Inside the Plan to Fix Baseball

inside the plan to fix baseball
Inside the Plan to Fix BaseballBen Alsop
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There is, inside the hearts of baseball fans, an alarm bell that goes off every time someone tries to change the game. True, the alarm is not inside all baseball fans, but it’s there for many of us, and it rings “Nooooooo!” whenever even the most subtle of changes to baseball is proposed. I don’t know that this happens for any other game.

For instance, a few years ago, the powers that be in baseball—in their never-ending and previously hapless efforts to speed up the game—ruled that pitchers no longer had to physically throw the four pitches when intentionally walking a batter. Since the dawn of the game, pitchers looking to purposely walk the hitter would toss four outside pitches to the catcher, a boring little production often played to a chorus of boos from the stands.

Well, going forward, the manager could just point to first base and the intentional walk was automatically issued. It is hard to imagine a more minor pronouncement, and yet because this is baseball, there was outrage, palpable outrage, as baseball fans (and I plead guilty) scanned baseball history to find instances when the four-pitch intentional walk had created a memorable moment.

What about in the 1972 World Series when Oakland’s Rollie Fingers tricked Cincinnati’s Johnny Bench by feigning an intentional ball and instead sneakily fired strike three?

What about in the movie The Bad News Bears when the much-hated Yankees tried to intentionally walk the Bears’ star player, Kelly Leak, only to have Leak reach out and drive the ball into the gap anyway?

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MLB hopes a strict pitch clock will speed games up to match the pace of play in the 1970s and 1980s.getty images

How could you strip such treasures away from the game? And for what? A few seconds of game time? How dare ye!

Remember: This outcry was over four pointless throws between a pitcher and catcher.

“I think you have two different dynamics going,” Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred says. “For fans, I think it’s generally about history and tradition. ‘Hey, we love the game; why are you changing everything?’ For players, it’s a performance issue. Change creates fear among players because it might affect the way they perform on the field.”

Just imagine how bonkers people will go this year.

See, changes are coming to baseball in 2023 . . . and beyond. Big changes. Game-altering changes. Why now? Well, baseball has finally decided to draw a line in the sand. The issues facing the sport have long been in the news. Attendance has gone down over the past ten years. Surveys show that baseball keeps losing ground to basketball and soccer, especially among young fans. Baseball’s shrinking television ratings are a more complicated story than many make them out to be—local television ratings are still strong—but it is simply true that the 2022 World Series was the second lowest rated since they began tracking the numbers five decades ago, ahead of only the Covid World Series in 2020.

Even more to the point: Baseball’s ever-slowing pace and the rapid increase in strikeouts have come to exasperate even hardcore fans. They have been adamant in every survey that MLB has done: “Give us more action!”

And now, yes, MLB reacts. Finally.

In years past, baseball dealt with the aversion to change by trying desperately hard not to change. It just felt safer for the league to leave the rules alone and hope that baseball corrected itself. There has long been an unhealthy faith in the timelessness of baseball, a belief that the game renews itself and that the sport that Babe Ruth played in 1927 and Ted Williams played in 1941 and Willie Mays played in 1954 and Bob Gibson played in 1968 and George Brett played in 1980 and Greg Maddux played in 1995 and Albert Pujols played in 2008 and Mike Trout plays today is, in all ways that matter, the same.

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Source: Major League Baseballgetty images

But here’s the thing: All of that is a myth. The games are not the same. Baseball has changed drastically with the times. Let’s take the year 1961 as an example. If you were a baseball fan last year, you probably spent quite a bit of time thinking about 1961 as Aaron Judge closed in on Roger Maris’s American League home-run record. Maris hit sixty-one homers in 1961. Judge hit sixty-two homers in 2022. The two achievements were put side by side.

But the baseball was entirely different in 1961. There were eighteen teams. There are now thirty. Starting pitchers completed more than a quarter of their starts then. They complete fewer than 1 percent of their starts now.

In 1961, you could expect to see roughly ten strikeouts per game, counting both teams, along with seventeen or eighteen hits. Today, you’re likely to see seventeen strikeouts per game and sixteen hits. Games in 1961 lasted a little more than two and a half hours. In 2022, games on average lasted three hours and seven minutes.

