds with the bases empty, and 20 seconds if there’s a runner on.
- The batter must be in the box “alert to the pitcher” within eight seconds of the timer starting.
- If the pitcher is late, he’s charged with an automatic ball. If the batter is late, he’s charged with an automatic strike.
- The pitcher may “disengage” from the rubber (i.e. step off or throw to the bases) no more than twice per plate appearance. If the batter advances during the plate appearance, the disengagement counter is reset. If the pitcher steps off or throws to the bases a third time, the runner automatically advances if the pickoff attempt is unsuccessful.
- In order to speed up play generally, there will be a 30-second limit on both mound visits and the time between batters.
These changes weren’t unanimous — the four players on the competition committee voted not to ban the shift or implement a pitch clock — but they’re extremely good. Seriously. After years of expanding the playoffs, contracting minor league teams, trying to implement an international draft, and other such (at best) controversial proposals, MLB gets an A for the 2023 rule changes. Take it home, show it to your parents, have them stick it on the fridge.
Okay, I have two minor objections. The first is that in addition to increasing the size of the bases, I would’ve liked to see a slow-pitch softball-style double first base implemented in order to reduce collisions and encourage batter-runners to run in foul territory. The second is that among the time-saving measures coming for 2023, batter walk-up music will be limited to 10 seconds. That’s a blow for anyone who grew up dreaming of entering to Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” but even so, there’s no shortage of songs that suit a 10-second excerpt: Tame Impala’s “Elephant,” John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” and various motifs from Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” just to name three.
We can work with this. So let’s go through the three big-ticket items, in increasing order of importance.
18-Inch Bases
This change is going to be imperceptible to fans, but represents a few potential positives without much of a downside. Anyone who knows their way around a pizza menu will tell you that a small increase in perimeter represents a giant increase in surface area — about a 45% increase, by my math. That won’t eliminate dangerous tie-ups between fielders and runners, but every additional square inch helps. Spikings, trippings, twisted ankles — these are some of baseball’s most painful and least necessary injuries, and bigger bases give players just that much more real estate to fight over.
Increasing the size of the bases also shortens the distance between bases by 4.5 inches, and gives runners a larger target to aim at as they try to avoid tags. Will this result in a perceptible increase in basestealing? Probably not — we all remember bang-bang plays that get decided by margins of less than five inches, but they don’t happen every night. A Baseball America study of data from the Triple-A trial of 18-inch bases revealed no perceptible effect on the offensive environment. Still, it’s hard to see a competitive downside to a measure that ought to reduce the risk of injury.
The Shift
The debate over whether the shift is good for baseball has been going on so long I remember writing a blog post in 2009 about how Ryan Howard should learn to drag bunt so opponents couldn’t overload the right side of the field against him. (Almost as contentious? The exact circumstances under which the shift works best.) This has been a long time coming.
In a perfect world, MLB wouldn’t have had to ban the shift. Players would have changed their approach and started flicking the ball the other way. Failing that, teams would recognize the competitive advantage of spray hitting and scouted and developed hitters who can use the whole field. Joe Sheehan put it quite well on Twitter last week: “Shift restrictions don’t reward contact, they reward dead-pull hitting.”
But that much-prophesied generation of Zoomer Tony Gwynns never showed up, and after 10 or 15 years of hand-wringing, the list of most-shifted players in baseball just looks like a list of the best hitters in baseball. No, seriously. The top five hitters in plate appearances against the shift this season — Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, Freddie Freeman, José Ramírez, and Matt Olson — have all signed nine-figure contracts in the past 12 months. Cedric Mullins and Rafael Devers are in the top 10, and Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani are in the top 15.
Rather than work around the shift, the top left-handed hitters in baseball have for the most part decided that the best option is to swing like hell and live with the occasional 115 mph lineout to a second baseman standing in short right field. Immediately after decrying the new shift rule, Sheehan diagnosed the real problem: It’s too hard to hit the ball. Even if most hitters were able to dink and dunk the ball to a specific place like Carlos Alcaraz — which they aren’t — contact is too precious a commodity to waste on anything but full-effort swings.
And the shift is only getting better at eating up batted balls:
MLB could goose the league-wide BABIP by moving the mound back, or transitioning to a smooth baseball, or gently electrocuting any pitcher who throws harder than 94 mph. But failing that, it’s time to concede defeat. We’ve waited more than 10 years, and the spray hitting/drag bunting revolution just hasn’t come, and probably never will. Treating the symptoms isn’t as good as curing the disease, but it’s better than not treating the symptoms at all.
The new rules don’t preclude the shift so much as they handcuff it. The aforementioned BA study showed that the new defensive positioning rules had little effect, if any, on the aggregate league-wide BABIP, but it’s fair to say that restricting the shift will influence which batted balls turn into hits. Teams can still overload one side of the infield in practice — does anyone doubt Francisco Lindor can get from just left of second base to a position in short right center in time to cut off a groundball? And against the likes of Ohtani, Joey Gallo, and Oneil Cruz, infielders will line up right at the edge of the grass, if only to reduce the possibility of having a line drive knock their teeth out via the cerebellum. Defenders can still run out in creative formations, but like poets bound by the structure of a villanelle, they’ll have to get even more creative than they are now in order to work within the restrictions.
Now, if MLB wanted to get really wacky, it would increase the minor latitude teams already have in where the infield boundary gets placed. What if all four infielders had to stand on the dirt, but the dirt could be the shape of a teardrop, or a fried egg, or the island of New Guinea? What if the Astros could festoon the Minute Maid Park outfield with bunkers, like a golf course, in order to facilitate the shift and the four-man outfield?
Too much?
The Pitch Clock
MLB’s new timing restrictions could end up being the most significant rule changes of the past 50 years. If properly enforced, they will at the very least alleviate the biggest problem with modern baseball as a spectator sport. At best, they’ll alleviate the baseball’s three or four biggest problems as a spectator sport. Follow along and stop me when I come to a predicted effect of this rule change that doesn’t sound like it would make the game noticeably better overnight.
For the past few years, MLB has tended to address its pace of play problem in terms of length of game. Even the MLB.com article referenced above addressed the most common question: How much will it shorten games? The answer, according to minor league data, is about 26 minutes, which is a huge number.
We’ve all seen well-paced three-hour movies, and riveting four-and-a-half-hour baseball games. It’d be nice to have a World Series game end before the kids have to go to bed, and for the beat writers to make it to the bar before last call, but… here, I’ll quote Bill James in the New Historical Baseball Abstract:
“The problem with long baseball games isn’t the time they take. The problem is that the wasted time inside baseball games dissipates tension, and thus makes the games less interesting, less exciting, and less fun to watch.”
That essay was published in 2001, when the average major league game was nine minutes shorter than it is now. James argued for prohibitions on pickoff throws similar to the rule MLB is set to adopt, but specifically objected to the idea of a pitch clock.
Here’s what’s happened since:
In 2010, the average time between pitches was an even 21 seconds. By 2021, it was 23.7 seconds, which has come down a bit this year thanks to PitchCom but is still almost 10% higher than it was a decade ago. The FanGraphs glossary page on the Pace stat, written in 2015, comes with a handy chart: 21.5 seconds is average, 23.5 seconds is slow. The entire league, by those standards, is positively Trachselite in its tempo.
Relievers, whose share of the game increases each season, topped out at 24.7 seconds between pitches last year. Giovanny Gallegos, may God have mercy on his soul, is the slowest among pitchers with 10 or more innings, at a pace of 31 seconds in all situations. It’s just not necessary.
Those few seconds per pitch bleed the energy out of the game a few drops at a time, and oh by the way add up to playoff games glopping on past four hours and ending after midnight on the East Coast. They’re the difference between a game that drags like the hymns at an Episcopalian funeral and a game that bounces along like “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
And speaking of bouncing along: The minor league data shows a predictable effect on basestealing and basestealing efficiency. Implementing a pitch clock and disengagement restrictions (or The Runaway Bride Rule; everyone gets one cheap joke and this is mine) has increased the number of minor league stolen base attempts by 27%, according to MLB, and increased the success rate from 68% to 77%. Far be it from me to police anyone’s aesthetic preferences, but if you don’t want more stolen bases — particularly in this historical nadir of the art — you’re just wrong.
Now here’s the really exciting part. Last year, Craig Goldstein and Patrick Dubuque of Baseball Prospectus proposed a so-called restrictor plate for the modern pitcher; a series of minor reforms that would require teams to build rosters that valued bulk innings. To make a random set of 13 guys who spent a long weekend at Driveline and now throw 98 with Brad Lidge’s slider, for one inning at a time, a less tenable pitching staff.
Part of the calculus was a pitch clock; the grip-it-and-rip-it reliever needs 25 seconds to rest between pitches or else he’ll get tired before even one inning is over. Forcing pitchers to work more quickly would, the logic goes, force them to conserve their effort. That means less velocity, less oomph on breaking pitches, and a more hittable baseball. The potential downstream effects of this — fewer strikeouts, more balls in play, a greater premium on top-end starting pitchers — are so exciting I don’t want to get my hopes up.
This is what functioning sports leagues do: When the competitive incentives of the rules make the game less entertaining, they change the rules to correct the problem. That’s how the NBA got a shot clock, why FIFA implemented the backpass rule, and the NHL took out the redline. Similar changes for baseball were long overdue; if these rules are half as impactful as they look on paper, 2023 will be a watershed season.
Michael is a writer at FanGraphs. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and various ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Follow him on Twitter, if you must, @MichaelBaumann.
I fully support gentle electrocutions for pitches over 94 mph. We could also use pitch data to shock pitchers whose sliders are too good, or whose change-ups are too slow relative their fastballs.
gentle or genital?
…why not both?
Genital electrocutions would encourage faster pitches in some guys.
Joe Sheehan is right. It’s still the pitchers. Banning the shift is a sop to bitter old men tired of shaking their fists at those damn kids, and won’t do a thing about helping hitters make better contact.
The most valuable batted balls are pulled fly balls, even this year with the deadened ball. Until that changes, the shift is irrelevant because hitters are going to try to produce the most valuable batted balls and the infielders positions are irrelevant to those.
But banning the shift is still dumb and they are doing it exactly for the terrible reason you gave. I say that as a bitter old man tired of shaking his fist at those damn kids.
