Baseball in 2023: A whole new ball game

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings When you make huge changes to a game that’s over a hundred years old, there are bound to be bumps along the way. Take this for instance, it’s a classic baseball scenario. The kind that every fan yearns for the game is tied. Bottom of the ninth base is loaded full. The wind is on the line in the hands of just the pitcher and the batter. And, and, now what? He’s out, they have called Strike three. Wow. This is Mayhem. Oh. Automatic strike three called with the faces loaded in a tie game in the bottom of the ninth. This is baseball in 2023. That was a pitch clock violation. It’s an automatic strike that ended the game without a pitch being thrown. And yes, that was a spring training game from a few weeks ago, so it doesn’t count. But those are the actual rules. There’s no reason that couldn’t happen in the World Series. So yeah, baseball is changing massively After nearly a decade of declining attendance in a World Series last year that drew the lowest rating. In almost 20 years, something had to give, and here it is, brand new sport, sort of. It came not without a fight. Not without doubts and questions and things like that automatic strike you just heard, but if it wasn’t adapt or die time for the sport, it was definitely adapt or resign yourself to shrinking audiences and increasing irrelevance. So how has baseball changed? What does it mean for a sport that clings so hard to tradition? What will the game look like on opening day, which is tomorrow? By the way, almost five years ago, we asked our guest what was wrong with baseball. Today we’re asking did they fix it? I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Shai DTI is the lead baseball writer for SportsNet. He covers the Toronto Blue Jays. He covers all of Major League baseball and he’s done so for years. So he’s seen how this has evolved. Hello, Shi Davidi.

Shi Davidi Hey. What’s going on?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Well, we got a whole new ballgame, I guess to use a cliche.

Shi Davidi Yes, it’s uh, gonna be quite different, I think at least a lot faster, which is, uh, a pretty good place to start.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So we wanted to get you on the show today because almost five years ago we did an episode with Stephen Brunt about how baseball was in trouble. It was getting slower, more tactical, less exciting in that was back in 2018. It was one of the first episodes we ever did of this podcast, and that at the time, the idea that there were real problems with this game. It was just starting to gain momentum. Can you explain kind of what happened to the changes we’ve seen in baseball over the past few years? What’s changed about the sport even since 20 years ago?

Shi Davidi Well, that was essentially, I dunno about the beginning, but you were starting to see the three true outcome mindset in the game where, you know, at bats, we’re gonna end in either, a walk, strikeout, or a home run. Permeating the sport, and not just at the major league level, but in development as well, where so much of the focus from, uh, you know, both the hitting and pitching perspective was on, uh, either avoiding walks or working walks, getting strikeouts or from a hitting perspective, living with strikeouts, uh, in the pursuit of power and home runs. The game had veered away from so many key elements. Contact wasn’t valued in the same way. Putting the ball in play wasn’t valued in the same way. The stolen base wasn’t valued in the same way. Defense, to some extent, wasn’t valued in the same way. So you took out all these elements that helped make the game exciting. Saying it’s a completely different game is maybe a bit too extreme, but you ended up with sort of a diluted version of the game. There were bigger breaks between the action as that built up, as I got inherently baked into the game at deeper and deeper levels, uh, you know, from development in the minor leagues all the way up, you know, major League baseball decided, okay, we’ve gotta stop this. We’ve gotta get back to a more natural version of the game. And that’s what led to the rule changes that we’re going to see in play this season.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Before we get into exactly what is changing and how it works, As someone who has followed and reported on the game for so long, when you look at these changes, how big of a deal is it that they are happening at all? This is a very old game, right?

