Baseball’s New Rules and Unintended Consequences

The Smartest People in Baseball try to fix the game they broke...

A while back I was watching the MLB channel and heard a number of MLB personalities and/or employees talk about baseball’s new rules and how terrific they are and how baseball will be way more fun and exciting from now on.

What I didn’t hear was MLB personalities and/or employees talk about who made the new rules necessary, which is probably a smart topic to avoid if you want to remain an MLB personality and/or employee. 

Nevertheless, it still bugged me for MLB to pat itself on the back and say, “Hey, everybody, look how we fixed baseball!” without admitting how they screwed it up in the first place.

Which leads us to today’s topic: Unintended Consequences.

First, some whining and then we’ll get to the new rules

The book Moneyball came out in 2003 and the Smartest People in Baseball decided the steal, the bunt and the hit and run – plays that were entertaining because something actually happened – were dumb plays and only dumb teams used them.

The Smartest People in Baseball also thought the best thing a hitter could do was a hit a home run or – failing that – walk, and pitchers should try to strike everybody out.

An approach to baseball which resulted in fewer balls in play and longer games with less action, which isn’t all that big a problem if you’re the kind of person more interested in the numbers baseball games produce than the games themselves. Unfortunately for the Smartest People in Baseball, a lot of baseball fans were less enthusiastic about watching baseball being played that way and, when measured by paid attendance, between 2007 and 2022 MLB lost about 14.9 million fans.

Which is a pretty big “unintended consequence.”

Right about here we should give credit to Theo Epstein – the baseball executive who won World Series with the Red Sox and Cubs – because he’s had the intellectual honesty to admit he’s one of the guys who unintentionally screwed-up baseball and is also one of the guys behind the new rules trying to fix it.

And now that I have all that off my chest, we’re going to examine the new rules and some possible unintended consequences.

The Pitch Clock

So here’s the deal on rules and ballplayers:

Tell them you’ve come up with a new rule and they’ll ask how the new rule will be interpreted and enforced and then start thinking about ways to get around or take advantage of the new rule and umpires might not enforce the new rule exactly the way you envisioned when you wrote it and the new rule you thought you came up with won’t be the rule that gets enforced on the field.

For instance:

Baseball already had a rule that said a pitch had to be delivered within 12 seconds after the pitcher received the ball and the hitter was done readjusting his batting gloves and getting his chakras aligned, but umpires never enforced the 12-second rule so in reality baseball had no rule.

If the sign on the freeway says the speed limit is 60 MPH, but no one ever gets a ticket for going 85, in reality, there is no speed limit.  

But this time MLB says it’s really, really serious and has come up with a brand new rule; with nobody on base the pitcher now has 15 seconds to deliver a pitch, with somebody on base it’s 20 seconds.

When this new rule was announced pretty much everyone (and that included me) thought about the clock winding down and imagined the pitcher delivering a pitch just before time ran out, but in a spring training game New York Mets pitcher Max Scherzer threw a pitch just as the clock started.

Which seemed to confuse the fuck out of everybody.

Scherzer tried to do the same thing on the previous pitch, but the hitter stepped out of the box. But since the new rules also say the hitter can only step out of the box once per at-bat, Scherzer did it again knowing the hitter couldn’t step out.

As someone predicted a few paragraphs ago, Scherzer read the new rule and tried to use it to his advantage.

The umpire called a balk and if you want to see 4 minutes and 34 seconds of Max Scherzer pushing the limits of the new rule to figure out what he can get away with, here you go:

Just in case you didn’t watch the video (your loss) Scherzer also tried reaching the set position before the batter had both feet in the box (apparently there’s no rule against this, possibly because nobody ever tried it before) and throwing a pitch just as soon as the batter got his second foot inside the box.

After Scherzer pushed the new rule’s limits, MLB sent out a memo “clarifying” the rules and stressing that a quick pitch is an illegal pitch and has instructed umpires to be “wary” of pitchers trying to deliver a pitch to coincide with the 8-second mark and here’s some more about that.

According to MLB’s website:

“Batters must be in the box and alert to the pitcher by the 8-second mark or else be charged with an automatic strike.”

So if the new rule says a batter must be alert to the pitcher by the 8-second mark, why is it illegal for a pitcher to throw a pitch at that point? And why is the pitcher the one penalized if the batter isn’t alert when the rule says he’s supposed to be? The rule sounds simple, but enforcing it in the Real World can get complicated.

If you want to read more about all that, here’s an article:

https://nypost.com/2023/03/04/mlb-cracks-down-on-max-scherzers-attempt-to-exploit-pitch-clock/

And while we’re at it: pitchers are also limited to two pickoffs and if they attempt a third one they have to get an out or the runner advances a base.

MLB decided to limit the number of times a pitcher could disengage from the rubber (and there’s a sex joke available here I’m not going to make) because when they tried the pitch clock in the minor leagues, they didn’t limit the number of times a pitcher could disengage from the rubber and the end result was a lot of unplanned pregnancies.

(OK, second time around I couldn’t resist…my bad.)

With no limit on the number of times they could disengage from the rubber (insert your own sophomoric joke here because I’m fresh out) minor league pitchers exploited the rule by stepping off whenever they wanted to reset the clock.

See? What did I tell you about new rules and ballplayers?

