Rules Changes and Baseball Entertainment

Prepare your "Ok Boomer" responses

I’ve been thinking a lot about this passage lately. It’s from the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract’s introduction to his chapter on baseball in the 1950s. James’ summation of the major league version of the game in that era described a product that was staid, drained of all energy and vitality, played out — a lot of standing around and waiting for something to happen. The kicker to this passage — which was already ironic when James wrote it decades ago, and is down right hilarious now — that baseball writers were horrified that the game had increased from a sprightly 2:23 to a ponderous 2:38 over the course of the decade is either evidence that people love to complain about things, or an indication that long term trends have been acting on the game we love for longer than many of us have been alive.

Who knows why the 1950s game was so static, so motionless. Perhaps the generation returning from the War, having spent years sleeping in a foxhole in the freezing ground at the Battle of the Bulge, was understandably moving just a little slower and creakier than normal and gradually slowed the game down into a station-to-station version of itself that previous generations would hardly have recognized. Regardless, I suspect that James was correct in his supposition that this dull and entirely conventional version of the game — in which no team sought the advantage of an entirely different style of play that might earn monikers like “Whizz Kids” or “Gashouse Gang” — likely had something to do with the almost existential attendance problems that plagued the game at the time. That dulled interest caused teams to leave foundational baseball cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York over the course of the decade.

When Henry Aaron passed away, The Ringer published a terrific article about The Hammer, which included this quote that he gave to Sports Illustrated in 1992:

We came along and saved what could have become the dullest game in history. We brought excitement, speed.

I don’t want to take that quote out of context because the point of it was that the industry then turned its back on the incredible early generations of players who integrated major league baseball and didn’t repay them for all they had done to make the game great again. Let’s understand and prioritize that point before moving on. But Hank’s throwaway point is quite probably accurate as well — that the staid and uninteresting post-War game was ultimately enlivened by an influx of talent from the Negro Leagues which brought a different, more dynamic style of play with it.

It was this fast, dynamic, scintillating game that (predominantly) National League teams were playing in the 1960s that won my heart to the game when I was a young boy. Many American League teams, to their eternal shame, dragged their feet as long and as hard as they could before integrating, and to James’ second point, that may well have contributed, for a short while, to a game that offered up different strategies of attack in the 60s and 70s, rather than just a static tableau of similarity. By the end of the 1950s, the “Go Go Sox” surprisingly stole a crown away from the Yankees, perhaps indicating a new era of play was at hand.

Of course, the reason I’m thinking about all of this today is that, for some time now, major league baseball has been sliding into a cultural moment that seems copied, almost word for word, from James’ description of 1950s major league baseball. Once again, the stolen base has mostly disappeared. Once again, it’s become a game focused on waiting for the home run ball to appear. And despite an unprecedented influx of talent from other countries and leagues that employ widely different styles of play, those players aren’t transforming today’s MLB from within. Instead, everything and everyone is getting homogenized in today’s MLB, with only the occasional bat flip around to enliven things.

While we don’t know exactly what caused this in the 1950s, today we know exactly what forces have driven the game to this point: we have drunk deeply from the well of knowledge. We simply know too much, and too precisely, what elements of the game give teams the best chance to win. We understand it too well. The same revolution in information technology that has transformed every element of our lives — that allows me to place this post instantaneously in a box in your pocket rather than making you wait a week for the newsletter to arrive in the mail — has allowed baseball executives and fans to peer inside the very DNA of the game.

It’s been a generation now since we’ve had the capacity to load every play in major league history into a computer and run those tens of millions of real-world scenarios through models to see exactly, precisely what gives a team the best chance of scoring a run, or two or three runs. Is it batters on 2b and 3b with one out (no) or batters on 1b or 2b with no outs (yes!). With mathematical certainty carried down to the decimal points, we know what factors lead most effectively to the creation of runs, and thus to the most wins.

Armed with that knowledge, teams naturally began to winnow out every element of the game that didn’t lead most directly to winning, that didn’t offer the greatest opportunity to achieve that ultimate goal. Sacrifice bunts mostly create more harm in giving away outs than they do good in accumulating bases (there are some cases where that is slightly less true). Stolen bases, unless they maintain an elite level of success (around 75%), fall into the same bucket. And, because these are professional competitors seeking every conceivable competitive advantage, the inevitable logic of competition has rid the game of those elements. The ruthless logic of models of efficiency naturally cause the game to direct its focus on those elements that bring the most success and remove anything that was superfluous to that goal. And so baseball has transformed into a Minimalist Theatre, where gestures are few and far between and freighted with meaning.

