Baseball does not usually stage its biggest moments in March, but 2023 proved an exception. The World Baseball Classic, the international competition that Major League Baseball started in 2006 and has gradually built up, was a sensation. The players cared a lot. The fans cared a lot. The event competed with March Madness for attention and put up a respectable showing. In the end, it came down to Shohei Ohtani striking out his Los Angeles Angels teammate Mike Trout on a full count with two outs in the ninth inning of the title game, a matchup sent from baseball heaven. Japan won the 2023 WBC, but insofar as baseball clearly has something with this tournament, MLB won too.
But baseball is not out of the woods. All of the existential hand-wringing about decades of tanking interest in the game still applies. The WBC was a brilliant idea and is now increasingly well executed, but the people who run the sport, chiefly commissioner Rob Manfred, have bigger ideas to rescue it. The 2023 season will introduce what is perhaps MLB’s biggest ever rules overhaul. MLB has changed its rulebook before, but this year’s reforms will stand out for their rapid noticeability. The new rules will need to overcome a healthy dose of skepticism. Some people will not embrace the changes, either because of traditionalist attachments or a lack of trust in Manfred and his team to change baseball in a way that works for anyone but team owners. But the new rules are important, and they may prove to be the rare case in which the interest of baseball’s ownership class and actual fans overlap.
Pitchers and hitters will both be on an explicit play clock for the first time: Pitchers will get 15 seconds to throw the ball when the bases are empty, and 20 seconds when a runner is aboard. Hitters will need to be in the batter’s box with eight seconds on the clock, ready to hit. A violation by the pitcher results in a charged ball, while a lollygagging hitter gets a charged strike. (There’s a little more to it, but that’s the idea.) The defensive shift, with three infielders on one side of second base, is now illegal. The bases are bigger. Plus, the extra-inning ghost runner—the free base runner who starts every 10th inning or later on second base—becomes a permanent fixture, after some experimentation over the past few seasons.
The game shifts every time MLB introduces a new rules package, but these changes will feel transformative from the jump. When MLB first added a universal designated hitter for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, it felt like a big move, but it affected only 1 out of 9 spots in the batting order, and only for the one league that didn’t already have the DH. Even the ghost runner, when it arrived, changed extra innings only in the minority of games that even had them. The pitch clock will reframe every at-bat. The bigger bases will always be there. The end of the shift will change a game of cat-and-mouse that in recent years was absorbing a huge percentage of plate appearances.
Beginning with the biggest shake-up: the pitch clock and related hitter clock. The league brought them to major league spring training over the past month, following prior testing in the minor leagues. At first, it’s downright jarring to watch: 15 seconds is not a long time, and the clock means pitchers don’t have time to do much more than receive the ball back from the catcher, take a sign quickly, breathe deeply, and get back into their windup. At some point this year, a big game will turn on a pitcher taking 21 seconds to throw a pitch with the bases loaded, rather than the allotted 20. That will feel unnatural. And then it will be OK. Going by MLB’s data, clock violations declined by half over the first three weeks of spring training, from about two per game to about one.
The league says spring training games have gone from taking an average of 3 hours and 1 minute in 2022 to about 2 hours and 36 minutes in 2023. This is, of course, the league’s real goal, and it’s a virtuous one. Three-hour games are not always a problem, but the trouble with a three-hour average game is that it means a whole lot of games are taking much longer than that. Sports games are entertainment, and do you know how good a piece of entertainment has to be to justify a three-hour time investment for most people? It more or less has to be The Godfather. Some baseball games really are that good, but most are not. It’s blindingly obvious that baseball needs to do more to win over kids these days than keep games 25 minutes shorter, but it’s equally obvious that very long games do not help the cause. And the pitch clock isn’t just about appealing to new fans. It’s about keeping things moving for existing fans too.