And here’s an article about that:

https://www.mlb.com/news/pitch-clock-may-bring-back-stolen-bases

And now the good news: I’ve heard Old-School Ballplayers who hate pretty much anything new including indoor toilets, but watched how the pitch clock worked in the minors – it shortened games by about 26 minutes – say fans are going to love it, so this rule will probably improve the game, but as Max Scherzer demonstrated, they’ve still got a few kinks to work out. 

Bigger bases

According to MLB, the primary reason for increasing the size of the bases is safety; bigger bases give players more room to operate and avoid collisions. (Baseball freaks out when star players get hurt; if it’s a bench player, generally speaking, they don’t give a rat’s ass.)

Somebody did the math and apparently, increasing the size of the bases from 15 inches wide to 18 inches wide means the distance between first and second and second and third will be reduced by 4 ½ inches which MLB hopes will encourage more stolen base attempts. (Which might make you ask who discouraged more stolen base attempts, but if you keep asking questions like that you’ll never get a job working for MLB.)

A smart coach once said the one place a baseball team can show energy is on the base paths, so the Smartest People in Baseball who didn’t like the stolen base or want to take chances on the base paths made the game less energetic and fun to watch, which is another one of those unintended consequences you’ve been hearing so much about.

And here’s one more:

First base is still 90 feet from home plate, but that’s measured from the back of first base, so do some math of your own and if the old bases were 15 inches wide and new the bases are 18 inches wide, the distance from home plate to the front of first base has decreased by three inches and it’s the same for the distance between third base and home plate.

Think of all the bang-bang plays that have to be studied by a team of NASA scientists, a forensic accountant and a bipartisan Congressional committee to determine if the runner is safe or out and now a bunch of runners who were out in the past are going to be safe.

So in an attempt to protect star players and avoid collisions around a base, MLB has also affected batting averages, ERAs, errors, runs scored and probably some other stuff I haven’t thought of yet which is exactly how you wind up with unintended consequences.

No shifts…sort of

The Smartest People in Baseball fell in love with home runs, but to hit home runs most guys have to pull the ball (right-handers hitting the ball to left field, left-handers hitting the ball to right) and just in case you haven’t thought about it, that’s because the corners of a baseball field are closer to home plate and the centerfield fence is farther away.

Hit a fly ball 390 feet down a foul line in Kauffman Stadium and it will clear the fence by 60 feet; hit a 390-foot fly ball to centerfield and it won’t make the warning track.

After the Moneyball Revolution, hitters knew they’d get paid for home runs and not opposite-field singles or bunts, so a bunch of them quit working on those skills and since they can’t do those things consistently or well, defenses were comfortable putting 75% of their infielders on the pull side of the field.

Shifts meant more groundballs were hit right at somebody and the unintended consequence of that was less athleticism being shown by defenders. Think about highlight reels and it’s mostly plays where guys make diving stops and catches and the Smartest People in Baseball used shifts to make sure there were fewer of them.

So MLB decided you had to have two infielders on each side of second base, but apparently someone asked if you could start with two infielders on each side of second base and then have one of your infielders sprint to the other side of the infield as the pitch was being delivered. (Apparently the answer was no.)

The new rule also says those players need to be standing “within the outer boundary of the infield” which means standing on the infield dirt. They also set the distance between the pitching rubber and the edge of the outfield grass (which used to be up to the individual teams) because you know some grounds-keeping genius was going to try to get around this rule by extending the infield dirt halfway to the warning track.

Now here’s another quote from the MLB website:

“This rule does not preclude a team from positioning an outfielder in the infield or in the shallow outfield grass in certain situations. But it does prohibit four-outfielder alignments.”

So a team can still have an extra guy on the pull side of the field as long as they’re willing to give up an outfielder standing where he usually stands and we’ll just have to wait to see how teams decide to play this one, but don’t be surprised that even though infield shifts have been banned theoretically, it still looks like teams are playing one.

There are people — and I’m one of them — who think this no-shift rule sucks because one of the great things about sports is someone figures out how to defend something and then their opponent has to figure out how to beat that defense and then the defense adjusts back and so on and so on and meanwhile the players make each other better and the sport grows and evolves.

When teams could position anybody anywhere as long as they were in fair territory (with the exception of the catcher and the pitcher on the mound), hitters had to develop the bat control to take advantage of any weak spots in the defense.

But because the Smartest People in Baseball went overboard on home-run-pull hitters they’re changing the rules so all those home-run-pull hitters they invested in don’t have to learn the skills that would make them complete ballplayers.

Speaking of which…

During the World Baseball Classic, John Smoltz, Hall of Famer and one of baseball’s best announcers, pointed out that banning shifts meant pitchers would once again have to work on fielding their position because there won’t be an infielder standing behind second base.

And while Smoltz didn’t say this — probably because he’s a pitcher — pitchers fielding more balls will lead to more errors, because as one coach told me, anytime things get really, really goofy on the infield, pitchers tend to be involved and that’s because a lot of them struggle to make any throw that isn’t 60 feet, 6 inches.

Conclusion: don’t jump to one

If Baseball History is any indication – and it is – the new rules will come with a bunch of unintended consequences and right now we don’t know for sure what they’ll be. After the Scherzer quick-pitch incident, Tony Clark, head of the players’ union, said:

“Any changes to the rules oftentimes present challenges that you don’t anticipate.”

Couldn’t have said it any better myself, although I gave it my best shot.

https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-2023-rule-changes-pitch-timer-larger-bases-shifts