Are MLB's new rules helping hitters close the gap with pitchers?

Baseball this year is — as you might’ve heard — quicker. Whether you think it’s a gross corruption of the unfettered escapism inherent in a summer afternoon spent at the ballpark or the better-late-than-never savior of a sport that has been slowing down in an era of shortened attention spans, the pitch timer is upon us. It’s the simplest and most dramatic in a slate of rule changes that went into effect starting in spring training after years of being workshopped in the minors.

Experts, aficionados and anyone trying to convince naysayers that the point is not that less baseball is better will clarify that the problem was not primarily length of games so much as pace of play. Pedants will quibble that calling it a “pitch clock” ignores the fact that batters are subject to time restrictions as well.

All of that is true. And frankly, so are reports and instances of praise that focus solely on the minutes shaved off the total time — not for nothing, the opportunity to get home by 10 p.m. probably makes a midweek game a lot more accessible for many fans. But all of this also elides another very much intended outcome of the cumulative rule changes: Helping hitters regain some ground in a game that can’t help but favor pitching and defense.

“No, I don't,” Detroit Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said this spring in response to whether he thinks MLB hitting can ever catch up to MLB pitching. “I don't because it's not as completely controllable. I mean, we can do so much with the ball in our hands, where hitting will always be a reactive sport.”

This has been an interest of mine for a while — hitting has always been a study in failure, yet modern advancements have focused, for good reason, on optimizing getting outs. Last year, I wrote (along with Zach Crizer) about the cutting edge and somewhat surreptitious technology teams were employing in an effort to give their hitters a fighting chance against the modern pitcher’s all-but-unhittable arsenal. But you don’t have to go that far into the weeds to see how the scoring environment — by which I mean the lack thereof — has been a growing crisis in the game.

In May 2022, ESPN published a thorough and damning look at the total absence of offense just a month into the season, when teams were “scoring the fewest runs per game in four decades, posting the worst OPS in more than 50 years and hitting for the lowest batting average ever one month into the season.”

Drawing attention to it didn’t fix anything, of course. The 2022 season ended with the lowest league-wide batting average since 1968, the Year of the Pitcher — even though 2022 was the first year of the universal designated hitter and the year after the league cracked down on sticky stuff in an effort to curtail pitchers’ runaway dominance in what had been widely dubbed the Year of the Pitcher, Part 2.

Starting in 2019, MLB tried to cap the number of pitchers a team could carry on its active roster to stem the tide of guys with otherworldly stuff coming out of the bullpen one inning at a time. That year, FiveThirtyEight published a study on how “relievers have broken baseball” because “more relievers mean more strikeouts.”

Baseball Prospectus encompassed that idea and more in a widely salient and oft-cited piece, titled “We Need a Restrictor Plate for Pitching,” addressing the primary problem with the sport: “Pitchers are increasingly dominating a majority of hitters, and hitters are dominating a minority of pitchers and mistake pitches, in an increasingly all-or-nothing game.”

But you watch baseball, so you already know this, or at least the gist of it. Non-home-run offense has been at an all-time low, and batters are swinging for the fences not because they lack appreciation for the aesthetics of small ball but because that’s often their only hope of scoring in an environment so hostile to hits.

That problem, already baked into the structure of the sport, was seemingly only exacerbated by the analytical and technological arms race happening behind the scenes of every organization.

Can hitting ever catch up to pitching?

“I'm skeptical that it will,” Baltimore Orioles general manager Mike Elias said when posed the same question about hitting catching up. “Hitting is more complicated because there's obviously a physical swing element, but there's also a timing element or bat speed element. Most of all, there's so much going on above the neck, and by that, I mean your brain and your eyes, swing decisions and not having horrible, negative thoughts enter your mind at the exact wrong split-second.”

Even executives who are a little more hopeful — “The short answer is sure. I mean, I think that it's possible,” Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins said — aren’t all that optimistic — “but the longer answer is it’s going to be very difficult.”

“So much of the early stages of the information revolution favors the pitcher because it’s just easier to put that information into play,” Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom said. “Which doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do with hitters.”

How?

“Life finds a way,” he offered.

But even the people whose job it is to find that way aren’t so sure. Jeremy Barnes, the New York Mets’ hitting coach, explained that pitchers can better replicate game situations in their training, perfecting their best pitches and pushing for top velocity while throwing off the same mound they’ll use to face opposing hitters. Technology helps them evaluate what they’re working with, even when there’s no one in the box.

Hitters, however, can’t face competitive pitches on command.

“So we're constantly having to try to simulate the game, where they don't have to do that,” Barnes said. “And trying to overcome what we call part practice.”

That inequity and the realization that he’s fighting an uphill battle in trying to prepare batters for increasingly nasty stuff doesn’t frustrate Barnes. “It’s what we signed up for,” he said.

In other words, he has to work within the existing parameters. MLB, however, has the power to change those parameters.

Are the rule changes helping hitters?

And this year, that’s exactly what the league did. The pitch clock should not only speed up games and shave some of the dead time but also prevent pitchers from always throwing at max effort, which, in turn, should neutralize the flamethrowers just a little.

Among the other new rules, shift bans are billed as a chance for infielders to demonstrate their athleticism and defensive range, but that’s just another way of saying they won’t be able to get to as many balls in play, thereby, hopefully, boosting the league-wide (and certainly lefty) BABIP (batting average on balls in play). Finally, bigger bases and pick-off limits should be a boon to the long-dormant running game.

How’s it all working? Well, the effect on overall game time has been the easiest to assess through the first week of the season, with games averaging 2:37 so far in 2023, compared to 3:06 for the full season in 2022.

Beyond that, running not only has been more common, but also it’s more advantageous, as both attempts and success rate on stolen bases have risen. Through the first week of games last year, there were 0.7 stolen bases per game (that’s both teams combined), with a 68.5% success rate. So far this season, the rate of stolen bases is up to 1.36 per game, with a success rate above 80% — which, if it holds, would be the highest in more than 100 years.

The shift ban should ostensibly make hits easier to come by, and while there are a lot of factors at play — especially when using early 2022, which followed a shortened spring training, as a baseline — there’s evidence that it’s working. Through the first week last year, league-wide batting average was .230, and BABIP was .278. So far this season, hitters are enjoying a .247 average and a .294 BABIP. It’s worth noting as well that offense is generally lower early in the season; by the end of 2022, league-wide average was up to .243 and BABIP to .290, so we can reasonably expect 2023’s numbers to improve even more.

(Caveat: The league-wide strikeout percentage, walk percentage and home runs per nine innings are also all up, if only slightly, so it’s not as if we’ve moved to a post-Three True Outcomes world.)

One week into the 2023 season, it would be easy to look at those numbers, all heading in the desired direction, and declare MLB’s efforts to put its hand on the scale a success. That could very well be true — after all, these rules were tested thoroughly in the minors and deemed able to do what was intended. But remember, it’s not simply that pitching had a head start; it’s also that advances tend to favor pitching.

Perhaps going forward, starters will be forced to recalibrate their effort on each pitch to account for the clock, or perhaps they will be pulled even sooner in games as teams lean more heavily on the cavalcade of relievers to accommodate early fatigue. Maybe teams will run more now that they’ve seen how viable it is, or maybe pitchers will adopt a slide step or otherwise adjust to hold runners despite their limited pickoff opportunities. Even before the defensive positioning rule went into effect, analysts were identifying loopholes and workarounds. And, as ever, the likelihood that a hitter simply makes solid contact remains closer to impossible than probable.

Which doesn’t mean MLB was wrong to implement rule changes that favor hitters. Just that the league might have to do it again someday.