You need to pretend to be a bitter old Rip Van Winkle who slept for over a 100 years and watched back when baseball had a Rover not this new fangled short stop position.
Four outfielders, one of them short and playing on the pull side, is how the game was meant to be played and how it was played back in great-great-great grandpa’s day.
And they didn’t put a rule in place to prevent evolution of the sport. This does.
Interesting! Like old softball games where we didn’t have nine player teams
It’s that they want to increase overall offense on balls in play (and not unfairly punish pull hitters), not anything to do with hitters’ contact approaches.
In fact, this is basically waving a white flag at trying to get hitters to change their approach. That’s a good thing, since as you said they’re better off just hitting the ball hard rather than trying to spray the ball more often than they naturally do. Although, I do wish more hitters would shorten their swings with two strikes.
It is not “unfair” to “punish” pull hitters.
Willie Keeler said “Hit ’em where they ain’t” over a hundred years ago. I don’t know why it took baseball so long to realize that “be where they hit ’em” was a good reply to that or why Manfred feels it should be illegal.
There is one part of the game that appears to be sacrosanct to the people running the game and that is the distance from the rubber to the plate. Joe Sheehan is right and this has been one of the sacred cows that I have attacked on several blogs for years. Velocity is the culprit and everybody knows it but nobody is willing to be the first to say that when the 13th pitcher on every team is averaging more than a K/inning there is a problem. I don’t like banning the shift but if it adds a few more singles to the game and brings the overall game batting average up from this year’s .243, without Max Scherzer’s 0-68 in 2021, then I will accept it.
Why do fans think they know more about hitting MLB pitching than MLB hitters?
As for bitter old men, perhaps that description fits Joe? Nah, he’s just grumpy.
Those of us who attend a lot of minor league games are overwhelmingly in favor of the pitch clock. And you are correct – it’s not just that the game takes less time but the fact that the game is faster paced. There will be six to nine months of player complaints about the pitch clock while fans who experience it never want to go back to a game without it.
I am one of those fans who had a half season ticket to the New Britain Rock Cats for more than 20 years and the pitch clock is everything it is claimed to be. The action flows and the pace is smooth.
I strongly disagree. I have attended minor league games in my area for decades. And when it arrived, I gave the clock a try. Many games. But eventually I gave up attending the minor league games because of the clock.
It is rush..rush..rush. The clock is in my face. All I think about is will my batter or pitcher perform their job within the time limit. Sorry, but my baseball fan friends have the same opinion. I wonder what will happen when an extra ball or strike is called late in a close game due to a failure of the 3 participates, batter, pitcher and catcher, doing their dance within the time limit. Will the fans start objecting.
Without a clock, there is time to think about the situation and to talk to friends without missing the action. Without the clock, baseball is more civilized.
I hope the players quietly ignore the rules and the umpires don’t enforce the clock.
Maybe when the game actually was played at a naturally faster pace but not now. The clock works. I always find it amusing to look at the World Series of 1939. Game 1 was completed in 1:33 and Game 2 beat that time by 6 minutes and this was during the #%$^&^# World Series, not a Thursday game between the Pirates and the Reds. In truth I can’t even imagine what a game played in 1:27 might look like.
No TV commercials is what it looks like.
I agree that the pace of play within the game could be improved, but it’s a shame that MLB has to be so greedy as to continue with 2-3 minutes of commercials every half inning and pitching change.
Especially when it’s so easy to do a split-screen with an ad on one half and the batter on the other.
Maybe having a total of four ABs with runners in scoring position for the entire game had something to do with it. Complete games by both pitchers so no pitching changes. And no 2 minutes between innings for commercials.
The “faster pace” wasn’t because pitchers worked faster. It was because batters didn’t work for walks.
I think the dynamic is going to be different when the pitcher and hitter involved make $50 million dollars and real things are at stake, unlike a minor league game.
Enforcement and letigation is going to be an issue
Litigation?!
Again I think this is a lot of hand-wringing about nothing. Some players may complain about it, but nothing is changing; the horse has left the barn. A few will grumble for a week or so then everyone will settle in to the new, slightly faster and improved pace of play.
Yeah, MLBPA agreed to this when they agreed to structure the rules committee in a way that lets MLB unilaterally implement changes.
I was just at a Hudson Valley Renegades game a week or so back and was pleasantly pleased by the pace. I paid attention to the clock and how the pitcher/batters reacted. I’m not even sure they were paying attention to the clock. The pitcher simply knows the routine. Pace was greatly improved. I was originally against it; now fully in favor of it.
This is a little tangential, but in response to the article I looked at the leaderboard for hitters, split into Shift/No Shift. And I cannot get the numbers to look right. Giancarlo, for instance has 382 PA’s. When I split by shift he shows 78 without shifting and 128 with shifts. Where’s the rest? I have a feeling I’m missing something.
I’ve figured out the answer. The shift data appears to be on balls in play. https://library.fangraphs.com/the-beginners-guide-to-using-fangraphs-shift-data/
I would love to know how to see this easily. This was the first thing I wanted to do when I read this was happening. There’s something definitely wrong because when you’re looking at the splits, Juan Soto has something like a 50 to 60 wRC+ against all formations in 2022 despite owning a 143 wRC+ overall.
But if this is correct–and I’m pretty sure at some level it is not–it sure looks a whole lot like there are some guys who are going to shift into God mode the moment the shift is banned. Here are some selected names of guys with their wRC+ against all shifts listed first and then their overall wRC+ line from 2021 to 2022.
Anthony Rizzo: 46 wRC+ in 662 PAs vs 124 wRC+ in 1065 PAs
Kyle Schwarber: 69 wRC+ in 514 PAs vs 130 in 1048 PAs
Juan Soto: 75 in 609 PAs vs 154 in 1230 PAs
This appears to be true to a lesser extent for guys like Austin Meadows, Rowdy Tellez, and Joey Gallo. These numbers cannot be 100% accurate given the issues with adding things up, and I’m not sure that all of this shifting would be banned (it could be only the traditional shift?). But if these are even within orbit of being correct, some basic algebra here suggests it’s going to be absolutely nuts next year.
The shift numbers aren’t counting home runs.
Or any walks or strikeouts, I think. I’m not so sure this leaderboard split is all that useful, or at least isn’t as useful as it could be.
right, i had seen that. yeah they measure somethign very odd and probably useless.
I don’t think it will be that big of a difference, since teams can still play their opposite field middle infielder just to the side of second base, but I agree that we should see better numbers from pull hitters and especially lefties.
I don’t think that shift ban is going to have the desired effect of more balls in play. It feels like a common sense to draw an increase it shifts to an increase in strikeouts because of the rise of the pull swing but that’s conflating the concept of trading off strikeouts for slug on a pull swing, and the ground ball being waste product. If anything the incentive to go dead pull will grow because there’s less punishment of the mis-hit. I’d be shocked if there was an increase volume of hits tbh, and that’s even thinking about the up the middle ground ball suddenly going to the outfield more, and if MLB wants more balls in play I’d be looking at the strike zone vs where guys are standing in the infield.
Agreed 99%
There probably WILL be more hits, but I do agree that this only serves to increase the incentive for hitters to sell out dead-pull.
Um, that’s the point, to increase hits on pulled grounders in play and allow hitters to just naturally pull the ball. It was never about increasing contact in general.
This is (hopefully) just the first step. If things continue the same, I suspect either a lowered or pushed back mound will be next. Hopefully they give it a few years to see how it shakes out first, but I’m all in favor of reducing pitch speed (or perceived pitch speed).
Including electrocutions, if need be.
I dont think you will see much change is K’s. Hitters didnt change their approach with the shift so there is nothing to change.
Hitters didn’t change with the shift for a myriad of reasons. Taking 95+ the opposite way is hard, exit velocity goes down the further your spray angle gets from pull-side. What does happen though is the trade off of striking out will matter even less than it does now because some of your mishits won’t turn into outs as easily, but the goal is going to be for the extra base hit regardless, and with that change in incentives and payouts the attack angles might go even more vertical for pull hitters.
That’s true, but I still don’t get why nobody even tried bunting on every pitch until you get two strikes.
Completely disagree. I feel like people equate contact with all fields hitting, but contact hitters of the past were more just grounder/line drive hitters, but naturally you’re going to be pull heavy. Being a grounder/line drive hitter became obsolete with shifting, it is launch angle and trying to elevate everything that leads to high strikeout numbers
Yep – it disincentivized hitting hard line drives up the middle, in favor of hitting it *over* the shift.
No. It’s the velocity.
Launch angle and selling out for power is the response to the increasing difficulty batters have with tying to string together multiple hits. It’s not a moral failing, it’s a physics problem.
I mean, why would you think that? Hitting the ball in the air and selling out for power is a pretty obvious result of shifting. It’s also a result of analytics in general. Good contact and NOT trying to hit the ball a mile is actually a pretty effective counter to poorly commanded high velocity pitches, but when so many get sucked up by the shift, again, those type of hitters are few and far between. Guys with preternatural pitch recognition and contact skills can still make a living, but athletic left handers who make their living by making a lot of average contact on the ground, like a Kenny Lofton type, are virtually nonexistent.
I believe you’re confusing cause and effect. Shifting was the result of everybody pulling the ball so much, not vice versa.
Shifting is the result of lefties’ natural tendency to pull the ball, because RHP’s offspeed pitches break in on them…and when you naturally pull the ball, and have spent 15-20 years doing so as your “base” approach to the plate, it’s easier to adjust your launch angle and try to hit it out of the park than to entirely rework your swing and approach to slap it the other way.
Hence, incentivizing a TTO approach for hitters.
That’s NOT the desired effect in the first place! The desired effect is to let more pulled ground balls get through for hits and therefore stop punishing pull hitters for just doing what they’ve always done in just naturally hitting the ball hard.
You keep insisting that pull hitters are being “punished.” Are guys who can’t hit curveballs being punished when pitchers throw them curveballs?
No, because they don’t deserve to do well on those curveballs.
The difference is that natural pull hitters DO deserve to get hits on hard hit ground balls just as often as hitters who naturally tend to hit more to all fields. The former are (in general) just as good of hitters as the latter, but they unfairly don’t get as many hits anymore just because certain unorthodox defensive arrangements were developed that just happen to put their style of hitting at an unnatural disadvantage.
The pitch clock is probably good. The bigger bases is definitely good–anything that rewards baserunning is fantastic.
Banning the shift drives me bananas. It’s better than messing with the ball but it’s in the same vein because they have no idea what the unintended consequences will be. The best case scenario is that it doesn’t work at all and we’re in the same place we were before with left-handers lining out at 115 MPH just like before but to different fielders. The worst case scenario is that it is going to work exactly as intended, juicing left-handed offense like crazy, leading to all sorts of lunacy. It could unbalance the game and league, create loads uncompetitive games, suck the drama out of everything, and lead to the return of immobile left-handed mashers everywhere who (completely unshackled from the shift) can reap all the benefits of the TTO approach without worrying about the downsides. Or even more things I can’t think of. The list of possibilities is endless.
Philosophically, I also hate it because if you don’t like getting shifted you shouldn’t be be so predictable. Seriously. But from a practical point of view, this is the thing MLB does over and over again and then wonders why–when they get what they want–they’re not happy.
Maybe the Phillies are on to something.
All of the potential pitfalls you list seem like things that would anger your average fangraphs reader but please your average casual fan.
I think the joy would be pretty uneven. Even if we just take the most simplistic measure with the FG splits, the Yankees and Mariners have been pretty dreadful against the shift this year. I’d imagine that fans of those teams (assuming those dreadful guys against the shift return) are going to be a whole lot happier than their rivals who aren’t.
The real no-fun scenario would be for the Tigers, who have a team-wide wRC+ of 87 vs the shift and 80 for all PAs. This cannot possibly be a real thing–who does better against the shift than not?–but can you imagine a scenario where the entire league starts scoring an extra run or two a game except the Tigers?
Teams can still shift right? Just not as much?
Seems like the truth will lie between the “with shift” and “without shift” numbers.
And if some of the game’s big pulling stars put up even bigger numbers, I suspect MLB sees that as a feature and not a bug.
Too many HRs is the problem, pure and simple. Because they’re easier to hit everybody tries to hit them.
More distant fences would have more of an effect, but MLB is in love with the HR. It’s made the sport boring, and this isn’t going to change that. It’s a boring game, and I say that as a 60-plus-year fan.
And the too-many-HR problem is a direct result of LHH BABIP cratering over the last few years, even as RHH BABIP has stayed steady.
Because of the shift, LHH are actively disincentivized from putting the ball in play, unless it’s going over an OF’s head…which leads to really ugly baseball.
Sorry, but baseball does not have casual fans.
Don’t we have 100 years of pre-shift MLB history? Left handed hitters didn’t dominate that,did they? I’d think it will just go back to the way it was..which is it good or bad?
There IS something aesthetically please about the line drive up the middle being a hit because it’s a good AB & deserves to be rewarded, but, I don’t see this changing things that much. Maybe BABIP will go up a little, but, it’s not going to go crazy.
I also think it’s a lot easier said then done to say “change your approach” when every pitcher is throwing 94 MPH+ with wicked offspeed stuff.
That said, I do wish some left handed hitter would have gone all in on just bunting/hitting soft grounders to 3B..just to see if it could have been done & at what point would teams have stopped shifting them? All of a sudden Anthony Rizzo hits .320 with less HR’s or something. Is it impossible or they just don’t want to try it because it’s not “manly”..kind of like NBA players not shooting underhand free throws?
It’s because home runs get paid, just like 100+ mph pitches get paid.
That’s the entire reason, in my opinion.
Did you ever face a pitcher? Pulling the ball requires meeting the ball in front of the plate.
If batters can’t change their approach, the logical solution is to get different batters — ones who know how to hit to all fields.
I’ve seen this a lot in all kinds of industries — “solutions” that deepen the problem.
It’s easier to bulk up and change your swing path than to rework the approach you’ve taken your entire life…especially when there’s no difference in outcome between a hard drive up the middle or in the gap and striking out.
This is about re-incentivizing balls in play for lefty hitters.
If that were a workable solution, it would’ve already happened by now. There just aren’t enough such replacement batters who can overall outperform the better lefty pull hitters even with their disadvantage with the shift.
Man, the fact that “three true outcomes” and “times through the order” have the same initialism really screwed me up for a minute there. We have to change one of those.
3TO and TTO. I’m available to consult on other projects as well.
This does work, but generally the third time through the order is where the problems start, so the 3 might still end up being confusing.
Maybe 3TO and XTO, respectively?
Incorporate HBP as the fourth true outcome.
The worst case is it doesn’t change much but makes baseball more aesthetically pleasing by having defenses look like they are supposed to, but is also something that as a fan you don’t really notice at all. But obviously it WILL at least also lead to increased good outcomes for lefty line drive hitters like Jose Ramirez and Kepler and younger Carlos Santana. Best case is it brings more athletic, high contact ground ball hitters back into the league.
The only hit that’s “coming back” is the line drive slightly over the head of the 2b.
Ground balls up the middle will still be outs.
It will be fun to see how long it takes traditionalists to complain that the shift rules weren’t good enough.
Eh – it definitely increases the gaps on the right side of the infield.
Hard grounders that would “naturally” be between 2B and 1B got swallowed up by shifted 2Bs in short right.
I’m interested to see if we get some “Left-Center/Right-Center/Short Right” OF alignments next year.
I can see the Rays already planning their 4 1/2 man infield and 2 1/2 man outfield.
???? The increase in the number of balls, mostly ground balls, that become singles without the third infielder on the right side of 2nd is going to be very significant. Studies have claimed that BABIP barely changes whether the shift is employed or not but that is comparing apples and oranges. The only thing that is being considered here is low launch angle balls hit between 1st and 2nd base. With a maximum of 2 defenders the area that can be covered shrinks dramatically and much more so when the 1st baseman is holding a runner. Pulling the “rover” in from short RF also limits his range. I will throw some numbers out that I have no idea whether they are even reasonable but let us assume that about 10 balls/game fit the criteria. In between 1st and 2nd and below an infielders upward reach. Is it that 10 or 20 or 30% of those balls that are presently outs become singles. Two more hits a game adds 25% to the batting average of the game and, of some importance, these are singles which puts men on base and increase action.
I meant .025, not 25%, added to the batting average.
Heh? Every game I watch there’s at least one play made by a second baseman playing shallow right field that would otherwise be a hit 70% of the time
I’ve mostly been of your view with regard to banning the shift. In addition further favoring lefty sluggers, it’s just a purer game when you have 7 fielders covering an enormous playing surface attempting to catch a small sphere and nothing but wits and athleticism to limit how they do so. (I know there are 9 fielders, but two of them have long been limited by rules in where they set up, and necessarily so.)
But in practice, we’ve seen that only certain defensive configurations are viable, and the shift has perhaps gone beyond “viable.” Michael’s counterargument, that there is no group of hitters coming along to revive the lost arts of drag bunting and hitting to the opposite field, seems right based on what we see on the field. If I were to quibble, I’d say we’re less than a decade into the rise of “almost always shift” defense, and if hitters’ habits are formed early, we might need to actually wait another 7-10 years to see the effects of different incentives on amateur development. But that’s pretty speculative.
So the question becomes: if hitters are too stubborn/too incentivized by home runs to change their approaches, is MLB justified in intervening? At this point, my answer is a weak “yes,” that it’s a good idea to promote hits (as opposed to just “balls in play,” since groundouts to short right are considerably less exciting than singles). Relatedly, MLB should seek to limit strikeouts by setting Draconian roster limits on pitchers so as to force longer outings and less velocity.
Sure, if it results in more injuries to more pitchers that’s not your problem, right?
It’s my intent, actually. The weak break, the strong survive. We’ll emerge with a healthier pitching ecosystem.
The game wasn’t lunacy back before teams began overshifting, so why would going back to that style of play make it any different?
Because the game has changed in many ways beyond just shifting.
Not in just the last 15 years, it hasn’t. We’re still going to have shifting more extreme than was used even as recently as the ’00s.
We may have more swing-and-miss sluggers than we used to, but those kinds of hitters always existed (at least since the dead ball era ended), and they don’t benefit that much from the shift being banned anyway when they keep trying to hit fly balls. The downsides for that approach are the same as they’ve always been: massive strikeouts and a lot of more weakly hit flyouts and pop-ups.
Line drive hitters (preferably with power) have always been and will always continue to be an overall superior type of hitter, shift or no shift, and the guys who sell out contact for launch angle induced power were never good line drive hitters in the first place.
“…they have no idea what the unintended consequences will be. “
Sure they do — they have the MiLB data they’ve been collecting, and I have to believe MLB is smart enough to know what to look at inside that data set to understand the consequences of the action they’re taking. You can tongue-in-cheek say “well MLB HQ is stupid,” but they’ve been looking at this situation for years now so they must know something about it.
I agree with your frustration at the surface level, that a team’s seven non-catcher fielders should be able to line up along the right field foul line if they so desire, but it is what it is right now.
I just don’t know that I buy that the data is going to be useful. Who makes it to the majors is selected on who makes it out of the minors, so it’s a different sample of players with different skill sets.
They also have several years of Statcast data to assess the impact of positioning on the value of balls in play.
I think the MLB wants more results for lefty mashers. I think for them that is a feature, not a bug.
I still think banning the shift is largely, to use a baseball term, eyewash. The pitching being too good is indeed the deeper issue, and the contact issues won’t be fixed until something is done to even the playing field between pitchers and hitters. However, the other changes I’m fully on board with and share in your enthusiasm for what kind of game they could lead to!
I’m really, really excited for the potential knock-on effects of the pitch clock!
I agree that it’s likely eyewash.. which to me is an argument against it.
What is the point of a rule change that doesn’t change anything? Why have a rule when having no rule likely has the same effect?
Lower mound, move it back, limit amount of pitchers on teams. Any of those 3 solutions would help hitters more than this solution. More reaction time from moving mound back, lowering mound would likely produce a better angle for the hitters, and limiting number of pitchers would require guys to throw more pitchers, likely at a slightly lower velocity/ increase injuries which would mean the quality of pitcher being used would be slightly worse on average, probably. I am unsure if the last solution is one worth pursuing, however.
I think the league’s goal should be for batters to hit the ball more often. Balls in play are the main source of action in a baseball game, and strikeouts take away that action. Limiting the shift will mean that more pulled grounders turn into base hits, but a marginally increased BABIP isn’t going to address a strikeout rate that is far too high for strikeouts to be fun to watch. As referenced in the piece, the shift means that batters already have every reason to try and make more contact, but they don’t and probably can’t with the current mound configuration. Lower the mound and/or move it back. Any other measures are not going to incentive batters to strike out less.
Totally agree, the only thing here that might reduce strikeouts is pitchers reaching fatigue more quickly due to the pitch clock. That might be okay, but it’s a rather indirect route to get there when we’re still living with a strike zone that is being called in a way that makes it larger than it has been through much of baseball history. This has been discussed numerous times here and on (rest in peace) THT.
Um, the strike zone used to much larger for much of the history of the game, from the armpits to the knees.
Rarely see a ball above the navel called a strike now.
Sure they are. The top of the strike zone is still the midpoint between the shoulders and the uniform pants.
Robot umps are going to help some with strikeouts, I think. And it will hopefully go along with a redefining or at least re-specifying the strike zone. And going forward, think how much easier it will be to change the strike zone when it’s just changing the code on the software and not training umps to entirely change everything they’ve done for 30 years.
I hope that this is just the first step and further changes will come if things stay the same.
We’re still several years away from the technology being perfected enough to be practical, and that’s only if MLB actually wants to make that change once it’s ready
Do people really find routine grounders more interesting than strikeouts?
I think so! Hearing the crack of the bat and seeing the players scramble into action is a positive aspect of the baseball watching experience, even on routine plays. Strikeouts are static and boring because they don’t involve any defenders or baserunners.
I won’t try to claim that 4-3 putouts are why baseball is great, but I think strikeouts (and walks) are the dullest possible outcomes of any at-bat and that their increased frequency in the modern game makes the sport less exciting.
Yes, because something can go wrong…which is the whole point of DIPS evaluation tools.
Maybe not routine grounders, but hard hit ground balls or ones so weakly hit that they also become tough plays, certainly.
Can we reduce strikeouts by making the ball 5-10% bigger? More difficult to throw hard, easier to make contact with, harder to hit over the fence.
Like men’s softballs??
I think deadening the ball somehow is a great idea in theory! I suspect there would be some unintended consequences, though, and I don’t think messing with the ball is an exact science. Lowering the mound seems more likely to have a predictable, linear effect on strikeouts.
Strikeouts aren’t that big of a problem. It’s not like we’re back in 1968.
Instead of banning the shift, widen the range of balls in play by allowing any ball that lands in fair territory beyond a certain point (say 50 feet from home plate) to be fair, even if it subsequently rolls foul or passes to the outside of the 1st/3rd base bag.
More ground to cover = tougher to shift. Period.
Cricket. You want cricket.
I’m of the mind that there is absolutely no substitute for widening or lengthening the field in some way, so I’m in favor of this. I would also like to see almost every stadium adopt a massive outfield on par with what we see in KC. I’m of the mind this is not only going to reward players who put the ball in play but also incentivize team to get more speedy types to cover extra ground.
This isn’t going to happen because I think this would require ripping out seats most places, since there are only a handful of stadiums that would already fit these standards (Coors and Kauffman are the only ones I can think of, and Fenway sort of kind of has this in a different way). But it would be a heck of a of fun.
Just institute conforming legislation for OF dimensions that grandfathers existing stadiums. New stadiums and “significant” renovations would have to expand the OF, and eventually we’d mostly get there.
In 50 years, it would be all fixed!
/s
The biggest problem with that idea is that when the Rockies eventually need to replace Coors Field, every other fair fly ball in their new stadium will be a home run.
Why? Conforming doesn’t have to mean identical. The standards could be a minimum larger sized outfield, and could even index with elevation if they so desired.
This is such a baseball nerd answer 😀 (I say lovingly! As a fellow baseball nerd)
I can hear Professor Frink…”well this stadium is 3,113 ft above sea level with an average wind speed in August of 3.2 MPH so of course their outfield size coefficient is…ABSOLUTE ZERO! Wait I, uh, forgot to carry the one…”
Um, no, conforming DOES mean identical. If you just meant to increase the minimum outfield requirements, then you need to actually say that, especially since we already have minimum outfield requirements for new stadiums (325 feet down the lines, 400 feet to dead center field) that have been on the books since 1959.
Baltimore chop!
I have a question about the disengagement rule. If the pitcher has already thrown over twice, could the runner just take off as soon as the pitcher gets on the rubber knowing the pitcher has to go home? Or is it after the pitcher comes set? If trying to steal resets the clock then maybe the runner takes a walking lead that never ends? If so, I’m not sure I love this rule from a competitive standpoint. A guy like Trea Turner is never going to get thrown out if he knows the pitcher is not throwing over.
It says the pitcher can throw over twice without consequence, but on the third throw, if there is no out, a base is granted. So no, taking off after two throws will still get you out.
Ok thanks for the clarification.
Yes, you cant just take off after 2 throws but the runner still gets a MASSIVE advantage because of the other rule change. The pitch clock. So not only will the runner know that the pitcher cannot try and pick him off again after 2 attempts but there is now also literal countdown on the pitcher throwing the next pitch.
I think this disengagement rule is absurd but I hope I’m wrong.
I think that you can throw over a third time, just if you don’t get the runner out he gets 2nd base for free. I assume that this is to prevent the obscene leads after 2 attempts that you are talking about.
Same concern / question. It seems like the defacto number of throw overs will be 1, because a pitcher will need to reserve 1 throw over to prevent a near automatic steal.
After the second disengagement, the pitcher may throw over again but he *must* get an out or else the baserunner automatically advances. So in theory, this should keep baserunners somewhat honest.
So, what happens if, after 2 “disengagements”, the pitcher throws over wildly, ball gets away, runner advances to 3B. Does the runner get to go home because the “disengagement” (God, I hate that term) didn’t result in an out?
Or what if the runner takes off for 2B, pitcher throws over to 1B, but, runner beats the 1B throw anyway? Does he then get 3B, too?
Baseball 2023, Catch the Fever!!
I don’t know this for sure, but logically it must be that the automatic advance is only granted on a play where the runner goes safely back to the original base. So if he advances on his own, either by error or by managing to steal on the pickoff throw, his reward is the outcome of the play.
The one ambiguous scenario that is hopefully addressed is what if the runner is picked off, gets caught in a rundown, and ends up safely back at the original base? I have to assume that because the pitcher was successful in picking him off (by forcing him to try to advance), that he’s not ex post facto penalized for his defense being unable to complete the play.
I have this exact same question
another potential scenario is the 1st and 3rd play where a runner stops in the middle hoping for a throw and the runner on third is able to make it home. Or maybe even a situation where the runners each draw throws but make it back to their original bases. does that mean they both advance?
Hmm, you could argue that since he successfully advanced, he gets no additional bases due to the disengagement count being reset at that point.
one thing I’d love this rule to encourage is for runners to start faking and dekeing in an effort to distract the pitcher and draw throws to the bases
Two questions: 1) Is the batter allowed to step out of the batters box once the pitcher is on the mound? I hope not because there’s really no reason for this aside from having something in his eye or something. 2) When can fielders start moving beyond the invisible barrier? Once the pitcher starts his windup? Once the ball is released? Once the ball is in play?
The hitter will only be able to call timeout once per pitch.
It says the infielders must be in alignment at “the time of the pitch.” Your guess as to the exact definition of that is as good as mine.
Sorry, the hitter only gets one timeout per plate appearance, not per pitch! My mistake.
Going to be awful for one of those games where the gnats and mosquitoes are swarming at home plate.
Deep Woods Off, my friend. Deep Woods Off
Forget bunkers in the outfield…what we really need are rivers:
https://www.sbnation.com/2022/7/13/23206817/finland-baseball-river-dive-video
My question with the anti-shift rule is: at what point is the rule “checked” during a pitch? Can a fielder move past 2B/in the OF while the pitch is being delivered? It seems like no, but I’m pretty sure that should be definitively answered before next season.
Also, this clause stood out to me (from the MLB article): Infielders may not switch sides. In other words, a team cannot reposition its best defender on the side of the infield the batter is more likely to hit the ball. What if the manager just moves the SS to be the 2B, and vice versa? Are we no longer allowing the “make my two relievers swap between P and the OF” “trick”?
Also, the IF dirt rule: does this preclude corner infielders from lining up inside the dirt on expected bunt attempts (think Anthony Rizzo — when you can see the 1B come into the picture from the CF camera, he’s clearly not lining up on the dirt).
The IF dirt rule only concerns the outfield boundary. A team can still play the 1B or 3B in close to field a bunt, and can still bring an OF in to play a 5-IF alignment. They just can’t play a 5-OF alignment
Seems to me the rule is there expressly to prohibit flipping the SS and the 2B.
It says nothing about moving guys to/from the OF, except as to the total count of players in the outfield.
Having to wait for the SS and 2B to switch sides every batter would add a huge amount of time to games that are already too long.
“make my two relievers swap between P and the OF trick”
…July 22nd, 1986, Mets vs Reds:
10th inning: Orosco goes from the mound to RF, Roger McDowell comes in to pitch
11th inning: Orosco goes back to the mound and Roger McDowell heads to RF
12th inning: McDowell and Mookie Wilson swap LF and RF
13th inning: McDowell back to the mound, Orosco to RF and Mookie Wilson to LF
This is already after the Mets resorted to using yesterday’s SP (Aguilera) to PH (and he drew a walk and was standing on third with one out in the 10th inning of a tie game.
Orosco and McDowell would get three combined PAs themselves (went 0-2 with a walk) and Orosco was one of the baserunners who scored on Howard Johnson’s tie-breaking HR in the 14th.
[edit] And the game involved a bench clearing brawl that delayed the game for >15 minutes and resulted in four ejected players. Darryl Strawberry was ejected earlier for arguing balls and strikes.
On August 16, 2017, Travis d’Arnaud had to be pulled from his normal catching duty to plug in for a late injury scratch in the infield. They decided to “hide” him by playing on each batter’s opposite-field side, and succeeded in only needing him to field one ball all game.