Funny thing though, it turns out that some of that superfluity we’ve dispensed with was terribly entertaining! Not the bunts particularly (though drag bunts were awesome), but the speed and dynamism in general. Stolen base artists from Bobby Bonds and Lou Brock to Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines forced you to stop what you were doing, sit up on the edge of your seat….and anticipate. Something’s going to happen!

It’s one of the greatest sensations in sports fandom, that sense of anticipation. And then the moment comes and you hold your breath — if you’re in the stadium, your brain starts the calculation, eyes darting from runner to ball and judging the speed of both. Those little bursts of mental activity are sports fan endorphins that keep feeding our lizard brains mini-bursts of tiny thrills throughout a game, giving the whole experience a dynamic ride, full of accelerating and decelerating rhythms.

This is not to speak ill of the home run, which is still the King of Entertainment in baseball. They pull the crowd to its collective feet almost unconsciously. Home runs are, naturally, thrilling to watch and certainly the at bats of many sluggers still cause us to stop what we’re doing and anticipate the moment with eager glee. But quotidien homers also come like thunder bolts out of the blue and disappear as quickly. There isn’t that build up of excitement and anticipation. The home run is suddenly here and then gone. And a game with nothing else in between the “heres” and the “gones” can feel, well, a little staid, a little static. What we need, in my humble opinion, is just a bit more running around in between the glorious shots. More action. More triples. More diving plays. I’ll fully admit I’m something of a speed freak — I’m a man who thinks Usain Bolt is easily the greatest athlete of the century and certainly the most fun to watch in action.

But even putting my personal predilections aside, I’d say that action is what we all crave in sports, and when world-class athletes start running around and past each other, the action is usually cranked up significantly, whether that’s a fast break, a deep fade route, or Maradona making a mad dash through the entire English defense to score one of the greatest goals in soccer history. Speed is an essential thrill. In baseball that comes in triples, in stolen bases, in CF running liners down in the gap. Ángel Pagán’s walk off inside-the-park home run will always be remembered as one of the most exciting plays in Giants history, despite coming in an otherwise lost season and more or less ending the man’s career. When Dave Roberts was sent out to pinch run for Kevin Millar in the bottom of the 9th in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, the entire baseball-loving world sat up, inched to the edge of our seat….and anticipated the moment to come.

Though I’m a lifelong Giants fan, my platonic ideal of a team is really the “Swinging A’s” of early 1970s. Those teams seamlessly blended all the best pieces of the game into one incredibly successful unit. From Reggie Jackson’s vicious hacks and Vida Blue’s or Blue Moon Odom’s ferocious power arms to the speed and dash of Campy Campenaris and Billy North. They even pioneered the underappreciated low batting average/high OBP types that SABRmeticians would spend decades championing in Bando and Gene Tenace. Those championship A’s brought a multi-faceted, balanced style of play that could both beat opponents and thrill fans in a number of different ways, and that variety of attack was itself a large part of the appeal.

It’s turned out, in other words, that our advanced knowledge has brought something of a Faustian bargain. The price we pay for understanding the game so deeply, so effectively, so efficiently, is these little elements of drama and tension, the rhythms of anticipation and resolution, small disappointments followed by sudden delights. Elements of entertainment have been dropped along the wayside for good, solid, rational strategies that give teams a better chance of winning. And it’s a serious bummer. Teams are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do, giving their fans the best chances to see triumphs, and the overall impression is just a little bit of a drag.

At least it is for me. I understand that everybody experiences the game in their own ways — the difference between being a fan who experiences the game entirely through a monitor and being a fan who experience it mostly in stadium is obviously huge. Younger fans might well find the outrageous pitch movement that Pitching Ninja pushes out on social media to be more than satisfactory compensation for watching guys getting thrown out at 2b or left-handers pulling six hoppers into RF. But for me, some things have been tossed aside, and I feel their loss keenly.

