Facts and fiction about new shift, pitch clock rules

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Baseball’s (supposed) flaws have been discussed ad nauseam, but what can we actually expect from the new rules in 2023?

Major League Baseball passed the point of no return on Friday.

Or did it?

Intellectual property, collective brainpower, superior data – all were chucked into a dumpster by MLB’s competition committee.

Unless it wasn’t.

Baseball, sweet baseball, that timeless sport without a clock, a glorious afternoon spent without a care in the world – this pastoral, time-honored ritual passed down from father to son, generation to generation – was unscrupulously ruined in the service of satisfying TV partners and hooking TikTok-obsessed youth to care about a pastime on the verge of being surpassed by pickleball.

Or maybe that’s your fear of progress talking.

Make no mistake: Friday was a momentous day in the history of the sport, when commissioner Rob Manfred’s self-appointed competition committee voted 7-4 (the Politburo has had more unpredictable votes) to install a pitch clock, to ban defensive shifts, to increase the size of the bases in 2023.

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There’s a gut reaction, developed over many years of balderdash spat out of MLB’s midtown Manhattan HQ, to hate the changes. An unlikely coalition of the embittered has formed in the run-up and in the wake of these rules: From the crankiest of the old school aghast that pitchers must release the ball within 15 seconds (20 with runners on base), to the Young Turks convinced that a ban on shifts will disempower their beloved brainiacs of the front office and create unintended consequences that will work against creating the action MLB so greatly desires.

To all of you we say: Chill.

To say baseball doesn’t have its problems is to stick one’s head in the sand. To resist drastic change based on The Way Things Have Been is a Seligian response when, for once, a more Manfredian torching of the landscape might be in order. And to claim to know how all these changes will play out is to flaunt an arrogance that has made the sport even more off-putting in this high-information era.

With that, we’ve aimed to separate the few absolutes from the prematurely apocalyptic. Some truths, falsehoods and many more jury-is-out reads from an epic Friday news dump:

False: Everyone hates the pitch clock

Oh, you’ll hear the naysayers. The MLB Players Assn. – granted a toothless four spots on the 11-man competition committee – voted unanimously against the pitch clock and the shift ban, noting in a statement that MLB “was unwilling to meaningfully address the areas of concern that Players raised.” We don’t necessarily doubt that, and we can envision Max Scherzer pawing at the dirt, ready to flay the new clock – or bite his lip hard enough to draw blood.

But MLB’s most ingenious maneuver has been to progressively workshop significant game changes in the minor leagues, starting briefly in the Fall League and moving on up, the pitch clock and the shift ban and the larger bases following the next generation of players like Mark Zuckerberg seeking your personal data.

Now, this group of kids has arrived in the majors – and they are down with the pitch clock.

“I feel like it does lock you in,” top Cardinals prospect Jordan Walker told us at July’s Futures Game. “There’s no nonsense; it does what it’s supposed to do and makes the games a lot shorter.”

“I love the pitch clock,” says Brewers prospect Antoine Kelly, who will soon be jousting with Walker in the NL Central. “It makes the games fly by. They’re, like, two and a half hours.”

Two hours, 38 minutes, to be exact. MLB says the time of game across the minors decreased from 3:04 in 2021 to 2:38 after the pitch timer was enacted at every level. Meanwhile, the major league game, despite a handful of mitigations such as the three-batter minimum, continues to dodder along at 3 hours, 4 minutes.

That’s a nine-minute, 10% rise from a decade ago, a span in which the league batting average has decreased from .255 to .243. Scoring is down, balls in play are down, but time of game remains&mldr;.up?

Gentlemen, you’re on the clock.

False: The shift ban ruins strategy

There once was a time long, long ago – close your eyes and picture the halcyon days of 2019 – when shifts were not so rampant, when the third baseman wouldn’t routinely jog out and position themselves at the right field line or the majority of second basemen would field a scalding one-hopper halfway to the fence and throw out a runner.

But times have changed. And now, it’s not just the Smart Teams that aggressively shift. It’s everybody.

From 2016 to 2018, the brainy (and occasionally nefarious) Houston Astros led MLB in shifts, and it was not particularly close. During this span, the Astros shifted 34% to 37.3% of the time, according to Statcast data, while the least-shifty teams (the Marlins, Cubs and Angels) shifted between 1.3% and 3.4%.

Big advantage, Astros, who in 2017 began a string of five consecutive trips to at least the American League Championship Series (and no, it wasn’t all trash cans).

But in 2019, a significant sea change occurred: The percentage of shifts by the No. 1 team leaped from 37.3% to 50.5%. And that No. 1 team was the Dodgers.

Unsurprisingly, that year featured the largest gap (29.1%) from No. 1 shifting team to the median shifting team and also the least-shifty team (a 37.8% gulf between the Dodgers and Cubs) in the Statcast era.

