In baseball’s new rules, sacrifice flies

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.”