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All of which brings me to last week’s announcement from MLB that the minor leagues will become a laboratory for experimental rules changes this year, aimed at improving the entertainment product of the game. This is something that sports constantly need to do and most sports leagues are doing more or less annually — tweaking rules to improve the product. The NHL has changed how many defensemen can stay behind the action in order to increase chances for shots on goal, and, not too many years ago moved the lines and goals all over the ice. The NBA added the three-point line and repeatedly tweaked rules on what constitutes legal defensive alignments. The NFL is a veritable Ship of Theseus — yes, I stole that from Wandavision and I’m not too proud to admit it! — changing rule after rule after rule aimed at freeing up the passing game until the sport is almost unrecognizable to older fans. The logo’s still the same but the product is very, very different. Even baseball was, once upon a time, willing to make big changes for greater entertainment appeal, with the Designated Hitter rule the most obvious and radical change (though if you’re a fan of 19th century baseball you might know that the National League once upon a time changed fundamental elements of the game almost annually).

The time has come for baseball to tinker with its product once again and, subsequently, a host of fairly radical proposals are being rolled out in the minor leagues to see what results from them. I think there are reasonable complaints to be had about this rollout of rules — I’ve seen agents complain that it’s too close to the season to spring such changes on players and there’s something unfair about asking players whose futures literally depend on their baseball development to simultaneously be experimental lab rats in engineering a better game. I can see both of those points. If players are going to need to be ready to play in shifts when they get to the majors, prohibiting them from doing so in Double-A is a rough preparation. But I also recognize that the only way to know if these (or other) rules changes are going to produce some desired effects is to watch them play out over time in a real-world context.

So, to the rules themselves:

Baseball America @BaseballAmerica

MLB will experiment with several new rules in the minors this year. Details here: buff.ly/3tb2hKF

The rules will be staggered by level, as you can see above. It seems fair to say that all of the results are focused on increasing base hits and stolen bases — bringing more sense of action to the overall game. Some of these rules were already piloted in the independent Atlantic League, which did see a dramatic increase in stolen bases under its new rules. That doesn’t mean that everyone was happy with the changes. As J.J. Cooper has reported, there were a wide array of differing opinions on the changes from Atlantic League participants:

JJ Cooper @jjcoop36

When I talked to players/coaches in the Atlantic League, robo-umps made the biggest change. Bigger bases were pretty much appreciated by everyone (especially first basemen). Pickoff rule changes meant SBs went up dramatically. baseballamerica.com/stories/cooper…

Personally, I’m not sure what to make of them. The bigger bases strike me as an obvious safety improvement which is a good in and of itself. I’m not sure if the extra three inches is enough to tip the scale back to more stolen base attempts given what we know about effective run creation, but I’m certainly willing to be convinced. The pickoff regulations seem overly complicated to me, and almost certain to lead to some very frustrated pitchers, though I can certainly see how they’d encourage large leads and an increase in base stealing attempts. My guess would be that none of these things will really move the needle on base stealing attempts without a simultaneous deadening of the ball (and the jury seems to be out on how the new ball will act).

The most controversial new move is almost certain to be the Double-A rule banning shifts. I know that many people whose opinions I greatly respect are absolutely against this. We’ve also seen a lot of chatter on social media already suggesting that banning the shift will have no impact on increasing the amount of hits and baserunners. I’ll say that this argument is inherently irrational to my mind, as it implies that teams have been dramatically increasing the usage of defensive shifts despite negligible evidence of its impact. The proliferation of shifts the last few years has to be connected to evidence that they are having an impact converting balls in play into outs, and thus inhibiting those shifts should have a counter-effect converting more balls of play into hits. There’s also evidence that shifts have an asymmetrically larger impact on left-handed hitters to a degree that carries a whiff of unfairness:

Bill Petti @BillPetti

@jjcoop36 @jaysonst You can further parse this by comparing drops in BABIP and increase in K% by handedness. Everyone has seen their Ks increase by roughly the same rate, but LHHs have seen a 20+ point drop in BA when they do get it in play. RHHs overall no real decline in BABIP.

