Drastic changes to the MLB’s rulebook are coming, which may change the core of how the national pastime is played at its highest level. This past summer, commissioner Rob Manfred confirmed that the league would be adopting a set of sweeping new rules that promoted a faster pace of play and more offense. This was an announcement that many had seen coming after these changes had been discussed heavily between players and the league during negotiations for the new collective bargaining agreement. The league has also tested these rules in the lower levels of professional baseball. Still, this announcement shed light on the pending changes, which will come into effect in the 2023 season.
The largest change to the game will be the elimination of the defensive shift. The shift, in short, was a tactic where teams would put more defenders in areas where players were more likely to hit it; thus, making it harder for some players to generate offense. What started as a fairly tame strategy quickly went out of hand, eventually creating shifts where a defense would place an infielder into the outfield to cover more ground. While this rule change doesn’t ban all shifting, it strongly limits what teams can do with their defenders. Teams must have at least four infielders, no less, but are allowed to play an extra infielder if they’d like. They must also ensure there are at least two infielders to either side of the second base bag prior to the pitch being thrown. If the defense is not properly aligned and a play is made with an illegal shift, the batting team may either choose for the pitch to result in a ball, or uphold the result of the play. While this change will promote more offensive action, and likely draw in more casual fans, some critics have emerged, who see the banning of the shift as an elimination of an integral piece of strategy in the modern game. People who are in favor of the change cite the rule as a leveling of a playing field which had been tilted very heavily against the batter.
The league’s Joint Competition Committee also approved another highly debated rule; the implementation of a pitch timer will be making its way to the big league. Pitchers will no longer be able to take as long as they’d like to throw a pitch, with 15 seconds to throw and the timer going up to 20 seconds when runners are aboard. The pitcher must start his motion before the timer runs out, and failure to do so will result in a ball. The timer will reset when a “disengagement” occurs, such as a step off the rubber or a pickoff attempt, and pitchers are limited to two of these disengagements per at bat without consequences. Pitchers may attempt a third pickoff attempt, but if the attempt fails the runner will be granted the next base automatically. If runners advance at any point during the at bat, the pitcher’s disengagement limit will reset.
These alterations will fundamentally change the way pitchers have to work. The league average for time to delivery is currently 18 seconds, jumping up to 23.3 seconds with runners on base. The biggest stallers, such as the Cardinals’ Giovanny Gallegos and Kenley Jansen of Atlanta, can take half a minute between pitches. This deadtime between pitches and the ever-increasing pickoff attempts slow down the game, a trend that has consistently gone upward. The implementation of a pitch clock has been proven effective in slashing game times. The pitch clock was given a trial run this season in the minors, giving pitchers 14 seconds to deliver, up to 19 seconds with runners on. The result was a 25 minute decrease in time of game from the previous year, going down from 3 hours and 3 minutes to an average game time of 2 hours 38 minutes.
Pace of play has been a concern at the forefront of baseball during Rob Manfred’s time as the commissioner, and this is the latest domino to have fallen in a long line of pace of play initiatives. Manfred placed limits on the length of mound visits in 2016, setting a 30 second cap per mound visit, also limiting the amount of mound visits a team could make in a 9 inning game in 2018 to six, later going down to five in 2020. Manfred has also enacted a three batter buffer before a manager can change pitchers and began putting a runner on second base automatically in extra innings in 2020. The pitch clock is viewed as the nuclear option, and it will likely be the final frontier of pace of play improvements for the foreseeable future.
Lastly, the league will begin using larger bases starting in 2023, going up to 18 inches from the traditional 15 inch size. This change will increase the safety of the game, allowing fielders, especially first basemen, to have more room to operate and receive throws without getting into collisions with the baserunner. The larger bag also makes the distance between bases around four inches shorter, and makes sliding into bases considerably easier, which should increase offensive action on the basepaths.
With this set of changes, the MLB has drawn their line in the sand. They acknowledge the issues with pace of play and lack of action and are striving to produce more action. The answer to if these changes will pan out the way the league hopes will have to wait until next summer. But one certainty has come about in all of this; the game is changing, and players will need to adapt to survive.
Article written by Alex Sheesley of Magruder High School
Photo courtesy of Pierre-Olivier Carles, Flickr