MLB’s new rules enter 2nd year as sport keeps evolving

Let’s reminisce about the top three topics of Major League Baseball’s spring training a year ago: the rules; the rules; and also the rules.

It was quite a time to be alive. After MLB instituted new rules to speed up the game, some strange things happened. A Grapefruit League game ended on a pitch-clock violation. Daniel Vogelbach starred in a base-stealing commercial. Innovations such as a twoman outfield became a thing. Umpires were calling pitch-clock violations on bat boys. Bases were stolen at a rate not witnessed since the days of Ty Cobb.

And those were just the highlights. It was Year 1 of sport-altering stuff such as the pitch clock, pickoff limits, bigger bases and the outlawing of extreme uses of the shift. So, of course, the new rules were all anybody talked about.

But that was 2023. We welcome you to 2024, when New Rules Baseball has pretty much blended into the background, unless you’re a player, coach or analyst. If you are, you are helping baseball do what it always does: It evolves.

Players and managers used the winter to dig in on what they learned from Year 1 of New Rules Baseball. They have spent this preseason figuring out how to exploit that knowledge in Year 2. And guess what? They’re not done.

“I think you’re seeing teams trying to figure out how to best manipulate the rules,” Miami Marlins manager Skip Schumaker said.

There’s also this: The pitch clock is shrinking again, from 20 seconds to 18 seconds with runners on base. (It is still 15 seconds with no one on.)

And umpires are now empowered to ticket infielders for obstruction if they drop a knee, while catching a throw, to keep base runners from reaching a base. That’s another new development, although it has been applied to an old rule.

Here’s a guide to everything you should keep an eye on in the second year of New Rules Baseball.

The two-second solution

So what have you ever accomplished

in two seconds? You can’t cook dinner, pay the bills or binge-watch “The Bear.” So, what’s more overrated than two seconds, right?

There were 310,504 pitches thrown by major league pitchers with runners on base last season, when the pitch clock ticked for 20 seconds. So, what if every one of those pitches had been thrown two seconds earlier? Each game would have been 4 minutes, 16 seconds shorter.

How are you feeling about those two seconds now, huh?

“Two seconds — it’s such a minor thing for a fan,” said the Philadelphia Phillies’ Whit Merrifield, who is also a member of the competition committee. “But if you talk to pitchers and players, it’s not.”

So, what’s the big deal?

“When you’re talking about going from 20 to 18 seconds with someone on base,” Merrifield said, “that’s a shake that a pitcher doesn’t get, for a pitch that he might want. That’s a thought a batter doesn’t get when a guy throws a pitch and he can step out and think about his game plan, think about the pitcher he’s facing, think about the sequence of the pitches he’s thrown him, think about maybe he fouled that ball off and didn’t get that swing that he wanted.

“All of that goes through your head. So, two seconds might not seem like a lot, but for us, it’s a long time.”

OK, we know what you’re thinking. This sounds exactly like the talk we heard from players last spring about dealing with the pitch clock. And what happened? Those players may not have been ecstatic, but they adjusted — because what choice did they have?

By June, there was one clock violation every three games. The World Series was played without a single violation.

So, here’s a safe bet: By June, you’ll be hearing a lot more about the latest White Sox trade rumors than you will about those two seconds.

“Basically, we’ve just got to deal with it,” Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “It’s for the fans, right? We’re listening to our fans. Do we want fans to watch and come to the ballpark? Then do it. We’re in the entertainment business.”

So, are you curious about what kind of impact that tighter pitch clock has had this spring? We were. Incredibly, that answer is … almost none.

So, why will Year 2 of New Rules Baseball be more interesting than Year 1? It’s that ebb and flow of baseball. Teams study. They use what they learned. Then they watch and see what those guys 60 feet away have learned.

“There’s a cat-and-mouse aspect to it,” Schumaker said. “I think the guys that have now been in the weeds, who have done it for a year, the smart hitters will wait until they want to hit. And the pitchers will try to get on the mound and make you look at them as quick as they can, right? So, that’s why the pitch clock is the one that’s going to be the most interesting to me — after we’ve all done it for one year.”

The art of the steal

Last month, we polled 31 executives, former executives, coaches, managers and scouts on what development we were most likely to see related to the new rules in Year 2. It turned out to be a landslide: more stolen bases.

“If the success rate is 80%, we should steal more,” a National League executive said.

“I think the aggressiveness on the bases is just going to continue to rise,” an American League executive said.

But it’s worth asking: How much higher is it even possible for base stealing to rise? We only ask because last year’s rule changes lit a fuse that produced a stolen-base explosion not witnessed in a generation: The rate of stolen-base attempts (1.8 per game) was the highest since 2012; 21 teams swiped at least 100 bases (two years before, there were five); 51 players stole 20 bases or more (the most since 1989); and the stolen-base success rate was 80.2% (the highest ever).

What makes people think this rocket has barely left the launchpad? It’s because their teams have now had time to do the math on what’s possible. And they see a landscape drastically tilted toward the local track team — deliberately, by the way, because fans have repeatedly said in surveys that they love it.

“We came out of camp last year,” Cash said, “saying these rules are going to promote more base stealing, but you don’t really know if it does. Well, now we know. It does. And we need to take advantage of it.”

If you thought the Rays were one of the teams that took advantage last year, you’re correct. They stole the fourth-most bases in the majors (160). And they were one of only three teams that even attempted to steal at least 200 times. (The others: the Cincinnati Reds and Kansas City Royals.)

But now they’re even more geared up. They’ve assembled one of the fastest rosters in baseball, according to Statcast. And they’ve accumulated voluminous data on pitchers’ tendencies — from how often they attempt a pickoff throw to the time (on the clock) that they’re most likely to deliver a pitch.

But for every action, there’s a reaction. Combating the running game was a massive point of emphasis for many clubs this preseason as well.

“That 90 feet you give up, it’s very valuable,” Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora said. “So the same way we take care of deliveries and pitch shapes and all that stuff, we have to do a better job in the dugout. That’s something that we know. But at the end of the day, that guy on the mound needs to be better.”

Obstruction reduction

Baseball has given umpires one more violation to look out for this year: the good old-fashioned obstruction call.

No more middle infielders stationing their whole leg between a base runner and the base he’s trying to get to. And no more first basemen taking pickoff throws by dropping to one knee and turning their leg into a highway barricade.

That didn’t used to be a prevalent technique. But then the rules changed last year, and base stealing became cool again. So, how did infielders respond? By perfecting their subtle base-blocking tricks. And what’s the big deal?

Take it from the Toronto Blue Jays’ Kevin Kiermaier: “I love Matt Chapman. But he sprained my wrist doing that. He’s one of my best friends I’ve ever had. But I told him: ‘I wish I would have slid in feet first because you sprained my wrist and I was messed up for three months in 2021.’ I’ve seen it happen to other guys, too.”

The proper authorities heard that enough to say: Let’s fix it. So, to do that, the competition committee empowered umpires to start enforcing a long-standing obstruction rule that had been pretty much ignored for years.

The committee thought the result would be a slew of obstruction brouhahas this spring, as players tested the limits of what would and wouldn’t be policed. Instead, there have been only a handful of obstruction calls — mostly because base running is so much more, uh, leisurely in spring training. So, when that changes next month, an Ángel Hernández moment is probably coming.

In the meantime, the league has been compiling video examples of when obstruction should (and shouldn’t) be called — and circulating them to umpires. And infielders have been trying to retrain themselves on the art of taking throws by straddling, not blocking, the bag.