His positional line for the game read “3B-2B-3B-2B-3B-2B-3B-2B-3B-2B-3B-2B-3B-2B-3B-2B-3B-2B-3B”; Asdrubal Cabrera did the opposite of that. It seems like that’s exactly the sort of thing they want to disallow with this rule, but all it is is a bunch of position changes.
These anecdotes are why I come here. Love this.
Also, is the shift positioning reviewable?
I’m really not looking forward to an ‘offsides’ style review where the booth has to determine if the shortstop started his motion and has a quarter-inch of toe across an invisible line while the pitchers foot is still instantaneously in contact with the rubber.
Pretty soon they will draw a grid on the infield.
They can’t just swap infield positions like that anymore unless a substitution is being made.
I don’t know about the P/OF trick, as neither of them count as part of the “four infielders” covered by the new rules, but that trick already lost most of its merit with the three batter minimum rule
Interestingly, you are still allowed to bring in an outfielder for a 5-man infield.
I don’t hate these rules, but there are several that could have been softer in my opinion. I don’t see the point of restricting walk up music. It’s a way that baseball connects with younger fans and brings personality to the game and that’s a good thing. You also need time for fielders to adjust positioning and signs to be delivered to hitters or runners or for the catcher to do signs for the infielders. I just don’t think there currently is a lot of wasted time between hitters the way time is wasted during plate appearances.
I would also make the pickoff limit a little higher. I like a limit but 2 seems like too few. I’d give the pitcher 4. You could also allow the umpire to make a judgment call on what are obvious stall-pickoff attempts and after a warning then call the next one a balk.
Finally, like others, I don’t like banning the shift. I would be okay with a rule that said you had to stay more or less in the same alignment for each plate appearance; that would remove the mid-PA sprint of the third basemen over to short right field after there are 2 strikes, but if a team can do that within the confines of the pitch clock, then maybe that’s fine.
I think that’s right–the pitch clock should make that sprint much more entertaining, at the minimum. Could definitely see a guy getting gassed if they can’t end the inning quickly.
Per this article: time between batters averaged 54 seconds while time between pitches averaged 20.3 sconds with the bases empty or 28.4 with a runner on first. So something like 25-30 seconds extra is spent on the new batter. If you’re going to try to shave a few seconds per plate offering off of pitchers’ time, I think it makes more than enough sense to do it with the walk-up music, too. No “younger fan” is going to lose their connection with the sport over 3-5 seconds less of intro clips.
Btw, the best part of that article is that you could speed up games by over a minute in one swoop by skipping ‘God Bless America.’
I like the pitch clocks. Bases, I’m for player safety. Stolen bases part, I could see stolen base specialists being used more in the postseason. I’m not enthusiastic about guys that can’t play much in the regular season becoming much more valuable for the postseason. Banning the shifts…I don’t really care too much about this except it is going to take time to get used to what is an out or a hit off the bat. I do look forward to not hearing, “that would have been an out if they weren’t shifted” after 3-4 balls would have been hits if the team wasn’t shifting.
What numbers does someone like Judge put up if he’s doing this now? He also has like 15 sb.
I hate the shift ban. It’s the kind of rule the NFL implements: they ban all sorts of formations, force players line up in very specific spots, ban certain players from catching the ball or even being too far downfield during a play. It saps so much creativity and unpredictability out of the game. What is cool about baseball is that besides the pitcher and catcher, it doesn’t even have positions per se…it’s just 7 other guys that stand wherever they want, and have no specific rules that apply differently to any of them. Now suddenly they are codifying what an “infielder” is and forcing them into formations.
I think for most of baseball history, it was sort of implied/assumed that the other 7 players would generally stand in the same area for the entire game.
.
The official MLB rulebook is unsurprisingly an ambigious mess.
Paragraph 5.02(c), which defines fielding positions, explicitly states “Except the pitcher and the catcher, any fielder may station himself *anywhere in fair territory.*”
It’s not even a requirement, but only a “courtesy” for the lineup card to include fielding position of the players [4.03(c)]
However, that doesn’t stop the word “infielder” from appearing in the text 40+ times in the context of advancing runners, appeals, the infield fly rule, award considerations etc.
Luckily, there is a definition of terms, which specifies that “an INFIELDER is a fielder who occupies a position in the infield”. Very helpful. At least it differentiates from “an OUTFIELDER is a fielder who occupies a position in the outfield, which is the area of the playing field most distant from home base.” Great.
So what is the infield? Para 2.01 says “The infield shall be a 90-foot square”, along with some drawings in the appendix which specifies geometry and dimensions.
So really, the current rulebook does not prescribe defensive positions to anybody except for the pitcher and catcher, but only describes their location at the time of play. As you say, all that will have to be completely overhauled if these shift restricting rules have any prayer of working as intended.
I am looking forward to the chaos of poorly worded and implemented rules being constantly challenged by teams looking for an edge. New York is going to incredibly busy next season.
On the other hand, the rulebook is oddly specific when it comes to certain things… How often are fielding gloves inspected to not have a color set lighter than the Pantone 14-series?
Wait, does that mean that under the current rules that the second basemen who are now often stationed in short right field against lefties don’t technically qualify as someone who can activate the infield fly rule?!
Technically, the infield fly rule is one rule that has always applied differently to infielders and outfielders.
Many sports do not have positional requirements. Basketball, soccer, to name a couple. Baseball is not special. I don’t particularly like the shift ban, but to act like it’s this touchstone of what makes baseball baseball is disingenuous. Billy Crystal wasn’t waxing poetic about how beautiful it is that a third baseman can stand in right field during Ken Burns’ doc.
I’d laugh if a team does something like make the whole field dirt so their infielders could line up as deep as they want.
Can home teams extend the infield dirt further back?
I envision half-circle cutouts into the OF between 1/2 and 2/3. Maybe a fat circle around 2B itself.
They cannot.
I look forward to a couple years from now when there is a painted line on the field for the infield arc. And a line that divides the field in half at second base. So asethetically pleasing!
There are a lot of changes that will cascade from this that will make the traditionalists even more pissy. And the best part they will all be of their own doing.
https://img.mlbstatic.com/mlb-images/image/upload/mlb/atcjzj9j7wrgvsm8wnjq.pdf
per this document
Seems to say the size of the infield is not static.
In the current MLB rulebook, Appendix 1, Diagram 1, the outfield “Grass Line” is defined as an arc centered on the midpoint of the front of the pitching rubber, with a 95ft radius. So any attempt to alter these dimensions would be in violation, although I don’t know how diligently field dimensions are inspected and audited during a season.
See the link under “the minor latitude teams already have in where the infield boundary gets placed.”
± 1′
I definitely see some players making a big show of kicking the dirt around at the back of the infield the way they do in the batter’s box.
Remember when some stadiums didn’t have the entire infield covered in dirt and merely had sliding pits around the bases? I guess that’s now illegal.
I remain convinced that banning the shift won’t have a significant impact on the game unless the pie slice proposal is added.
As for the pitch clock, I wonder if it will cause even shorter starts for starting pitchers. Does anyone have the data for the minors pre- and post-clock enforcement?
Why would it cause that
Pitchers won’t have time to catch their breath between pitches
Because if pitchers are going 100% on every pitch, but have less time to recover, then they won’t be able to go 100% on every pitch for as long in the game.
I know that people will argue, “That’s the point, they shouldn’t go 100% on every pitch,” but I bet there will be a bunch of pitchers that will be too stubborn to take something off to counter the loss of recovery time.
I don’t fully understand all of the hand-wringing over the shift ban. Sure, it’s not ideal and won’t fix all of the existing problems, but it will improve the aesthetics of the game while increasing the amount of runners on base. I’m not sure what’s so exciting about watching a line drive to right field become a one-hop 4-3 groundout. I’m looking forward to those balls being hits again.
Shifts weren’t heavily used until the last decade or so, so at worst, we’re largely returning the game to how it was played in the not-so-distant past.
5 Infielders is a shift. Playing 1B or 3B in close to field a bunt is a shift. Double play depth is a shift. “No doubles” defense is a shift. Playing defenders on or off the bag to hold a baserunner (or not) is a shift. Defenders have been shifting since the dawn of time.
That’s a pedantic argument. 5 infielders rarely happens. The other examples you list are all within the rules still.
Sure, but your “I’m not sure what’s so exciting about watching a line drive to right field become a one-hop 4-3 groundout. I’m looking forward to those balls being hits again.” argument also equally applies to banning double play depth, no double defense, holding the runner, etc.
Why aren’t you saying, “I’m not sure what’s so exciting about making it harder to steal a base,” “I’m not sure what’s so exciting about making it easier to turn a double-play,” “I’m not sure what’s so exciting about turning a double down the line into an out,” etc.
Your argument really just is “the aesthetics of the game are better when they’re what they were ten or twenty years ago; any shifts older than that are grandfathered in.”
I see your point but I think there’s a difference between moving around the confines of your position and playing a different position entirely. A 1B holding on a runner is still playing 1B. A 2B in double play depth is still playing 2B. A 3B in right field isn’t playing 3B. But you’re correct, I believe the modern shift is aesthetically bad and uninteresting.
Yes, so technically it’s the overshift that’s being banned.
And flipping SS/2B. And playing a 4th OF at any spot.
Penalizing defensive innovation to solve the problem of pitcher velocity.
Will it “improve” the aesthetics… or return them to what makes you feel more comfortable?
Also… it’s only a matter of time until we need to paint a line dividing the field in half and/or paint a line that designates the infield/outfield boundary. Are those lines going to be aesthetically pleasing? Are reviews over whether someone left the infield or their side of the field too early going to be aesthetically pleasing?
Hitting line drives right at players has always and will always be a part of the game. I’m not sure why people get their panties in a bunch because that exact same thing happens when players stand where they’re not used to those players standing.
I find it odd that they passed two rules at the same time that have a good chance of cancelling each other out.
Pitch clock will help shorten games.
But also we’re trying to raise babip which means more hits, more PAs and pitches.
It’s not about time of game, it’s about pace of game.
Tell that to most of the people who whine to me about baseball being too long.
