Baseball at the Break

An extremely biased view of baseball’s new rules…

We have now reached the All-Star break which seems like a logical time to examine how baseball’s new rules are working out, but before we get to that let’s not forget why the new rules were needed:

Analytics screwed up baseball.

Because of the emphasis on home runs and walks and striking everybody out and not taking chances on the base paths, games were getting longer and longer and had less and less action and fewer and fewer fans were willing to buy tickets to watch that.

I’ve only heard one guy admit all that out loud, but the guy was former front office executive Theo Epstein (also the guy who helped develop the new rules) and Theo had the intellectual honesty to admit he bought into analytics in an effort to play baseball more efficiently, but unintentionally made the game a lot less entertaining.

And now that we have that out of the way…

The Pitch Clock

The biggest change is the pitch clock and it appears to have worked as advertised and nine inning games which were taking an average of 3 hours and 3 minutes last year are taking 2 hours and 38 minutes this year.

Which is a huge difference so well done, congratulations, high fives all around and drinks on the house, as long as you don’t mind the occasional ball or strike called by an umpire without a pitch being thrown because a pitcher didn’t start his windup on time or a batter was slow getting into the box. Most people don’t think much about that, but it’s a big deal because it dramatically changes at-bats.

For instance:

The Texas Rangers are currently the best-hitting team in baseball with a .274 team average, but if the Rangers start an at-bat with a strike that average goes down to .246 and if the Rangers start an at-bat with a ball that average goes up to .292.

Also…

They had Roger Clemens on some baseball broadcast (I’ve watched a lot of them so I forget which one) and Roger said he’d talked to a lot of pitchers who didn’t like the pitch clock and we’re struggling with it, a comment the TV broadcasters didn’t want to touch with a 10-foot fungo bat.

Major League Baseball and the Billionaires who own it don’t tend to employ people who criticize Major League Baseball and the Billionaires who own it and if you want to keep your job it’s a good idea to shut the fuck up when retired players like Roger Clemens say something negative.

After Clemens said that about pitchers, you’d think, “What don’t they like and why are they struggling?” would be a logical question which helps explain why neither one of us are currently employed as Major League Baseball broadcasters.

On the other hand…

On Friday, July 7, the Cleveland Guardians beat the Kansas City Royals 3-0 in 1 hour and 51 minutes which (if the Royals are going to lose and recent history suggests they will over 70 percent of the time) is way better than watching the Royals lose 3-0 in a game that takes three-and-a-half hours.

Limited Pickoffs/Larger Bases

Pitchers are limited to two unsuccessful pickoffs and if they try a third and don’t get an out, the runner advances a base and the pitcher has to give him a piggyback ride to his car after the game and the bases are larger which cuts down the distance between them and both were promoted as ways to encourage more stolen bases which appears to be working because so far this year there are more stolen bases and you have to go all the way back to 1997 to find a season where they stole more bases-per-game than this year. 

I once asked Jason Kendall how he would encourage more base stealing and he said: “I don’t know…have the manager give the steal sign?”

Which is another one of those inconvenient remarks retired players make because it points out that most baseball managers are no longer there to have ideas of their own; most managers are there to do what the front office tells them to do and take the heat when those ideas don’t work out.

Kevin Cash of the Tampa Bay Rays made one of the worst decisions in World Series history when he pulled pitcher Blake Snell too early and cost the Rays the Series and yet Kevin Cash is still manager of the Rays and I gotta think not blaming his analytics department for giving him bad advice is one of the reasons Cash still has a job.

Anyway…

It’s great to see the stolen base make a comeback because it’s one of the most exciting plays in baseball and puts pressure on the pitcher and defense because if you never steal, pitchers throw whatever pitch they want and take as long to deliver it as they want and catchers receive those pitches anyway they want and middle infielders stand where they want.

When the guy at the plate gets a hit with somebody on base, some of the credit needs to go to the base runner who helped distract the pitcher and made him rush his delivery and maybe throw a hittable fastball to give his catcher a better chance of throwing out a base stealer.

We’re sticking with the Rangers because I’ve already got their stats up on my laptop and that .274 team average turns into .296 with men on base.

The stolen base has always been one of the best bets in baseball; catchers who throw out 30% of runners are considered outstanding and this year base stealers have been successful about 80% of the time and the percentage of runners caught stealing is lower than it’s ever been and right now is an excellent opportunity to ask yourself what other baseball offensive tactic works 8 times out of 10.

The sabermetrics community reached the conclusion that generally speaking you shouldn’t attempt stolen bases because it risked outs. And leaving the runner on first base while letting a .231 hitter swing the bat doesn’t?

But what if that .231 hitter hits a home run?   

OK, let’s go with that.