Shi Davidi Oh yeah. And baseball is really locked into its traditions. Any sort of change, people resist in a big way in the sport because it is so steeped in its traditions and everything’s supposed to be the way it’s. What finally pushed them to make these changes? I want to say like it was for the love of a pure, uh, back to baseball’s roots type thing, but really, There’s money in audience and, uh, deals like that in play, right. Always it’s, it’s always a business decision, right? Especially when you’re changing, uh, your product. To some extent. The market research that Major League Baseball had conducted, pointed overwhelmingly to time of game and dead time in the games as issues that people didn’t like. Factor that against an environment where the baseball demographic is continuing to get older, they’re having more difficulties engaging the younger fan base. You’ve got generations coming up who have shorter attention spans when you put all that together. It’s essentially putting, uh, an expiration point on your business if you don’t adapt. So let’s get to the three big changes then. And since you’ve mentioned time, uh, so often in pace of play, there’s a clock in baseball now, which there never has been ever. And it is necessary because the primary point in terms of killing pace of play has been the way pitchers by and large, but also hitters have. Essentially just taken their time far too much between pitches. Mm-hmm. for a long time now, pitching coaches have said to their pitchers, you are in control of the game. You work at your own pace. You know, if you need to take a lot of time between pitches and you need to think about things and you do that, go as slow as you need to go. And so as more and more pitchers started doing that, The game just got slower. And then of course, to counter that, hitters want to have some control in the batter’s box too. So they’ve started to call time to disrupt pitchers rhythm, and they’ve done their own processes to collect their own thoughts and plan their approach to the next pitch. And so you get this back and forth going between the sides and it just extends the length of games. And, you know, you’re, you’re three, three hours plus average time for a game. It’s not because there’s more action, it’s just because there’s more inaction. And so the clock is essentially designed to cut out the stuff from the game that you don’t really need. And you know, based on what I saw in spring training, uh, I actually thought it worked essentially well, and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything that I was seeing last. How was the reaction in spring training?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I mean, I, I know that it has been relatively positive from people who watch baseball because to your point, they’re not missing anything that they would actually miss. But how was the reaction from the teams and the players? Because I played a clip in the intro, uh, before we brought you on of a Tide baseball game in the bottom of the ninth inning, bases loaded, full count, and the batter took too long to step into the base, he got an automatic strike and the game was over without a pitch being thrown. That’s the rule. Right? I know that was spring training, so who cares? But that could happen anytime. How do players feel about that? There are some players who are like, this is no problem and this is not a big deal.

Shi Davidi Right. And there are others who are really pissed because they have to change their processes in a significant way. And then I think there’s just a big group in the middle that are just learning to live with it. Players are starting to understand, okay, these are the demands. A good portion of major league players now have come up through the minor leagues and at least experienced these rules in a minor league setting.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So they’re going back to that, right?

Shi Davidi It’s really the older players who are particularly set in their ways who are gonna have a tougher time with this, but there’s nothing that you can do. It’s a adapt or die. And so after some initial growing pains, I think a lot of the players are going, Get on board with this, and as their games are ending faster and they’re spending less time on their feet and things are moving along, I, I think any complaints will eventually dissipate. The second big rule change that I want to talk about is the banning of the shift. And a second, I’m just gonna get you to give us the Cole’s Notes version of what the shift is and what you can and can’t do. But this touches on something I want to get into in a bit. Which is how the game can be broken down to incredibly complex numbers and played that way, even if it makes the game worse.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So just first, like what is the shift? What’s the point of it, and what are they doing to it?

Shi Davidi So to put it in the most simplest terms, Now when the pitch is thrown, there must be two infielders on either side of second base. You can’t take one of your infielders from one side of the diamond and load him up on the other side of the diamond to have three infielders there. And the reason they were doing that is that the hitting profile of certain batters was such that. , if you were positioning players in a certain way, you could take away a lot of hits from them, particularly for left-handed batters. As hitters were being shifted more aggressively, they started to realize I can’t have these ground balls that used to be hits, disappear, turning into outs. In order to overcome the shift, I have to elevate the ball on a more consistent basis, and so the focus starts becoming elevating and hitting home runs, which leads to less action because you’re only gonna. Even in the best case scenario, you’re having a monster historic season, you’re gonna hit 62 home runs in 600 plate appearances, right? And so that’s a lot of empty calories in your portfolio. And so the thought is by having infills start on either side of the diamond the way they traditionally have, uh, it’s gonna create more holes. And that hit. Are going to try to take advantage of all that space and say, I don’t have to swing for a home run to avoid an out because I can poke this ball through this hole and end up with a base hit.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings The shift came from, and you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but came out of the entire quantification of baseball where you can break everything down into these core numbers and you know, come to some conclusions that might not be intuitive. And moving a third guy over to one side is one of them. And I say all that to ask. It seems to me like this rule, especially, is a bit of a pushback against the way that baseball has been run recently by people who are dedicated to taking as much advantage of the numbers as possible. How has that battle played out?

Shi Davidi I mean, it’s a really interesting question, and to some degree, the principles behind it have always been exist in existence, right? Because even before you had, uh, the, the type of data that exists today, you still had teams trying to position their fielders in the places where they thought a hitter was most likely to put the ball into play. The difference was now you. The amount of information that tells you when you throw a fast ball to this location, to this hitter, he’s going to, in all likelihood, hit the ball in this spot. And as teams became better at breaking down just exactly where they’re, where a hitter is gonna be able to put the ball into play, they became better at positioning their defenders.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Shi Davidi And the challenge. You can’t unknown things right when the utilization of information becomes so good that it’s negating parts of the sport. Really the only option that you have is to legislate the rules around the sport to create the gaps that used to exist. And there are teams right now who are spending lots and lots of hours trying to figure out how to best work around or within the new rules.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Shi Davidi Teams are constantly trying to push to know more and more things, to have more and more data points. And to apply them within the game. So this is, this is sort of the reality where we’re at, that baseball is at a point where it feels it has to legislate against the intelligence of clubs. The last change is maybe not as big as the first two. And it’s actually kind of a couple of changes, but I wanna ask you about it just cuz I, uh, just finished reading a biography of Ricky Henderson about a month ago on vacation. And I remember the baseball that I grew up with, which was fast and mayhem on the bases, and guys stealing 80, 90 more bags a year. The bases are gonna be bigger and I guess there’s a limit now on Pickoff attempts. Can you explain how they’re trying to create sort of more of that action you talked about.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Sure.