In 1961, you were twice as likely to see a triple as today, a ball hit up the middle was a likely hit, teams carried ten pitchers, a 100 mph fastball was a unicorn, very few players worked out (lifting weights was supposed to hurt players’ flexibility), and the ability to bunt was treasured by managers.

None of that has been true of late. The number of triples has continued to fall. Balls hit up the middle are outs. Teams carry thirteen pitchers but would carry more if they were allowed. You see 100 mph fastballs in practically every game. Players work out obsessively. Few sacrifice bunt, and what managers hold dear doesn’t matter as much as it did.

That’s the thing that MLB did not anticipate: Keeping the rules the same did not prevent baseball from rapidly and substantially changing. It only prevented MLB from having any say in what those changes would look like.

Enter Theo Epstein. In 2017, Fortune magazine ranked the baseball executive the world’s greatest leader, ahead of, among others, the pope, Jeff Bezos, Angela Merkel, and Elon Musk. This was just after Epstein helped guide the Chicago Cubs to their first World Series victory in 108 years. This was also after he helped the Boston Red Sox in 2004 to their first World Series victory in eighty-six years.

Now, as a consultant for MLB, Epstein is taking on the biggest challenge of them all: He’s trying to help guide baseball back to the game he grew up loving. “I’m really excited to see what is going to happen,” he says. When I mention to him that these have to be the biggest on-field changes in baseball since the designated hitter was added fifty years ago (and people are still arguing about that), he only slightly disagrees.

“The changes we’re talking about will affect every pitch,” he says. “In that way, this might make for the biggest change in baseball since the beginning of the game.”

So what’s coming in 2023? A pitch timer! Bigger bases! A ban on the shift! Even people within baseball don’t know for sure what it will all mean, but let’s look at each, one by one.


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PITCHERS WILL HAVE FIFTEEN SECONDS TO THROW THE BALL TO THE PLATE WHEN THE BASES ARE EMPTY AND TWENTY SECONDS WITH RUNNERS ON BASE

“Baseball is supposed to have a pleasing, leisurely pace. That’s a big part of what has made baseball special all these years. But baseball is not supposed to have a lethargic pace, and that’s the difference.” —Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Costas

By 2015, a year after Rob Manfred became commissioner, it was clear to everybody that baseball games were moving way too sluggishly—and just as clear that the players themselves couldn’t fix the problem. That’s when the powers that be in baseball came up with a simple idea: a pitch timer. The pitcher would have to begin his windup within twenty seconds of getting the ball from the catcher or else he’d be charged with an automatic ball.

So they put the pitch timer in the minor leagues. Sure, there was a backlash against it, this being baseball and all. Fans pointed out that one of the enduring charms of baseball is that it has always been the sport without a clock. Players griped about how a pitch timer would throw off the entire rhythm of the game and hurt its quality. “I was pretty skeptical at first,” admits former all-star Raul Ibañez, now senior vice president of on-field operations at MLB.

But baseball went forward with the tests anyway because the situation had grown pretty dire. The league has long had fan research that shows the ideal average length of a game in baseball is two hours and thirty minutes. That’s the length it had been, more or less, up through the 1970s. In those days, that’s just how the game was played. MLB officials were stunned when they watched a 1986 Mets–Astros playoff game and put a pitch timer on the screen just for context. The pitchers consistently beat the clock, often by several seconds.

“Absolutely,” says Epstein. “If you dropped a pitch timer in the 1970s or 1980s, I don’t think anyone would have even noticed it.”

But for various reasons, everything started slowing down, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s. By 2015, the game was stretching out to three hours, and it was filled with dead time—pitchers just standing there, batters adjusting their equipment, absolutely nothing happening. Something, clearly, had to be done.

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“The game has evolved,” Epstein says. “The natural cadence has changed. It wasn’t anything anyone planned. But pitchers—particularly relief pitchers—got used to taking twenty-five or thirty seconds getting physically recovered and mentally primed, working through multiple sets of signs, getting just the right one, plus hitters stepping out, making adjustments. It’s like a Broadway production.”

Well, like the world’s most boring Broadway production. And so that year, 2015, MLB added the pitch clock to the minor leagues with the highest expectations.

And . . . it was a colossal failure.

