BASEBALL IN THE 3RD DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY: RULES CHANGES ARE NOT ENOUGH

[NOTE: the 1962 series resumes Monday the 19th, when we'll cover the Dodgers' 9/18 and 9/19 games simultaneously. The Giants had 9/18 off, and we interrupt that series for a post about the present...and the future.]

Rules changes have been announced for MLB in 2023. They reflect the hypertrophied conservatism that continues to plague baseball, ensuring that the game remains hostage to its own two-dimensionality. 

(Of course, singular events and individuals still radiate within the game. And that insulates the decision-makers from their actions, at least to some extent. But "out of the blue" occurrences--like Aaron Judge closing in on Roger Maris, or Shohei Ohtani settling into two-way success--can only go so far.)

As a result of the rules changes to be implemented next year, the one thing that is almost a certainty is that games will be shorter in length. Wider bases and a severe constriction of defensive shifting, however, are unlikely to have much, if any, impact. 

What matters most, as those of you paying attention this year have seen, is the baseball itself and the ballparks in which the game is played. Something has happened (we do not quite know what) to the baseball this year; it has made some difference in home run rates, but little else. The Orioles surprised everyone by pushing out their fences in left field: the difference in the number of homers hit at Camden Yards in 2022 is 20% of the total downturn in the number of homers hit in the AL this year (as opposed to 2021). That's three times as much as one would expect if the change was uniformly distributed among all fifteen AL teams.

Change. The folks running baseball want the illusion of it, as opposed to seriously embracing it as a way of rekindling and redirecting mass interest in the game. They've hollowed out the game to homers and strikeouts over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, and strikeouts can no longer be a positive event because no one can break the "positive" record. It belongs to Nolan Ryan, and he's virtually certain to do so until the earth ceases to exist. It's not quite at the same level of certainty, but no pitcher will ever break the single-game strikeout record, either. 

That leaves home runs. Judge is having a season for the ages, bucking the downward trend this year--but then again they didn't change the fences at Yankee Stadium this year, either. Deciding to leave such events to chance has been baseball's modus operandi ever since they started messing with the baseball (in 1920).

A combination of more radical, innovative rules changes and ballpark alterations undertaken in concert with carefully controlled implementation of those changes is the way that baseball can create and sustain a level of offensive diversity that has always been latent in the game, but never engineered into existence.

ADDED NOTE 9/19: There has been a lot of discussion about how getting rid of the shift will have a huge impact on left-handed pull hitters, helping their batting averages. While some of that may happen to a few players, a comprehensive look at the results for hitting ground balls suggest that it will have limited impact at best. Why do we say this? Because unlike that portion of the media that is mesmerized by Statcast data, we're able (and willing) to look back further than the advent of Statcast to play-by-play data that's been collected for nearly thirty years, and it tells us that there just isn't that much difference in the results for hitting ground balls as some folk seem to believe. 

The table at right shows the breakdown for lefty and righty hitters when they hit the ball on the ground, and it focuses a comparison between the last two years (2021-22) and two years from the heart of the offensive explosion (1996-97). What it tells you is that shifting is not changing the results for left-handed hitters all that much...and for right-handed hitters, there has actually been a modest gain in performance.

A two-part essay written here in November 2020 covered the organizational and structural changes that MLB needs to implement in order to create a dynamic league with a sufficient level of diversity across offense, a scenario that would broaden the strategic underpinnings of the game and add a fascinating, long-overdue layer of aesthetic alteration to it as well.

It involves expansion, restructuring of the leagues, changes in the post-season to create even more possibilities than what the current league structures provide, and it involves some "trick" rules that will continue to trouble (and annoy) certain readers but whose implementation would add color, notoriety, unpredictability, and a long-overdue massive uptick in the number of triples--at least in one of the four leagues that would come into existence.

IF such sounds intriguing, click the links to read the two-part essay:

https://bigbadbaseball.blogspot.com/2020/11/baseball-2024-or-four-leagues-three.html

https://bigbadbaseball.blogspot.com/2020/11/baseball-2024-four-leagues-3-bases-2-of.html

Baseball still has much to offer to those who love it. The starry-eyed approach of a Sarah Langs can produce a sizable amount of eye-rolling in some quarters, but much that is unusual and astonishing still happens and is worth celebrating. That said, imagine what the game could be like if it were organized to permit all of its possibilities, including the ones that have been systematically lost over the years. If more radical, even "trick rules" are needed to accomplish this, these should get discussed and we should get beyond what is mere cosmetics. It's time to really get to work on this...