Shi Davidi Uh, and base stealing. Look, from a statistical standpoint, if you look at the run scoring and run expectancy models that are out there, it stresses the value of an out. And so if you weren’t stealing bases at a roughly 80% clip, then you were hurting your chances of scoring runs more than you’re helping them by advancing 90 feet.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings But you’re making it more fun for me to watch the game personally.

Shi Davidi Exactly. And. , how do you get back to that? So you make it a little bit easier to steal bases, one by the expanding of the bases. And part of that is there’s a safety element to that too. Particularly at first base, making the bag a little bigger is reduces your chances of inadvertent contact between defender and base runner, uh, and of their paths crossing in some sort of way on close plays at the bag. But it also. Lessens the distance. And you know, that fraction of a second can sometimes be the difference between success and failure in a stolen base, na, to limit pitchers using, uh, pickoff attempts as a way to cheat the pitch clock. Uh, they’re going to be limited to two pickoff attempts when a, when a runner’s on base and anyone after that must result in and or it leads to a Bach in which the runner is able to advance 90 feet. So if you’re a bass runner, you can force two pickoff throws. Once you’ve got the two there, you know that that pitcher is an all likelihood throwing home. And so you can get a better jump. And so the combination of being able to get a better start towards second base with a slightly shorter amount of distance to cover is in theory going to entice more teams to. Cut loose and, and take chances and get that success rate up into that 80% range where it starts paying off to take the chance to seal the base. We had to have you on to talk about the biggest story in baseball, which is all the changes, but, uh, I would also be remiss, this is a Canadian show in our audience as 95% Canadian.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings If I didn’t ask you to take these changes we’ve just discussed, apply them to the Toronto Blue Jays, do they help or hurt this baseball club this year?

Shi Davidi There’s certainly some guys that it helped. Right. I think Kevin Boggio, uh, in particular is uh, one left-handed hitter who feels freed by the reduction in shifts cuz he lost a lot of hits right into defenders who were positioned in the perfect spots to collect the balls he’d put into play. I do think bass runners like, uh, Whit Maryfield and Kevin Kier Myer in particular, but also George Springer and Bobette, maybe even Dalton VA show, uh, are very excited. To take advantage of the shorter base paths and the limits on pickoff attempts. Uh, an attempt to exploit that someone like a Chris Bassett is really excited about the opportunity to weaponize the pitch clock and to try attack hitters in, in a variety of ways and to not really let them breathe in the batter’s box. And it’s something that he’s made a point of emphasis for himself throughout spring training. But then you’ve got some more deliberate workers on the pitching staff, like, uh, say a Jordan Romano, uh, Alec Manoa has made the adjustment so far, but he, there’s an adjustment to make Kevin GOs man’s delivery. He’s had to make some tweaks. The changes are more impactful to them and are gonna force them to make more adaptations in others.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So will it pay off for them?

Shi Davidi We’ll see, I think, uh, uh, by and large it’s gonna be a good thing. Some of the off-season moves that they made, uh, particularly in terms of focusing on outfield defense. Part of that was anticipating that there could be more balls in play there, and that outfield defense could be more important this year in this environment with these rules and potentially more balls in play. So it, it does certainly seem like the rules should work for them, but there are always unintended consequences and you never know how the psychology impacts different people. Like every other team in baseball, there’s gonna be a lot of wait and see here.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Shi, thank you for this. And listen, last question. If even Major League baseball can change, uh, doesn’t that mean there’s hope for everything else?

Shi Davidi You’d hope so, right? Uh, Saying adapt or die, it’s for good reason that it, it resonates and, and live on right. You have to look at the circumstance around you and be ready to, to change to, to the realities as they, uh, as they present themselves. And certainly the game, uh, stubbornly to some extent, but, uh, per, perhaps a little bit optimistically is moving towards that mindset.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Thanks again for this and, uh, enjoy the season.

Shi Davidi I appreciate it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Shi Davidi of SportsNet. That was the big story. For more head to the big story podcast.ca, you can always find us on Twitter at the big story fpn, and you can always email us hello at the big story podcast.ca. You can find this podcast wherever you get ’em and wherever you are tomorrow. Let’s Go Blue Jays. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.