“For the first month, it definitely had a positive impact,” says Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations. “But then the game returned to the length it had always been. And then the games got even longer, much longer than three hours. After a while, we basically dropped the whole project. It wasn’t working.”

Why wasn’t it working? Good question. It took MLB a long time to figure it out. The reason was: There were too many loopholes in the rule. There were too many ways for players to avoid the time limit without penalty. Pitchers learned they could just throw to first base or step off the rubber. Hitters learned they could call time-out or complain about an injury. After a while, umpires grew increasingly lax in calling automatic balls and strikes. The whole thing was a mess.

“I don’t think it was a purposeful thing,” Ibañez says. “I just think players will take all the time they can. If you gave players in the NFL fifteen extra seconds between plays, don’t you think they would take it? I just think, as a competitor, you will use every tool you have. If you can use more time, you will.”

There was a temptation within baseball to simply give up on the clock. Instead, they brought it back but took the advice of Lester Bangs in the movie Almost Famous: Be honest and unmerciful. The time was shortened: Pitchers were given just fourteen seconds to pitch with the bases empty and eighteen seconds with runners on base. Batters were told that if they were not in the box and ready to hit with nine seconds left on the clock, an automatic strike would be called. And loopholes were eliminated. Pitchers no longer had as many pickoff attempts as they wanted. They could step off the rubber only two times per plate appearance. For example, they could throw over to first base twice without penalty. But if they threw over a third time and did not pick off the runner, an automatic balk was called.

We’ll get back to this last part in a minute.

“It’s only natural that when there are loopholes, players will take advantage,” Epstein says. “That’s a more natural thing to do, rather than adjust. What we learned is that enforcement is really, really important. Umpires have to be onboard. Enforcement has to be crystal clear, reliable, and unflinching.”

The new and more unflinching pitch clock was used in the minor leagues in 2022—and the results were utterly startling. Minor-league games were twenty-six minutes shorter than they were just one season earlier. More kids came to the ballpark. Many more fans stayed to the end. Fans actually bought more hot dogs and beer, something that the baseball executives were not expecting with shorter games.

And across the board—new fans and old—people loved this brand of baseball unconditionally. In one survey, 85 percent said that the new pace of play was “just about right.” And the more people watched games with the pitch timer, the more they loved it.

“The thing that to us was most remarkable,” Sword says, “is that it’s exactly the same amount of action in significantly less time. Teams were scoring the same number of runs. They were getting the same number of hits. If anything, strikeouts were down a little bit, so there were a few more balls in play. And it was all happening in about a half hour less time.

“That was every bit as important to us as the time. The game itself isn’t changing. The perception we were hearing again and again from fans and the players and even the grizzliest baseball personnel was that they loved the way the game felt. Everything felt crisper and more alive.”

That was Ibañez’s perception, too, when he went to see his first pitch-clock game.

“I was really surprised,” he says. “I look at the game from the perspective of a player, and as a player, change is hard. Anytime anything changes, it upsets us.

“But it took only five minutes of watching to make me go: This isn’t new! This is old! It reminded me of the pace of play when George Brett played for the Royals and Reggie Jackson played for the Yankees. It reminded me of the early 1990s, when Roberto Alomar and Paul Molitor were playing for the Blue Jays. The game just moved, like it used to be.”

The pitch timer MLB will use in 2023 is slightly less onerous. It will give pitchers fifteen seconds with the bases empty and twenty seconds with runners on base. Batters will be allowed one time-out per plate appearance.

But make no mistake, this will be a dramatic shift from the way the game has looked for the past decade or so. MLB executives fully expect games to be substantially shorter, especially because they have spent the off-season talking with umpires and players so that everyone understands that the pitch clock will be fully operational from the first day of spring training.

“For me, I don’t focus on time,” Manfred says. “Time of game is affected by many things, such as how many runs are scored, how many hits an offense can string together, and so on. But I firmly believe it will dramatically increase the pace of the game. It will take the dead time out.”

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Naturally, with a change this big, alarms go off inside many baseball fans. Plenty of people think there will be chaos, particularly at the beginning, with players and perhaps even umpires angrily rebelling against the clock and the automatic ball/strike calls. Some have predicted that the protests will be so insistent, the pitch clock may even be abandoned.

