In baseball’s new rules, sacrifice flies

The national pastime will pitch artistry over analytics, team play over individual glory.

|
AP
Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw returns to the dugout after being pulled from the mound during a March 16 spring training baseball game in Glendale, Ariz.

It turns out that watching people adjust velcro is boring.

That, on the surface at least, is the problem that Major League Baseball is trying to solve. When opening day arrives next week, a slew of new rules will give the national pastime a jolt. The bases will be bigger. Infielders will be confined to their positions. And for the first time, a game that was never bound by time will have a clock.

The changes are meant to quicken a game that has become insufferably slow. Batters won’t readjust their gloves between pitches anymore. Pitchers won’t have time to stroll the mound between throws. But if fans return to the ballpark (total attendance at home games dropped by 15 million between 2007 and 2022), it may be something less material than a pitch clock that draws them back – a restoration of the game’s inner qualities: selflessness toward teammates and heart to make the sport less about analytics.

“When you look at what happened to baseball with ... massive amounts of data, ... a lot of intellect applied to these optimizations, successfully, to sort of get ahead and thrive and succeed, it was at the expense of something beautiful, something organic,” said Theo Epstein, a former executive for the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs who has helped draft the new rules. After a month of spring training, he told The Athletic last week, “the games now look like the games ... when I was a kid.”

The heart of the game was always making it the next 90 feet (the distance between bases). Sure, home runs were crowd-raising. But stolen bases or a solid cut up the middle mattered more. Geometry brought the game into a perfect balance of speed and distance.

But modern sabermetrics undid it. As statistics have become more complex and multidimensional, strategy has become more one-dimensional. The result is less artistry and more predictability, more home runs but fewer base runners. Power matters more than hustle. In January, one baseball historian offered a bleak indictment: “We have to accept that, unless there is a historic re-direction, a radical change in the trend line, over the next generation the ratio will be 3 to 1 or higher in favor of the selfish type of hitter. ... It is not really a ‘team’ game anymore; it is a game of individual actions.”

Yet like opening day, hope springs. The new rules limit how much time pitchers and batters have to set up. Managers can no longer shift defenders based on the hitting stats of individual batters. The results are measurable. The average spring training game was 25 minutes shorter than last year’s average. Base-stealing attempts doubled. There are more base hits, more runners, and more pick-off throws from home plate.

“It made for one of the most fascinating, closely watched spring trainings ever,” baseball writer Jayson Stark observed.

Or, as Texas Rangers second baseman Marcus Semien described a recent game, “it felt like baseball.” 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to In baseball’s new rules, sacrifice flies
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2023/0324/In-baseball-s-new-rules-sacrifice-flies
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe