But this year’s new rules have thus far failed to hold the line. K rates did decline a little in 20, when stricter enforcement of the league’s long-toothless foreign-substance ban, a deadened baseball, and the universal DH tag teamed to end a 15-season streak of increasing strikeouts. The best we can say about MLB’s attempts to corral the K rate and the combined rate of “ three true outcomes”-strikeouts, walks, and home runs-is that those figures are no more inflated than they were five years ago. Despite this season’s revamped rule book, strikeouts are as common as they were last year. Players may be fielding more like Ozzie and running more like Rickey, as one of the league’s promos this spring promised, but they sure as heck aren’t making contact like those ’80s and ’90s icons did. When Epstein laid out the changes fans said they wanted, however, the wish list led with “a lot more balls in play.” That type of time travel hasn’t happened. “The results are completely in line with what we were hoping to see based on the minor league testing,” says Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations. Thanks largely to the clock, games are shorter than they’ve been in 40 years, and they vary less in length than they have in a century. Thanks to the pitch clock and its attendant tweaks-a more predictable tempo between pitches, more balk calls, and restrictions on pickoff attempts-the rate of stolen bases per game has bounced back to what it was 30 years ago. Thanks to new constraints on defensive positioning, infield alignments look more like they did 15 years ago, before the infield shift’s ascendance. The league has succeeded in most respects. This season, MLB set out to “restore the game to the way it’s traditionally been played,” as consultant Theo Epstein put it in 2021. It’s doubly ironic that in a year when Major League Baseball has implemented several significant new rules that have, as intended, quickened pace and increased action, strikeouts have thus far proved impervious to change. (Walks came along a few years later to address a related problem: hurlers who refused to throw pitches within batters’ reach.) It’s ironic, then, that strikeouts came to be seen as obstacles to action: “Strikeouts are boring,” Crash Davis said. Strikeouts, then, were a remedy for slow-paced, boring baseball: swinging and missing ad infinitum, or refusing to swing at all. This was every bit as exciting as you would expect.”īaseball’s Pitch Clock Has Transformed Game Length-and Not Just in the Obvious Way “A ball would eventually get past the catcher, allowing the runner to advance without risk. “The called strike rule was instituted in 1858 because some clubs would, once they got a runner on first base, refuse to swing at anything,” Hershberger says. Once someone was on first, though, another pacing problem presented itself, which soon led to the invention of another way to K. “The solution was that the third time he swung and missed, the ball was in play regardless and he had to run for first.” “The swinging strike was the earliest identifiable addition to the game, put there in response to the batter who was hopelessly flailing, making everyone else stand around and wait for him to successfully put the bat on the ball,” says historian Richard Hershberger, author of Strike Four: The Evolution of Baseball. Without them, the sport’s pioneers discovered, the game got bogged down. Once upon a time, strikeouts weren’t a cause or symptom of baseball’s lack of action.
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