MLB maintains there’s no chance of that. They’re pushing in all their chips on this one. “It’s so difficult going with change,” Manfred says. “If you’re going to do it, you cannot have the change not achieve results.”

Anyway, while baseball executives do expect there to be a learning curve, they think that in time everybody will love the new pace. That was the minor-league experience. In week two of the pitch timer, games averaged 1.73 violations, which is way too many. By week five, though, that number had been cut in half. And by week twenty-one, there were fewer than 0.5 violations per game, similar to the number of delay-of-game penalties in the NFL.

“Players will adjust,” says Cincinnati Reds star Joey Votto. “We’re athletes. We’re made to adapt. We will adapt. I actually don’t think it will take very long.”

There has been one other major complaint about the pitch clock: A couple of studies have been bouncing around for a few years suggesting that a pitch clock could increase the risk of injury to pitchers. Sword says it’s something that MLB will certainly watch but that minor-league data actually pointed to injuries going down slightly.

“I think we have a high degree of confidence that the pitch timer is going to work at shortening the game a significant amount,” Epstein says. “As for the rest, we have to wait and see. We know that things are going to come up, especially during the transition, and we have to be humble and open-minded, making necessary adjustments. But we’re confident that we will, because the response we got in the minor leagues was so good across the board; it was so universally liked and loved.”


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THE BASES WILL BE ENLARGED FROM FIFTEEN-INCH SQUARES TO EIGHTEEN-INCH SQUARES

“Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has come to perfection.” —Pulitzer Prize–winning sportswriter Red Smith

When you’re trying to change baseball, there are land mines everywhere. Among those are baseball’s sacred numbers. You can’t mess with the sacred numbers: four balls, three strikes, three outs—these are sacrosanct. It is sixty feet, six inches from the pitcher’s rubber to home plate. It has been that way for more than a century. You are not allowed to mess with it.

And then there’s perhaps baseball’s most sacred number of all: ninety feet between the bases.

Nobody will change that.

This is part of the puzzle that has fascinated Theo Epstein going back to his days as president of the Chicago Cubs. He was asking the question that everybody in baseball continues to ask: How do we encourage batters to put more balls in play? Every survey that MLB sends out comes back with the same response: Fans want more action, more triples, more doubles, more great fielding plays.

For these things to happen, batters have to put the ball in play more. And right now, they are putting the ball in play less than at any time in the history of baseball. Strikeouts have skyrocketed. There are some, such as one of my favorite baseball analysts, Joe Sheehan, who believe that batters have little to do with it: Pitchers are simply throwing so hard and with such high spin rates that batters cannot respond. And, yes, finding ways to limit pitchers is something MLB will have to explore.

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SOURCE: BASEBALL-REFERENCE.COMHearst Owned

But Epstein believes—and I think he’s right—that hitters have also been incentivized the past few years to swing for the fences rather than just put the ball in play. And that’s a formula for more strikeouts.

“I know that as a hitter, I started to feel like it was pointless just trying to put the ball in play,” Ibañez says. “I mean, that’s an out, too, no different from a strikeout. I felt like the only way to get a hit through the defense was to hit the ball over the wall.”

Epstein had this notion: If the bases were closer to each other, that might spark some more action. Batters might put the ball in play more because they’d have a better chance of beating out an infield grounder. They’d try to steal more because they’d have a better chance of being successful. Maybe they would try to take the extra base more often.

But, as he very well knew, you can’t change ninety feet between the bases. So how?

“What happens,” a friend asked Epstein, “if you just made the bases a little bigger?”

He loved it. And in 2023, that exact thing is happening. Most people at MLB will tell you that, based on what they saw in the minor leagues, it won’t be too noticeable.

“The idea was conceived to get more balls put in play,” Sword says. “If that’s happening, being honest, it’s very much on the margins. One thing that was real was the safety factor: Injuries were down 10 to 15 percent. It gives players a little more room. I think it’s a good thing—it does feel like we have outgrown the fifteen-inch base—but I don’t think most of us are expecting it to have a particularly big impact on the game.”

“It’s the smallest change, for sure,” Manfred says.

Epstein, though, remains bullish. The distance between bases has been reduced by four and a half inches, and while that might not seem like much, you can probably remember many plays where the runner was out by less than four and a half inches. As Manfred admits: “You can’t say that baseball is a game of inches and then say that a few inches don’t matter. You can’t have it both ways.”