I think that MLB might be confusing these a bit. Right now, people who don’t like the pace or length of the game can just complain about the game being too long. But this will only solve one of the actual complaints–the pace of game vs time of game. I suspect there is an entirely different group of people who will be just as frustrated as before.
In favor of the shift ban and clock. W a fielder in shallow rt it’s too much over-the -line and less baseball. But will the pull hitters simply get more intentional walks. Will low velocity pitchers get a second life cause they may be better at painting the outside corner? Will limited range 3rd or 1st basemen like Justin Turner be more a defensive liability? Just curious I don’t know the numbers.
props for the over-the-line reference.
I like the pitch clock (though extended commercials are a culprit never addressed bc of $$$) and agree with the concerns being expressed regarding the shift. One area overlooked in the discussion so far is the elimination of throws to 1st base: This essentially offers a green light to the more aggressive base stealers without a commensurate defensive strategy. Coupled with 18″ bases, this is a major shift without properly gauging its impact before implementation.
Finally, there was no review of the ‘ghost runner’ or ‘home plate lane’ rules, both of which require serious reconsideration. My two cents…
What makes you say that? It was tested in the independent leagues and minor leagues before being proposed for implementation at the major league level.
Keep in mind, a third pickoff throw isn’t banned–you just have to actually pick the guy off. So if you’re envisioning runners getting 30-foot leads after the second pickoff throw, don’t.
MLB did actually shorten ad breaks in 2019, by only 5 seconds on local broadcasts (2:05 to 2:00), but by 25 seconds on national broadcasts (2:25 to 2:00).
Why can’t MLB make First base half flat (like home plate) and half regular? This way it will allow the First baseman to be able to tag by feeling for the bump, but allow runners to touch base without having to worry about twisting their ankles?
If they’re going to go that far, it’d be simpler to just use the double first base.
As long as they make one flat to the ground.
A half-flat base sounds like an excellent way to twist an ankle.
I hope these base changes don’t impact early slides where the runner has the base stolen, grinds to a dead stop four inches in front of the bag, looks up pleadingly, and gets tagged out on the nose.
Getting rid of the shift is a TERRIBLE idea. It’s only going to encourage more plodding, dead-pull hitters and that’s the least interesting player-type to watch in baseball. Seriously, if you really think having more space on the right side of the infield is going to make hitters like Gallo rethink their approach, I have a bridge you might be interested in.
It actively makes the game more boring too as it takes away from both action and strategy. I’d rather watch the defense move around the infield to set themselves up however they see fit. It’s interesting to watch in person, especially compared to each player shuffling around in the same spot between hitters.
Teams don’t apply the shift uniformly either. The Dodgers, Blue Jays and Astros have been using it more than 50% of the time per Savant compared to teams like the Rockies, Guardians, and Orioles, who use it less than 25% of the time.
It has just taken too much of the intrinsic action of baseball away. The Lords of Baseball recognized that scoring was dropping at the All-Star break in 2015 and juiced the ball. It has prevented scoring from disappearing completely but the TTO game of the past 7+ years is tedious to watch. Personally I don’t think anything short of moving the mound back, which might increase contact rates, is the best solution but the great ability of today’s pitchers has simply altered the balance too much and any change is welcome. The game needs more singles and fewer HR’s. A game wide .243 BA without pitchers hitting is too low and if the batting average rises and scoring takes a big jump then further adjustments can follow.
That’s not what this does though. It allows a very specific player type (pull-happy lefties who swing for the fences) to add a few more singles to their ledgers. Hitters like Gallo, Rizzo, Kepler, etc aren’t going to change their approach to start spraying the ball all over the field. They’re going to further double down on their limited approach at the plate because it now stands a better chance of bearing fruit.
It does nothing to address the real issue causing low batting averages: the increase in pitcher velocity, which has led to an increase in strikeouts.
I’ll also never understand the argument that the shift has “taken too much of the intrinsic action of baseball away.” The act of hitting the ball to a fielder in the shift for him to record an out IS action. Fielders moving around to shift in-between pitches IS action.
I doubt if too many here think fielders simply positioning themselves is action.
Actually, it’s the pull-happy lefties who DON’T swing for the fences who benefit the most from this. They’re the ones who are going to get a lot more singles and raise their batting averages significantly.
Still, I agree that it’s probably not going to convince anyone to change to a more contact-oriented approach.
After attending several minor league games recently, I love the pitch clock. With that said, I do understand some pitchers fears (as expressed in today’s Athletic article) that the pitch clock penalties could impact key moments in the game, and I agree that that is not desirable.
I thought of a potential solution and I’m curious what you guys think: could they add a rule where each pitcher gets one “timeout” per inning? Essentially, if it’s getting down to the wire and it’s a big moment, the pitcher could throw his hand up one time and get a pitching clock reset.
I think that would be perfectly reasonable, easy for the umpires to track, and would not be abused since you only get one anyway.
Would that work?
Sounds like something that makes sense. Crucial moments ARE different and should be recognized as such.
They effectively have timeouts in the rule, mound visits stop the clock and give you 30 extra seconds, and you get 5, plus one extra in the 9th, and more extras in extra innings.
You just need to save one of your mound visits for that kind of situation. They’re even adding an extra mound visit to the 9th inning if you’ve used them all up beforehand!
It will be interesting to see how the trade-off that pitchers face will play out now that the benefit from inducing pulls into the three defenders when measured against the very dangerous pulled fly ball changes by an enormous percentage. How much will they be forced to change how they attack left-handed hitters? Off speed away looks like it might be the most important feature in a right-handed pitcher’s arsenal .
Great article.
1 – Has MLB announced whether the automatic balls or strikes awarded will be counted in pitcher’s statistics, such as strike percentage?
2 – Would anyone object to the following change that might seem like a big big deal but I don’t think is?
Let players SLIDING into 2nd or 3rd base over-slide the bag. Basically, when attempting a steal or sliding into 2nd on an attempt to stretch a single into a double, runners would not be called out on an the overslide of the bag, especially in those situations where it takes a replay to show that they let go of the bag for a millisecond while the fielder kept the tag on. This change would put an end to those stupid reviews and encourage more aggressive baserunning. So long as the runner is on the ground and making no attempt to advance to the next base, what’s the downside here?
I’d prefer the “halo” rule- where as long as the runner’s body is over the bag & when the slide stops they are still touching the bag, if they come off the bag for a millisecond while sliding, it’s not an out.
Basically, creating a safe “halo” over the bag. Calling those milliseconds where a runner has lost contact with a base while sliding over it was not the intent of replay.
Wouldn’t you then have to go to the replay to determine whether the runner’s body is over the bag and whether the slide had stopped?
Other than tradition, I just don’t see a downside in allowing runners to overslide 2nd and 3rd as long as they’re not going anywhere (similar to a runner making or not making a turn at first base, only here it’s easier because the guy needs to be on the ground).
Would you have to go to replay? It’s pretty easy to see if the runner’s foot is still on the bag. You don’t need replay for that (at least 99% of the time, I guess there could be a case where he’s hanging on by a shoe lace or something).
I think the vast majority of those are cut & dried.
Just make it so teams can’t review video before challenging. Those challenges will stop
I doubt it. Already those challenges are made before there’s any clear evidence and the manager just takes a shot based on the unlikelihood of a better challenge occurring later.
Unpopular opinion: I’d just eliminate replay all together.
It might encourage more late slides, which could be a safety issue.
I agree in spirit. My version of this rule is essentially time-based, where runners can come off the bag for a second (or some updated time period that seems to work when it comes to separating arbitrary milliseconds from a player who genuinely failed to stay in the vicinity of the bag) and as long as they resume contact they are safe, just as they were throughout baseball history.
I love the replay rule, but the micro-second off-the-base “out” calls are stupid.
I like all the changes, except I think the disengagement rule goes too far. I think It’s too much of an advantage to give the baserunners essentially free reign to get huge leadoffs if they can just manage to draw (and safely retreat from) two pickoff throws first, which isn’t very hard to do.
Also, what if something unexpected happens to break the pitcher’s concentration (without time being called) or he just has a brain fart after he’s already stepped off twice?
The limit would still be reasonable (or even down to just one disengagement allowed) with an automatic ball penalty when the bases are empty, but I just don’t like having to limit how well pitchers can hold runners on.
On the bright side, though, after two pickoff throws, the first baseman can play further back just as long as he can still get back to the bag quickly enough in the event that the runner leaves early or takes an extremely long leadoff to where another pickoff attempt is worth the risk.
The other thing to keep in mind is the pitch clock. So not only will the runner know that the pitcher cannot try and pick him off again after two attempts but there is now also literal countdown on the pitcher throwing the next pitch.
I think this disengagement rule is absurd but I hope I’m wrong.
Are we sure we’re ok with a batter being awarded a BB on a 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th of a tied postseason game, when the pitcher hesitates slightly due to the immense amount of pressure on him?
BTW, will the umpires have any discretion whatsoever in making these calls? If yes, in the above situation, would the manager of the batting team go berserk if the ump DOESN’T make call?
Unless/until it actually happens I don’t know that it’s worth the hand-wringing. If it was going to happen it probably would’ve happened in the minors already and we would’ve read accounts or seen video of it somewhere.
And, no, minor leaguers likely aren’t faced with pennant-altering pressure but they typically aren’t as experienced either. Then again, they don’t change the shot clock late in basketball games or change the play clock late in NFL games. The clock is there and everyone gets used to it.
Watch when a homerun gets called back because the ump was waving his hands that the pitch clock had expired.
None…none of these things are going to happen. The clock has been implemented without incident in the minors. The sky, she is not falling
I mean, it absolutely will happen at some point. It might be the first game, it might be in 20 years but it will happen.
Is that any different from a home run being overturned and called a foul ball on replay review?
This is like banning a zone defense because it’s too effective. “We know they’re going to hit it right there every time, so don’t stand there.”
Sometimes those kinds of balancing rules are needed, though. It’s why we have rules like the infield fly rule.
The NBA actually has such a rule. It’s called defensive three seconds (a defensive player can’t camp in the lane while not actively guarding an offensive player for more than three seconds), and it was passed because it’s too effective a defense (and leads to a more boring, defensive oriented game). Same rule, same rationale.
Yes. And the NBA sucks, so…
Yeah, basketball in general sucks to watch, but that has little to nothing to do with one specific NBA rule.
Before that rule came about, its predecessor was the vague “Illegal defense” call which purported to disallow zone defenses generally; defensive 3 seconds codifies that into an objective standard that refs can look for.
As some have pointed out, the real issue is that pitchers are too good. What ever came of moving the mound back? Between higher velocity and further extension of release, fastballs are just way too fast. If one foot didn’t make a difference, try two or three or lower the mound again.
And as Michael pointed out, this drastically reduces the recovery time pitchers have between each pitch.
They’ll either have to reduce their velo or gas out.
The pitch clock is also a batter clock. I look forward to a lot less of batters stepping out after every pitch and constantly adjusting their batting gloves like an ADD teenager on 5 cups of coffee. At least the pitcher waiting longer between pitches was an attempt to improve performance by throwing harder. There is absolutely no basis for mindless adjusting of batting gloves helping hitting. I suspect that batters saw someone do it once and get a big hit and they decided “if it worked for them it might work for me.”
This this this. So much of the increase in game time is on the hitters, not the pitchers. Kyle Tucker steps out on every pitch and picks up some dirt for heavens sake. My wife will be so happy not to hear me yelling “get in the box” at hitters ever again.
Nomar Garciaparra would be struck out by the umpire without ever seeing a pitch.
Banning the shift is silliness…has the NFL stopped defenses from playing 5, 6, 0r 7 DBs? The NBA hasn’t declared that every team MUST have a 7-footer on the floor either!
Let teams decide how they want to defend, period.
BTW, since the start of the 2018 season, the batting average on 2 strike ground balls TO THE OPPOSITE FIELD is……:.411!!!
Enough of hitters saying it’s just too hard to go the other way; when they DO, they are hitting like Ty Cobb at his peak.
The NBA has banned zone defense in the past. They’ve also reinstated it. And they’ve banned hand checking.
The NFL has all sorts of rules about where people can stand (illegal formation, illegal man down field, etc)
Sports leagues have always tinkered with the rules. They do this for competitive balance reasons, and for entertainment value reasons.
I am always amazed that folks have not heard of the defensive three second rule which has been in place in the NBA for 20 years. Very similar concept to banning the shift — you can’t play defense in certain locations/formations. Improved play by increasing offensive opportunities.
Also — the .411 BA appears misleading as it presumably assumes a ground ball, thereby taking strikeouts out of the equation. What is the BA for pulled ground balls on 2 strikes?
Yes, but in basketball, the 3 second rule is to keep from blocking the basket. In baseball, you have 100,000 Sq ft available to hit the ball, not including homeruns.
No, but the NFL has banned certain formations and defined many starting positions, and the NBA banned zone defense for many years.
As you said, that’s only when they do hit grounders to the opposite field with 2 strikes. If they changed their natural approaches to try and do that more often, that number would go way down, and they’d likely strike out even more than they already do. It’s like saying batters should swing more often on a 3-0 count just because they put up big numbers the rare times they do swing on that count.
Here’s a simpler idea to improve offense. Lower the mound and/or shrink the K zone. It’s been done before, in reverse, in 1963 and it brought about the decade of the pitcher.
They also reversed those changes after 1968. Offense hasn’t struggled to the same extreme that such drastic changes are necessary.
I may be the outlier, but I don’t want a faster-paced game. I prefer a game that is a pastime, where you can have a conversation with the people you watch the game with (whether it’s friends, my parents, or my kids). If I wanted to watch a fast-paced game, I’d watch something else.
What they could do is start games an hour earlier across the board. You want to increase youth participation and get more young fans? Start the games before kids’ bedtimes. Then end exclusive broadcast deals and blackout restrictions. Stop messing with the game itself.
Did you feel like MLB games in 2000 were played at a breakneck pace? If not, I think you will like the new rules just fine.
I’m biased as a CST resident who follows a EST team, but making those games 5pm starts for me would be pretty awful. As it is, I sometimes miss the beginning of the game coming home from work.
Half the nation is on adderall and antidepressants and needs immediate satisfaction or they get bored and check their smartphones to see if they have a new text msg. Hockey is all action that really does not matter for most of the game; basketball is constant action that results in 2 or 3 points out of 100 each time down the floor; football is action that takes a break every play and then teams switch offense and defense every few minutes. But BASEBALL is a game of beauty, skill, and romance. A game of justice for the individual and the team. A game of freedom to use your knowledge to decide to play a batter who pulls the ball. And MLB, like any corporation, wants to ruin something beautiful.
“Half the nation is on adderall and antidepressants”*
*Citation badly needed
The biggest problem with starting the games that early is it puts the start of the games at the time of the day that most affects fielders’ vision of the ball.
As for exclusive broadcast deals, they’re a necessary evil, as a national broadcast system like the NFL uses is impossible with as many as 15 games being played every day. It would be nice to do something about the blackouts, but even they have a legitimate business-related reason behind them that would be very difficult to change.
Pitch clock great idea. Implementation will be a nightmare…constant stepping off and batter timeouts, umps being too lenient.
Forcing teams to play very specific zone defense is unheard of in sports, and for good reason.
The only thing that really moves the needle is roboumps, and that’s been mysteriously delayed for five years…
“Implementation will be a nightmare…constant stepping off and batter timeouts, umps being too lenient.”
Counterpoint: implemented without incident in the minors and leading to immediate and noticeable improvement in pace of play.
It’s not unheard of, as football also has required starting areas for most players on both offense and defense, and like in football the fielders in baseball are free to move almost anywhere they want once the play is in action.
Even basketball and hockey have some positioning requirements during jump balls and face-offs respectively.
This is without even mentioning the positioning requirements that pitchers and catchers have always had.
Meanwhile, they can’t use robo umps even if they wanted to until the technology actually works properly on all pitches.
The scaling back of my interest in the sport will pick up with the rules on the shift. Sad to say, this will probably curtail my interest in the site as well. Good luck all.
Love the changes! I took in an afternoon Twins game a few weeks back, then went across town to an evening Saints game. The difference in pace and tension was quite noticeable, with the players in the Saints game moving right along, versus the Twins and Royals, who all acted as if I were there to watch them prance and preen to 60-second walk-ups and batting-glove adjustment marathons.
I’d like to note that this and the piece about the minor league union are the author’s first two pieces at Fangraphs. What a way to start! Is this the journalistic equivalent of hazing? Where do you even go from here?
(Well done with each piece.)
I appreciate the take that so many of the changes in the game are made because they get collective bargaining deals complete and that finally, something is being done about how the game itself is played. I look forward to changes that will actually make the game better, like robot umpires that get calls right, that don’t have “interpretations” of the strike zone and that don’t hold it against a player who looks a them cross-eyed. But adding a pitch clock and banning the shift are not good for the game.
Making pitchers hurry and throw before they’re necessarily ready is not going to make for better games. It will make for more offense, sure. It will make for more balls thrown to the backstop. (Just imagine how wild Aroldis Chapman will be under time pressure.) But more offense does not translate directly to “better.” And banning the shift just further pushes the swing-for-the-fences-every-time approach that has overtaken the game. It will make the contact hitter less and less of a factor. We’ll have more Dan Vogelbach, less Ozzie Smith.
The argument that it’s been 10 years and people still haven’t tried to make teams pay for shifting is not swaying me. Bill James’ first Baseball Abstract came out in 1977. Moneyball didn’t happen until 2002. Even after that, there was a decade or more of teams that ignored or even denigrated the use of analytics. Change is slow. When it happens, it’s because someone has the guts to try something different, follows through with it and has success with it. That happens on its own schedule so just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it wouldn’t.
With the exception of the wider bases (good because its purpose is safety) these changes are just more of MLB marketing the game to people who aren’t really fans. The crowd that arrives late and is just there to see home runs and leave before the eighth inning to beat traffic will love this. They’ll be done sooner. Great for them, but they’ll still stop watching the game come September when football starts. This is just another couple of fingers in the eye of the “I don’t care if I never get back” kind of fan.
The robo ump will call whatever strike zone it is programmed to…recent iterations used in 2022 are setting the strike zone at 28% of a batters height for the bottom and 56% of his height at the top. The inner and outer edges are basically one ball OFF the plate…for the “avg” hitter the strike zone is this a 20x 20 inch square – not what the rulebook says.
Um, you do realize that banning the shift helps pull-heavy contact hitters the most, don’t you?
These are relatively minor changes other than the pitch clock. Still didn’t address by far the biggest problem which is the continuously rising strikeout rate. MLB can’t undo the scientific advances made in pitching in the last decade but they can lower the mound or move it back. Until the strikeout rate is lowered, they have to consider going back to a juiced ball because the current level of offense is way too low.
That’s why the most interesting part of this (besides allowing LH hitters to be more aggressive on pitches that they can’t hit out of the park) is the knock-on effects of the pitch clock.
There’s a reason these high-octane relievers take the longest between each pitch – reducing that recovery time will force them to either dial things back or wear out sooner.
I know I’m in the minority on this, but I like longer baseball games. Pay $100 for a ticket and the game goes 4 hours, you just paid $25/ hour. Pay $100 for a ticket and the game finishes in 2 hours, you’re paying $50/ hour. The longer the game, the better the value for your money.
Hmm. Yes, I think that is the minority opinion, although everything within reason. An hour would be too short while if assume you’d find 10 hours clearly too long.
Likewise, with golf. If I pay $120 for green fees, I’d still rather pay $30 per hour for 4 hours than $20 per hour for 6 hours.
A way to reduce strikeouts would be to reduce the size of active roster to 24. You’d get fewer max effort 100 mph pitches and more pitch to contact guys who can pitch multiple innings.
I’m glad you mentioned this. Fewer pitchers on the roster would encourage starters to last longer. injuries are a concern if pitchers pitch behind their capabilities.
However, I think a happy medium can be struck by requiring teams to mark a certain number of pitchers active per series like they do in the playoffs
The 13 pitcher maximum we now have is fine. You have to account for extreme situations like the starter getting hurt or knocked out in the first inning, especially now that they’ve limited how many times a player can be optioned to the minors per season. Plus, MLB could very well go back to traditional extra innings rules next season.
These are AWFUL!