Last season Aaron Judge led the Milky Way Galaxy with 62 home runs, but had 696 plate appearances so if you’re counting on a homer, the best home run hitter in baseball would give you something less about 90 percent of the time.

Waiting on home runs is a long shot and the other thing that rarely gets talked about is you can’t control when you hit a homer and how many home runs look good at the end of the year, but didn’t really matter at the time because they happened in a blowout and if I’m in a one-run game I’d find a tactic that works over 70 percent of the time a great club to have in my bag and I think I switched sports about halfway through that explanation.

Runs-per-game are up slightly from last year, but are still lower than runs-per-game scored the entire decade before Moneyball was published, so maybe analytics did less to make baseball more efficient than its proponents like to think.

No shifts

A coach who shall remain nameless because I want him to keep talking to me and buying me the occasional meal, pointed out that no shifts means pitchers have to do a better job fielding their position because there aren’t going to be 12 guys standing behind second base.

It also encouraged more athleticism from middle infielders.

Some guys are on the field for their bats and not their gloves, so if your second baseman sucks defensively and there’s a left-handed pull hitter at the plate, you can no longer send your shortstop over to the right side to help your lousy-fielding second baseman.

This may be an anomaly and it might not, but either way I’m not looking up every team’s numbers (if you’re bored, feel free to do it yourself and let me know what you find out) but once again sticking with the Texas Rangers: in 2022 when teams could still shift and the Rangers left-handed hitters pulled a ball they hit .266 and this year when teams can’t shift they’re hitting .374.

BTW: If you’re looking for a team to root for because right now it’s pretty hard to root for the Royals, you could do a lot worse than the Texas Rangers, mostly because their General Manager is Chris Young, the 6-10 pitcher who played in KC and is also one of the smartest and nicest guys I know in baseball and he hugged me after the Royals won the World Series and when a 6-10 guy hugs you it’s kinda uncomfortable because my face ended up in his chest so I felt like I was hugging my dad if my dad was wearing a T-shirt soaked with champagne.

Anyway…

Limits on shifts and helping out weak defenders helps explain why the league batting average is up from the last four years, but compared to most of Baseball History it’s still pretty low and that might be explained by the fact that hitters are still swinging out their asses, trying to hit home runs and once again there are more strikeouts than hits which never used to happen so the new rules haven’t fixed that problem.

So most of the rules are working out OK – sort of…more on that in a minute – so what’s the bad news?

Lousy Fundamentals

In a different broadcast which I also failed to keep track of because I didn’t know I needed to, the announcers talked about players spending less time in the minors and how great it was that teams were getting these talented ballplayers to the Big Leagues more quickly. 

Because the people who currently run baseball like things they can measure and often ignore things they can’t, throwing hard and hitting a ball a long way are overvalued and defense is undervalued.

(BTW: I know how a bunch of the “advanced” defensive metrics like Ultimate Zone Rating are put together and I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw Chris Young in a dry T-shirt, but that’s a different column for a different day.)

It’s also become a thing to ask players to play more than one position and guys who struggle to play even one position competently are now being asked to play three, which might explain some of the lousy fundamentals I’ve been seeing all season.

Admittedly I mostly watch the Royals because YouTube TV and MLB got a trial separation which turned into a divorce, so I figured I was seeing bad fundamentals because I was watching a team with a .286 winning percentage, but when I get to watch some of the other teams with better records I still see way too many fundamental mistakes like:

• Failing to cover a base.

• Failing to back up a base.

• Failing to hit the cutoff man.

• Failing to keep the double play in order.

• Failing to block a sinking line drive.

• Failing to run a ball out.

• Failing to communicate on a fly ball and letting it drop for a hit.

• Assuming a ball was foul and turning it into a triple.

• Failing to pay attention to the lead runner and winding up with two runners on one base which, if you check the rule book, is one more than you’re allowed.

• Failing to pay attention to the runner on third and letting him steal home while the pitcher has his back turned to the plate and contemplates the universe.

• Failing to understand the situation and playing the game accordingly.

And worst of all…

• Failing to hustle

I now sound like every Grumpy Old Man who ever lived long enough to match that description and now that I’ve reached that status I realize those guys are grumpy for a reason. I’m seeing stuff you shouldn’t see in Little League and despite the new rules which have improved baseball in some ways, a lot of the 2023 season has been hard to watch which might partially explain the following.

Attendance is still down

So far this season attendance-per-game is better than last year and the year before that and the year before that (when the fans were made out of cardboard) and the year before that, but attendance this season is still down compared to the 15 seasons before that and you have to go back to 2003 to find a season where it was worse. 

Pitches-per-plate appearance still average over 3.90 and multiply that by plate-appearances-per-game and it means you’re still seeing about 295 pitches per game and about 221 of them don’t result in a ball in play.

Baseball at the break is better, but still has a long way to go.