Plus, when you put the bigger bases alongside the new limit on pickoff plays, there is a powerful feeling that the stolen base will make a major comeback in 2023. Sword says the pairing will not turn the game into the running free-for-all it was in, say, the mid-1980s. But he fully expects the best base stealers to take advantage of the new rules.

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“I mean, look, you might not see Daniel Vogelbach with twenty or thirty steals,” Sword says. (Vogelbach has never stolen a base in his big-league career.) “But I think you could see the top base stealers stealing sixty or seventy bases again. It’s been a long time since that happened, but I think that would be good for the game.”

Sword is right: Nobody has stolen seventy bases in a season since Jacoby Ellsbury in 2009. In 2022, Jon Berti led the major leagues with forty-one stolen bases, and Jorge Mateo led the American League with just thirty-five. It reminds me of the time in 1987 when Rickey Henderson was hurt and Harold Reynolds finished the season with sixty stolen bases, leading the American League. The next day, Reynolds got a call from Henderson. He was expecting congratulations.

Instead, Henderson said, “Sixty stolen bases? You ought to be ashamed. Rickey would have sixty stolen bases by the All-Star break.”

“I’ll admit I’m probably a little bit more excited about the bigger bases than some others,” Epstein says. No, he does not expect the change to have a dramatic effect right away, but he does think it pushes the game toward more action. And he makes this argument: If the bases were, say, five feet closer together, there would be a huge stigma attached to striking out. Teams would search for players who put the ball in play.

The bases will not be moved five feet closer. But a few inches now . . . maybe at some point the bases go from eighteen to twenty-one inches. Anyway, he thinks it’s an interesting path for baseball.


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WHEN THE PITCH IS THROWN, ALL FOUR INFIELDERS MUST HAVE BOTH FEET ON THE DIRT OF THE INFIELD AND THERE MUST BE TWO INFIELDERS ON EACH SIDE OF SECOND BASE.

“If teams start shifting me like that, maybe I’ll bat right-handed.” —Hall of Famer Ted Williams

Of the three rule changes for 2023, the banning of the defensive shift is the one that MLB is least sure about. They have plenty of good minor-league data on the pitch timer and the larger bases, but shifting wasn’t nearly as robust in the minor leagues, so that data doesn’t tell a whole lot.

In other words: They don’t really know exactly what to expect. Everybody has a different opinion.

“I’m very interested to see where it goes,” Sword says. “We have major-league coaches and hitters who say, ‘Trust us, without the shift you’re going to see better hitting approaches, more offense, pitchers pitching differently.’ They’re predicting a virtuous cycle. I can’t say I’m fully confident that happens. But I’m hopeful.”

Meanwhile, others think it will have no impact at all on action . . . or make things even worse, as pull hitters swing even harder and strike out even more.

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Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto isn’t worried about the pitch clock: “We’re athletes. We’re made to adapt.”getty images

Teams have been shifting their defenses against players since the nineteenth century. But shifting really took hold in 1946, when Cleveland manager and shortstop Lou Boudreau—somewhat on a lark—put six players on the right side of the field against Ted Williams, including all four of his infielders. The first time Williams saw what would become known as the Boudreau Shift, he literally laughed. Then he hit a ball into the teeth of the shift and made an out, and teams shifted him for the rest of his career, costing him, in the words of author John Updike in his classic New Yorker piece “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” “perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average.”

The shift was used irregularly after Williams, but a few years ago, led by the analytically driven Tampa Bay Rays, teams began systematically shifting pretty much every player based on detailed statistical breakdowns of precisely where they were likeliest to hit the ball. It got to the point, one former MLB executive tells me, where baseball was like the game Battleship, with front offices determining where to place all their ships. “It’s like we took the game out of the hands of the players and put it in the hands of our analytic teams,” he says.

For years, Manfred and MLB waited on this rule in the hope that the hitters would end the shifting themselves by punching ground balls into the wide-open spaces in the opposite field. When they didn’t do that on a consistent basis, fans started to complain that baseball lacked the artful hitters like Rod Carew and Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs, who sprayed the ball to all fields so that there was no way for defenses to gang up on them.