The ban of the shift won’t transform every play like the pitch clock will, but it will change about one-third of total at-bats and more than half of those by left-handed hitters, based on 2022 data. MLB front offices and field staffs have gotten smart, and one of the things they’ve deduced over the past decade is that they can dramatically depress good hitting by shape-shifting their infield alignment. For a while, this was kind of fun. There’s joy in watching teams play chess, moving their fielders around a board, and there’s also fun in watching an enterprising lefty poke a ball to third base when the area is vacated. But the shift got boring as more teams did it more often, and offense got worse as defenders kept standing exactly where the ball got hit. The leaguewide batting average last year was .243, the worst since 1968’s .237.
Yet the best reason to ban the shift is not so much that it will mean more offense in a vacuum, but that it will liven things up by making pitchers and defenses work harder to get batters out. If a shortstop wants to make a brilliant play ranging to his left across second base, great! It’ll be more fun to watch him do that than it was to watch a ball be hit directly to him because he was standing there already. The star should be the player, not the quant who made sure he was in the exact right spot. And watching the quants adjust to this change and look for new advantages will be neat in its own right.
The introduction of slightly bigger bases—18 square inches, up from 15—will not shatter the earth, but this change should be welcomed too. The theory goes that bigger bases will encourage more attempted steals, as bigger bases are easier for runners to access, and discourage injuries as players run and slide into the vicinity of a defender’s legs. The steal attempt is one of the game’s most exciting plays, and it’s waned a lot. Most years over the past decade, teams have tried about 0.7 steals per game, down 30 or 40 percent from long stretches in the ’80s and ’90s (to say nothing of the old old days in the late 1800s, when teams stole two or three bases a game). Let’s open up the base paths a bit and see what happens. The larger bases should work in conjunction with a new limit on pickoff attempts to encourage taking off.
The permanent establishment of the free runner on second base in extra innings doesn’t do as much for me; it feels as if it makes offense a bit too easy. But I don’t mind it, because 15-inning games, rare as they might be, don’t do a lot for the viewing experience either. And the ghost runner does achieve its goal of getting everyone home at a reasonable time without nuking the availability of either team’s pitching staff for the next week. Worse things have happened than an occasional runner on second.
The ghost runner and the pitch clock in particular have gotten a lot of early flak. That’s in part because baseball has many old-timey fans who abhor change. But it’s also because of where the changes are coming from: Manfred and the league office. (Much of the internet has taken to calling the ghost runner “the Manfred man,” and everyone should continue to do so.) Manfred got the authority to quickly push through big rule changes in a collective bargaining negotiation a year ago. That was the same negotiation in which Manfred locked out the players in an effort to keep their compensation as low as possible. And then lied about why he was doing it. Manfred’s job is to protect the people who own MLB teams, whether by changing baseball’s rules or putting on a lobbying blitz to exempt MLB owners from complying with Florida’s minimum-wage laws.
So, someone could take an insidious view of these rule changes: that Manfred would like you to look at these changes and think about these exciting new innovations in MLB instead of thinking about other things that dampen fan interest. Most specifically that, in any given year, a huge chunk of the league’s ownership groups are fielding puny payrolls that don’t give their teams even a cursory chance to compete. Occasional four-hour games do not help my enjoyment of baseball, but they don’t hurt it nearly as much as Bob Nutting owning the Pirates and 2023 being the fourth season in a row, and roughly the 22nd in my 28 years of life, in which my team making the playoffs feels like a near impossibility before Opening Day.
Manfred has a track record of trying hard to make baseball better for the owners without showing the same verve for improving it for players or fans. Skepticism of anything that comes out of his brain is warranted. But as people who enjoy baseball, do not own teams, and would just like the sport to be the best version of itself, we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. That means acknowledging that baseball has huge economic and cultural problems that a few rule changes will not solve, while still taking wins where we can get them. The new rules won’t cure baseball’s issues, but their role isn’t to be transformative. It’s to give a sport a fighting chance when it needs one desperately.