And, as I’ve discussed in other contexts, there’s a slightly more insidious outcome of shifts as well — teams are much more inclined to leave average fielders in critical defensive positions because they feel they can supplement the player’s skills with improved positioning. As Buster Posey (noted shift-antagonist) put it, the result is that a play that might have let Brandon Crawford show off his incredible athleticism, racing to grab a ball up the middle and cartwheeling a throw to 1b, is now just a four-hopper directly to a defender, making even outs somewhat less dynamic. Our focus shifts, pun intended, to the data collection behind defensive positioning and away from players’ athletic abilities. In other words, the shift shifts attention in the exact opposite direction from the one ex-Cubs, current-MLB hauncho Theo Epstein said the game needs:

“We need to find a way to get more action in the game, get the ball in play more often, allow players to show their athleticism some more, and give the fans more of what they want.”

I know many people think that banning the shifts places an unnecessary constraint on teams’ abilities to innovate and find competitive advantages. I’ll admit that argument doesn’t persuade me much. Rules of games frequently do nothing else but create constraints on a team’s ability to strategically pursue its goals. Certainly sending your best hitter up in any situation would be a competitive advantage. Reinserting your slick-fielding SS back into the game to preserve a lead just obtained by pinch-hitting for him the previous inning is a strategy that leads to a competitive advantage. The rules, quite intentionally, prevent teams from following those strategies. It’s what rules do. They construct barriers, often entirely arbitrarily.

Beyond that, I’m of the opinion that where creativity and ingenuity create an unappealing aesthetic experience, it’s perfectly acceptable to step in and force a change. Pat Riley created a defensive strategy that led the New York Knicks to a lot of wins in the 1990s, but most observers felt the aesthetic result fell flat and the NBA found ways to regulate that strategy out the back door. The legendary Dean Smith created the absolute Hall of Fame entry in brilliant-strategy/scratch-your-eyes-out-entertainment with the notorious Four Corners offense. When I was growing up, high school teams everywhere used Smith’s innovation to sit on leads, causing gymnasiums everywhere to ring with howls of derision and cascading boos as fans were forced to sit and almost literally count seconds draining away from their lives. I’m here to tell you, watching games that forced you to contemplate the essential meaninglessness of human existence was nobody’s idea of a fun Friday night. Was the Four Corners offense a bold, innovative strategy creating a competitive advantage? Absolutely! Did every level of the game sooner or later find a way to regulate its repugnant reality out of existence? You betcha!

Proponents of the DH have long said that nobody goes to a game to watch strategy. Of course, that was always overstated. Many fans derive tremendous pleasure from the academic arguments that surround the actual play — for some it’s a primary pleasure. Others, perhaps, focus exclusively on the visceral thrills of the game, but most of us, I’d guess, blend the two pleasures into our own personal concoction. Still, I’d say that’s about where I come down on the shift. If banning or constraining shifts does lead to more baserunners, more action, more sterling defensive plays — then I’m for it. I don’t know for sure that the data will suggest that is the result of a shift ban, but certainly shifts have increased in usage because of how effective they are at converting balls in play into outs. If fewer outs are what we’re looking for, that does seem an obvious place to start. A bigger question might be whether Double-A will provide the most relevant data, as shifts began appearing in the minors later and less frequently, and batted ball data in the minors is also significantly different than it is in MLB.

There’s also the Law of Unforeseen Consequences that is always lurking, of course. So, it’s entirely possible that none of these rules will lead to the desired results. Some might create even more egregiously unwanted results, the way instant replay has stuck us with these godawful out calls on the basepaths when players’ shoes recoil off the hard rubberized surface of bases for nano-seconds. Sometimes you don’t get what you want. Whether Mick was right about getting what you need will be the question going forward.

Still I maintain that increasing action and speed in all facets of the game, and a more dynamic style of play, increasing different styles of play from team to team, all of these are and should be desired goals for the game at large (not for the teams, who are rightly focused on winning with whatever rules are given them). It may not be one giant wave of rules changes that get us where we want to go — maybe it will be an NFL-like series of tweaks and iterations over decades that effect the desired response. Maybe “what we want” will change and evolve with the sport.

But if bigger bases or constraints on pickoffs or defensive positioning, or tweaks not yet considered, get us all sitting on the edge of our seats and anticipating a little bit more often during the course of a game, then I’d say it’s a step in the right direction.

Now I suppose it’s too much to ask to get working on longer outings from starters. (OK, Boomer!)