It is un-American to restrict how a team can position their defense. One of the beautiful things about baseball is the freedom.
Get ready for games filled with balks and balls being called when no pitch is thrown in time. Oh wait – what if the pitch clock expires just as the pitcher starts his windup? Now he risks injury, or continues and throws the ball. What if the batter hits the ball for a homerun, but the ump said the pitch clock expired? What a horror show.
The pitch clock is for people who can’t appreciate the romance of the game, and pull out their smartphones every 5 seconds.
And the limit on moves to first base is crazy. Any runner with speed will just use up the throws to first and then he can take as large a lead as he wants. Ridiculous.
MLB will ruin the beautiful game just like all corporations ruin all things beautiful.
The only major sport where there is no clock. Time is measured by counting things. NO CLOCKS ! Also the only sport where the defense controls the ball. Now MLB wants to dictate to the team when the defense has to provide the ball to the offense (throw a pitch).
Take some deep breaths.
The pitch clock has been used in the minors for multiple seasons to very positive reviews. In a couple of years you won’t notice it but you may think to yourself that the games are played with a more enjoyable pace for some reason.
As a former college pitcher, I doubt it. I threw at a face pace but I had a strong arm and could do that. And I didn’t have to worry about my next contract. People who check their smartphones every 10 seconds to see if they have a new text message are the ones who need this rule change.
Basketball does not have position restrictions. Soccer does not have position restrictions (other than offsides). Football has minimal positional requirements. Baseball is not special.
Baseball still is not run by a clock. A team cannot run the time out. There is just this small measure to speed up the game.
If the corporations took your complaint to its other extreme, they could have unlimited length of commercial breaks, as there is no clock that limits them.
You need to calm down and stop blaming people on medications for your own lack of ability to accept change.
Football’s positional requirements before a play are NOT minimal.
Is the language that infielders must have both feet on the infield dirt OR neither foot on the outfield grass? The former would seem to outlaw playing in on the grass for bunt defense and would continue to toy with Anthony Rizzo …. denying his death defying bunt defense or switching to third for a play while giving him–the man who lost the most hits to the shift–a chance to hit singles to right again.
It’s the latter. They can still play in as much as they want at their own risk save for obvious exceptions.
shrink the strikezone at the low end. That’s how it used to be called anyways.
There should never be any rules in sport against defensive formation. The offense must adjust. That is what makes sport interesting. Lefties will make a mockery of baseball now that everyone understands to just swing out of their shoes and pull.
The shift drastically disincentivizes hard line drives up the middle, in favor of either talking a walk or swinging out of your heels.
Pitchers will adjust and, without the three defenders on the right side, will throw away much more and watch the pull happy hitters make a lot of weak contact.
American football called and is wondering how their defense would work if there were no lineman requirements nor encroachment/offsides penalties.
Meanwhile, lefties will make no more of a mockery than they did before the overshift became popular. Pull-heavy contact hitters will once again be able to hit like they used to 15 years ago, while fly ball hitters won’t gain much from it, anyway. Guys like Ryan Howard were often good or even great hitters, but they didn’t make a mockery of the game, did they?
I like the rules but the shift rule is bad. I’m for a shift rule but the new rule means that the SS can still stand just off the middle. Minor league data actually showed that that kind of shift (2 on each side, everyone on the dirt) is mostly ineffective which is why they experimented with the pie slice rule).
That means the new anti shift rule will barely have any effect on stats, it is a cosmetic change so that oldheads stop complaining about weird arrangements.
If they really wanted it to have a tangible effect then they should have waited for the results of the pie slice rule and if it works install that, but don’t implement a rule that has already failed to bring results at the minor league level.
People have no problem with overloaded lines in NFL, or having no idea where a defensive back will be from play to play, but somehow MLB thinks intelligent/unconventional positioning is too much for fans to handle.
Speaks volumes as to where the sport is headed long-term.
FFS, just enlarge the field. If HRs are harder to hit the guys who can’t hit them will stop selling out for power on every swing.
That’s not what the new rules are designed to prevent in the first place. Those kinds of hitters are already punished by their massive strikeout numbers and inflated numbers of routine fly out and pop-ups. The guys who sell out like that only do so due to it still being an improvement compared to how relatively poorly they hit before making the change.
I still think there is a lot to be said for just backing up the fences 15-20 feet rather than eliminating the shift. Take some of the value of swinging for the fences away and make the ability to hit to all fields more valuable. But MLB still seems convinced of the entertainment value of the home run.
The biggest value for swinging for the fences is that lefties’ BABIP has cratered over the last fewer years, so LHH have become more reliant on defense-independent outcomes to provide value.
I wonder why lefties BABIP has cratered in recent years. Could it possibly have anything to do with the shift being employed against them? Hitters decided that they would rather swing for the fences instead of beat the shift and we ended up getting a lot of .243/22/70 lines using the old system instead of a .275/12/70 line that would have been the result if hitters chose to use the entire field. Does eliminating the shift mean that our hypothetical hitter might now be able to raise his BABIP and produce something like .275/22/90? I think that is a possibility.
Yep – any hard, low contact that isn’t slapped the other way has become an automatic out…so they’re saying “Eff it, I gotta hit it over the OF’s head or walk.”
And that’s some ugly-ass baseball.
No, because if he reversed his style to a more contact hitting approach, he’d be back to being a 12 HR hitter; while if he kept with his fly ball approach, he’s not going to hit enough ground balls to raise his average anywhere near that old .275 mark (in the absence of the overshift) or gain very many extra RBIs.
Besides, it’s very unlikely for a natural pull hitter to do that well just by trying to hit more to all fields in the first place.
That’s not what the new rules are designed to prevent in the first place. Those kinds of hitters are already punished by their massive strikeout numbers and inflated numbers of routine fly out and pop-ups. The guys who sell out like that only do so due to it still being an improvement compared to how relatively poorly they hit before making the change.
Besides, even if pull hitters didn’t sell out for power, they’d still be pull hitters. Selling out for power doesn’t suddenly turn someone who naturally hits to all fields into someone who’s a heavy pull hitter.
So if I am reading correctly batter no longer has the ability to step out of the box every pitch? Basically once the clock starts he has to be in the box within 8 seconds? I like this change a lot, always felt the batter stepping out every pitch to adjust batting gloves and helmet was a huge part of slowing the game down.
200+ comments. There must be some debate. Let’s hear the other side…
Completely agree on all points, Michael. The changes are a net positive. Each have pros and cons, but, on balance, the results are likely to be positive.
It’s amusing that the comments raging against the shift ban are equally divided between “it won’t do anything, so it’s pointless” and “it will destroy the game.” Pick one.
The reality is simple: The shift suppressed offense. We can debate how much, but it’s undeniable that it did. That’s why analytically-minded teams embraced the shift, and the rest of the league followed.
The shift was used because it worked.
In a game that has tilted against offense in recent history, I want more offense.
How much of a plus the rule change ends up being for the offensive side of the equation remains to be seen. As with everything, there are competing factors. But it’s undeniable that, to some extent, the offense-suppressing effects of the shift will be mitigated.
And, for me, any change that adds more to the offensive side of the ledger is a welcome development.
Offense that improves pace of play. In other words, not just walks, K’s and HRs. Also, anything that improves the athleticism we see on the field. I suspect a few current 2B’man will be losing their jobs next season, moving to new positions.
Despite your distaste for Episcopal liturgy, I still liked this article and found it concise and convincing. I remain glad to find your writing here.
Limiting defensive shifts is hardly going to end defensive shifts. It will change how they will be deployed. We might see more defense in motion (that would be fun), or the LFer now moving over to short RF for certain hitters. History says there will be both positive and negative implications to the change, some unexpected. Someone else in the thread referred to grumpy old men being in favor of this change, but that’s really incorrect as younger fans also want to see shifts restricted. Perhaps those against experimenting with restricting shifts are grumpy middle-aged men afraid of surrendering one of their sacred cows?
I’m actually more curious about the combination of the wider bases and the restriction on pitchers not being able to disengage from the rubbers no more than twice per plate appearance. This may cause an explosion in SBs. It’s led to an increase in the minors, but we could very well see a more rapid increase in the majors. An increase in SBs and overall athleticism would be a positive, unless SBs become so overdone like HRs.
A question for the group, It seems to me that when shifting against a pull hitter that the pitchers then throw inside more (is this true?). If now no shift, then as a pitcher I would be much more inclined to throw outside pitches against dangerous pull hitters, with the result being a lot more weak ground balls to the pull side and fewer pull home runs (more opposite field home runs from the real power hitters). Does this thinking make sense?
A question for the group, It seems to me that when shifting against a pull hitter that the pitchers then throw inside more (is this true?). If now no shift, then as a pitcher I would be much more inclined to throw outside pitches against dangerous pull hitters, with the result being a lot more weak ground balls to the pull side and fewer pull home runs (more opposite field home runs from the real power hitters). Does this thinking make sense?
That is the way pitchers attacked pull hitters before the shift became ubiquitous. The shift changed the balance and pitchers, now with three defenders on the right side, began to risk more home runs, by going inside more, as an acceptable trade off when virtually all ground balls and a larger percentage, than usual, of line drives were now outs..
Does the 10-second walk-up music also apply to relievers? That would be unfortunate considering the great success of Timmy Trumpet. I’m not a Mets fan, but that was a great addition. Fans were totally into it. How about trying to replicate that in other ways with batters? No, of course not. MLB’s reaction is to suck the life out of fun.
Pitch clock is great.
Banning shift will marginally help some hitters, but the root of the balls in play problem is that hitters and pitchers are smart.
It’s smart to limit contact so pitchers try to strike out as many people as possible. Bullpens are generally strong enough that 5-6 premium innings are more valuable than 8-9 good innings.
It’s smart to swing for power on good pitches and let most borderline pitches go. Thus more walks, home runs, and strikeouts.
Banning the shift increases the incentive for both of these trends.
1) Lower the mound (or move it back, or both) to make it easier to hit the fastest pitches. This would decrease the incentive to go for strikeouts, especially with high fastballs, the ones that generate the most 3 outcome results.
2) Extend the strike zone to increase the space of “pitchers” strikes. This would increase the incentive to for batters to swing earlier in the count and put the ball in play rather wait for a pitch they can drive.