Phillies' outfield Kyle Schwarber
Scott LaMar/WITF
Baseball will be different this year as season opens with new rules
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Scott LaMar
Scott LaMar/WITF
Phillies' outfield Kyle Schwarber
Airdate: March 28th, 2023
The Major League baseball season begins Thursday and games will be different this year. That’s because MLB has instituted a number of rules changes that are designed to speed up the games and create more action on the field.
Pitchers will have 15 seconds with no one on base and 20 seconds with runners on base to throw pitches. Batters will have to be ready in the batter’s box in eight seconds. The bases will be larger (18 inches compared to 15 inches) and two infielders will have to position themselves defensively on each side of second base rather than in a “shift” with three or four infielders on one side of second. Pitchers are limited to throw over to first base twice when a runner reaches base.
Baseball writer and author Andrew Linker appeared on The Spark Tuesday where he pointed out that the new rules — specifically the pitch clock — have been used in minor league games and it did make games go faster,”It definitely sped up the game. For example, last year in the minor leagues for nine inning game, the average time was 2 hours and 39 minutes, which was down 20 minutes.”
Baseball in recent years has been dominated by analytics — statistical analysis of many, many categories. The result has been more batters trying to change the “launch angle’ of their swings to hit home runs and strikeouts have increased and not evenly viewed as a negative. The new rules are designed to lead to more stolen base attempts and action,”Teams don’t take as many chances trying to steal bases because outs are so precious. It’s funny because they talk about outs being so precious. They don’t want to take a chance on having a runner thrown out. But they’re okay with teams averaging ten strikeouts a game. And if they sat down and looked at it analytically speaking, if your team strikes out nine times a game, which is perfectly acceptable by today’s standards, you only play in a six inning game, aren’t you?”
The World Baseball Classic that was won by Japan last week over the United States generated a lot of excitement for baseball that may carry over into the season as Linker suggested,”That was a terrific two weeks. They had terrific pools set up. Everyone was competitive. If you watched the final game between Japan and the United States and if you’d said two weeks before going into the tournament that you had Shohei Ohtani facing Mike Trout with the game on the line, you would have been salivating. Want to see that match up? And it didn’t end well for the United States, but it ended great for baseball because this has people talking about it.”