But this was more of that dreamy baseball talk. Sure, of course, it’s true that Carew and Gwynn and Boggs and others like them were artists who hit line drives and fly balls to all fields. But what they did not do was hit ground balls to the left side of the field, which is what the shift requires.

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“I’m not a physicist, obviously,” Votto says. “But I think it would be hard to hit a ball coming at you, or close to you, high in the zone, inner part of the zone, a cutter, a slider—it would be hard to hit any of those to the other side. That just doesn’t match the pitch.

“Anyway, I don’t think that’s ever been what hitting is about. Those great hitters you’re talking about, they didn’t try to force a ball anywhere. They hit the ball where it was pitched.”

Epstein agrees: “It’s really hard to hit a ground ball the other way, especially as pitchers’ stuff gets better and better. I think that explains why the hitters didn’t eliminate the shift on their own.”

While people may diverge on the impact of banning the shift, everyone agrees that the new setup will make the game look different . . . or, more to the point, it will make the game look a lot more like it did ten years ago, twenty years ago, fifty years ago, when shortstops played shortstop and second basemen played second base and you didn’t have players hitting line drives into right field that were easily turned into outs.

It’s the last of these that MLB is particularly glad to eliminate. Since 2018, the use of four-man outfields—usually with the second baseman simply dropping back into short right field—has multiplied almost 600 percent. And four-man outfields, frankly, stink. “Sure, it’s no fun when you hit a ball over the first baseman’s head and, instead of a double, you’re not even able to run to first base,” Votto says. “I think [banning the shift] will make a difference. I think it will make a mental difference. The shift is definitely frustrating for some guys. They feel like they’re being triple-teamed. I do think it will help hitters.”

There’s another thing that MLB believes: The banning of the shift will allow good fielders to show more athleticism. Second basemen, in particular, will have a lot more ground to cover when there’s a left-handed hitter at the plate.

“I know others will disagree with me, but I see no downside,” Manfred says. “Will it impact offense? I believe it will, but we’ll see. The worst-case scenario is that people look out on the field and see players standing where they had grown used to seeing them, and it’s no harm, no foul.”


This is probably only the beginning. While everybody around baseball is bullish about these changes making the game more vibrant and fun to watch, they all concede that baseball’s biggest problem—the dominance of pitching and the lack of balls in play—will still need to be dealt with over the next few years.

And that’s a tougher nut to crack. Right now, because teams use so many pitchers and those pitchers throw at max effort all the time, hitters have felt forced to go with an all-or-nothing approach, which has led to more home runs and more strikeouts and many fewer balls in play. For more than one hundred years in baseball, one thing you could count on was that you would see more hits in a game than strikeouts. Often it was twice as many hits as strikeouts.

This article appeared in the March 2023 issue of Esquire
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For the past four or five years, though, there have been more strikeouts than hits.

And MLB knows that has to be fixed.

“We know, as much as we can know anything, that the pitch clock will improve the pace of play,” Sword says. “Unfortunately, there’s no analogous fix on the strikeout. There’s no one thing that can just balance the scales. I believe it’s going to be through the cumulative impact of many small changes.”

Those changes will be coming now. Manfred says that one of the most important decisions made during the 2022 labor fight was to create a joint committee of players and executives to consider rule changes every year, have conversations about them, and then make the changes. “Baseball has never had anything quite like it,” he says.

So, yes, changes will come. What will they look like? Well, it’s too early to say for sure, but MLB is exploring everything—from new, tackier baseballs (to eliminate the need for the rosin bag) to baseballs with different-colored seams to restrictions on relief pitchers to automated strike zones to limiting the number of pitchers a team is allowed to carry on the roster.

It is perhaps this last one that is the most promising. In June of 2022, MLB did make a rule that teams could not carry more than thirteen pitchers. Over time, if the Players Association allows it, that number might be reduced, and with fewer pitchers, you would have fewer relievers and perhaps a better balance in the game. But it would certainly create a fight.

The big story here, though, is that baseball is no longer sitting around and waiting for the game to cure itself.

“I do think it’s a real moment for baseball,” Manfred says. “All I can say is, I always look forward to Opening Day. But I’ve never looked forward to Opening Day as much as I am this year. I can’t wait to see what happens.”

The one guarantee is that whatever changes come, many fans will hate them, at least at first. That’s just baseball.

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