In the years since, not unlike the standings, the rest of the league has been trying to close that gap.

From 2018 to 2022, the amount of shifts for the median shifting team has doubled, from 16.5% to 33%. This year, the top 10 shifting teams are filled with highly successful clubs (Blue Jays, Dodgers, Astros are 1-2-3) and more middling squads (Marlins, Cubs White Sox). And the bottom 10 shift-friendly clubs are filled with both good (we see you, Cardinals, Rays and Orioles) and bad (Royals, Reds, Rockies).

The greater point: The field has been harvested. Many teams’ internal data likely looks a lot more similar than it did three years ago, especially as top- and mid-level executive talent gets poached by rival organizations.

And besides, the new rules will give the quants and their executive suite overlords new, if limited, alignments to ponder. (Picture a shortstop and second baseman each close enough to the bag to dap each other up, say).

False: Shift ban = more ‘launch angle’

OK, so the jury is out on this one.

For sure, power hitters and “launch angle guys” (remember, everyone has a launch angle) will love the new rules. As Joc Pederson put it Friday, “The shift sucks.”

With fewer penalties for selling out – the scorching liner into shallow right field should now be a single, and not a 4-3 putout – there’s a worry that more hitters will be emboldened to swing for the fences, and that the more precise batters, who might be inclined to “shoot one the other way,” will be penalized.

Yet this latter group of hitters largely does not exist.

Why? Well, shifts are never done in a vacuum. Pitchers will attack hitters in concert with how their fielders are positioned, and thus the couch-bound former juco star who bemoans that hitters “just don’t go the other way” has never tried to do so with 99 mph bearing in on their hands. Believe it or not, many elite lefty swingers have tried.

There are unicorns, such as Mets hitman Jeff McNeil, who has been beating the shift since his first full season in the majors. The lifetime .304 hitter saw his percentage of plate appearances against the shift nonetheless double from 19% in 2019 to 42% in 2021. He responded with a .336 weighted on base average against the shift – 62 points higher than his .274 mark with no shift.

Teams learned their lesson: McNeil is shifted on just 25% of the time now, and he’s better on both fronts – a .342 wOBA with no shift, .405 against it. McNeil, in essence, successfully fought City Hall.

A generational hitter like Bryce Harper learned to adjust. He was awful against the shift in 2018, batting a dismal .249 in 2018, including .214 in the first half. But he learned to go over the top in subsequent years. He’s batted .286 since, with a .955 OPS. Citizens Bank Park in Philly has surely helped that a bit.

But won’t it be nice to see a more doubles-oriented guy like McNeil and a classic slugger like Harper go up to the plate and largely not have to worry about this stuff? We will see how it plays out, but it would be surprising if we didn’t see a spike in both the frequency and the variety of offense.

True: Bigger bases inspire action

It’s a weird rule change, largely overlooked in the overall debate and one actually rubber-stamped by the MLBPA. But bases will increase in size from 15 to 18 inches. MLB’s data claims that base-related injuries in the minors were reduced by nearly 14%, making it a no-brainer for players to approve.

But it’s the enhanced chance at a stolen base that’s most alluring.

Among the maxims that evolved in baseball’s information era is that potential basestealers should be successful 85% of the time to justify the risk. Today’s game largely mirrors that: MLB’s stolen base success rate is 75%, and the stolen-base leader, Miami’s Jon Berti, is successful on 88% of his attempts (32 for 36). Baltimore’s Cedric Mullins and the lightning-fast Jorge Mateo are both 30 for 38 (79%).

That’s a far cry from 1977, when the game was much more go-go and teams were penalized for it – a whopping .42 caught-stealing per game compared to .17 now. Back then, the success rate was just 63%.

Now, a little more knowledge – and a larger, white square bringing success that much closer – will almost certainly enliven this game of inches.

False: There’s no turning back

Manfred released a series of rule changes Friday – not the Magna Carta.

His commissionership has been marked by strident movement and a general aversion to admit he is wrong – save for his regrettable “piece of metal” comments in the wake of the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. But Manfred works for the owners, and the owners pay the salaries, and they, too, won’t be happy if unforeseen circumstances stain the game.

If the pitch clock injures pitchers (or that perception exists), well, the folks signing the nine-figure contracts won’t be happy, either, if their “assets” are on the shelf. If fans are suddenly wistful for the glorified fourth outfielder and the 110-mph line drive turned into an out (pause for laughter) and stay away in droves, sure, there can always be adjustments.

More likely, this is a starting point, a momentous shift (no pun intended) toward a different and possibly better game. Tweaks can be made – a second on the clock here, an inch there. Here’s hoping some sense of cooperation exists going forward – that the commissioner not rule unilaterally, that fans and players alike gain more than a symbolic seat the table.

For now, it’s new game, on. It certainly can’t hurt to try.

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