It's been almost two years since Major League Baseball introduced a series of new rules in early 2023 aimed at making the game more exciting while shortening game time. Some of these rules have worked more or less as intended, while others seem to have had little effect. It's time to take a holistic look at the offensive environment across Major League Baseball to see how the rules have changed the shape of productivity. We'll start with the most obvious impacts and work our way to the ones that are a bit harder to isolate from all the other factors that could be moving the league's statistics in one direction or another.
The most impactful rule change, in my opinion, was the pitch clock. Nobody is complaining about having a tighter game with the same amount of play in a smaller package. In the years before the change, the average game time ranged from 3 hours to 3 hours and 15 minutes. Last season, the game was The average was 2:42, down to 2:38 this season.This is a great change that has worked perfectly: the number of infringements has also dropped significantly this year, so disruption of play is kept to a minimum.
The return of base running and stealing was an explicit goal of the new rules. At the very least, it was accepted to reduce the time between pitches. The two major changes were to limit the number of times a pitcher could try to tag out a runner and to make the bases a little larger in the hope that there would be an added side effect of reducing collisions. These rules also had the desired results. In 2023, the number of stolen base attempts jumped to one per 42.2 at-bats, roughly the same rate that teams were running in their heyday of the 80s. In 2024, they stole bases even more frequently, once per 39.7 at-bats. These translated into stolen bases at rates of 52.6 and 50.3 with one out per at-bat, respectively.
The all-time record for stolen bases per at-bat was 1 in 1987, when players stole 1 in 45.2 attempts, so while 2024 is still not back to the league's best rate, it would represent a significant improvement. What's different between the past and the present is the overall success rate. In 1987, players stole 3,585 bases and were caught 1,529 times, for a success rate of just over 70%. With just a few games left in 2024, the results are 3,525 stolen bases and only 936 blocked attempts, for a success rate of 79%. Although stolen bases are on the rise, teams still tend to only attempt them when they have a fairly good chance of doing so safely.
Another initiative the league has put forward for 2023 is a change to the rules regarding defensive shifts. Many people have been put off by this, as a hard grounder in a spot that was traditionally a hit is now an out. It ruins the aesthetics of the gameOn top of that, hits off batted balls were at their lowest level in decades. With the three true outcomes (home runs, walks, strikeouts) now dominating the offense, it seemed appealing to get more hits other than home runs. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence that the new shift rule fixed anything. The league BABIP for 2023 did indeed jump to .297, which is promising considering batted balls have hovered between .290 and .292 for the past few seasons. But the BABIP for 2024 dropped to .291, so it's back to pre-rule levels.
A higher BABIP than in years past will not be enough to bring back the same total hits and the corresponding web gems that come with more balls in play. The strikeout rate is down a bit from its 2020 peak, but by less than 1%. The K% for that season was 23.4% and remains at 22.6% in 2024. Similarly, the walk rate has not changed much. In the 1980s, 70-75% of at-bats ended with a ball in play, rather than a walk, home run or strikeout. That rate for the past two years has been 64%, only slightly above the 2020 low of 62.4%. That means that for this year and last combined, there will be just under 120,000 balls in play. This means that, despite there being more teams and games than 40 years ago, there will be fewer balls in play than there were in 1980-84. The new shift rule alone will not be enough to bring the level of hit balls back to the same level, regardless of how many hit balls are available.
It becomes harder for teams to stop hitting home runs, and hitters become less concerned about striking out. This problem is beyond the scope of the shift rule. There is less to carry There are a few fewer home runs than last year. I don't know if tinkering with the ball is the best way to get to where the Commissioner's Office wants baseball to be, but if you slow it down, enough players are going to have to adapt. I don't think it's a good long-term strategy for the league. Strikeouts are even harder to deal with. Pitchers are so good right now, and hitters aren't going to suddenly become contact hitters after working their whole lives to get where they are now. For now, I think the three true outcomes will continue to be a big part of the offense across the league.
So what is going on with the offense? The short answer is that, except for 2022, runs scored are a bit lower than in recent years. They're not as low as they were in the 2010-2015 period, and they're not as low as they were in the '80s and the first few years of the '90s. Is the scoring environment good? I don't know what the ideal is, but I think 4.4 runs per game is reasonable. I think the form is more important than the absolute amount of runs scored, unless we go back to the extremes of the pitcher's year or the steroid era. Batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage are all at or near all-time lows, unless we go back to the '70s or '80s. That's probably not what the league wants, but the answer to increasing singles, doubles, and triples without significantly increasing home runs and runs scored is not obvious.
Personally, I think the current form of baseball is good enough. I don't think there's anything wrong with the game experience itself. We have marketable stars like Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. We also have a lot of exciting young players who are poised to become stars. These rule changes have mostly worked. The 1980s isn't actually the only best way to play baseball. Chasing home runs is fun too. It's time for the league to get a win here and find other ways to grow the league.
