Last Friday, the newest additions to the Big Ole Baseball Rulebook (patent pending) were officially ratified by committee to take effect in 2023. Besides a shift ban and bigger bases, the headline that stuck out to me was a fully enforceable pitch clock. You might have seen a timer at MLB stadiums within the last couple of years, arbitrarily counting down from and to a number that didn’t impact the game being played, but now that clock will mean something next season. Pitchers will now have 15 second to throw a pitch with no runners on base and 20 seconds to throw one with runners on base, with respective penalties on both pitchers and hitters if these timeframes aren’t followed. You can complain about or applaud the rule changes all you want, but there’s no doubt that MLB baseball will forever be altered with their implementation in 2023. The only question is how the pitchers themselves will react.
I’ve talked before about how baseball is all about isolated strategy, and how the fact that you can get so microscopic with analyzing said strategy makes understanding it much easier than, say, the strategy of a fluid game like hockey. So, let’s start in the macro and then get smaller and more strategic. When this rule change came out, the first thing I thought of was how many pitchers naturally adhere to the 15-20 second rule already. Per Baseball Savant’s Pitch Tempo tracking, the surprising answer is that a large chunk of the league falls within these new thresholds, with most of the pitchers who need to speed up being relievers. I thought that was kind of interesting, considering this group of rules were implemented to, among other reasons, make the game more exciting, and what’s more exciting than a rattled reliever with the hitting team ready to rally in the later innings? I apologize for the "r" alliterations, but my point is that just putting a pitch clock in place will throw most pitchers off their rhythm because of the very existence of a timing boundary. I’m not sure if run production will go up across the league, but I’m almost certain that the volatility at which scores change will increase dramatically. Managers will have to have quicker hooks if pitchers look fatigued or work themselves into more jams than usual. At the highest level of looking at the pitch clock, mental fortitude will be the first thing that pitchers will have to overcome.
So, what about the smaller levels? Well, a crucial part of the pitch clock rule that I haven’t mentioned yet is that pitchers only get two disengagements with the batter they’re facing per plate appearance (a disengagement is any instance of engaging with anything but the plate appearance). That includes pick-offs, so the consensus right now is that stolen bases are going to explode in popularity, which I am all for. This actually might help with the increased pressure on pitchers. If a runner on first will turn into a runner on second anyway, there isn’t a lot of pressure to pitch to a batter in that situation. Walk rates will rise, in this case, but only in the calculated sense to create force outs at more bases. Pitchers and managers are already aware of this philosophy, thanks to the extra innings Manfred Man from the 2020 pandemic season. The adaptability of a team to assess a situation like this will certainly be tested, but I actually don’t think an increase in stolen bases will scare pitchers as much as stolen bases generally do.
That being said, pitch mixes will certainly change. If there are to be more runners on base, high-risk, high-reward pitches like fastball and sliders, the two most common pitches in baseball, will have to be reserved for pitchers who can control them almost perfectly. Hunter Greene’s fastball usage, for example, will have to decrease for him to survive at the Major League level, because there will naturally be more runners in scoring position that he will have to prevent from scoring. Even though his fastball is fast, it doesn’t have enough deceptiveness to induce weak contact, which will balloon his ERA to an even higher point than it already is. Pitch types that result in line drives and fly outs and pitch locations that see the highest exit velocities and launch angles will have to diminish if pitchers are to counteract the extra runners that will unavoidably be on the basepaths.
That means that off-speed and off-fastball pitches like change-ups, sinkers, two-seamers, and cutters will all jump in usage, or at least the pitchers that specialize in those pitches already will have better seasons. Ground balls are going to become so much more useful when there are more runners on base, along with the fact that infielders aren’t going to be allowed to shift as egregiously as they have for the last decade. I don’t think “power pitching” will wither away, but I certainly think it’ll be more specialized. The pitchers that are able to pound the strike zone will really pound it, because strikeouts will increase in value with the fact that outs will be a harder commodity to secure, while finesse pitchers will get trickier with their pitch sequences, wasting no time by throwing hitters off right at the start of their plate appearances.
I think the last big change that will come with this rule will occur off the field, specifically in coding languages or Excel spreadsheets. I know that people get scared when they hear the word “analytics,” but the whole idea behind this rise in baseball research is to compute what our minds can’t visualize in a tangible format. Now, that research will go up to 11. Not only will pitchers have to fine-tune their wind-ups, deliveries, and each of the types of pitches they throw, but they’ll also have to nail down their accuracies, learning how comfortable they are at throwing pitches in different spots. Low-and-away sliders are going to become way more precise than they already are, while jamming-type pitches will have to become more “scientific" in a sense. Instead of “hitting them where they ain’t,” the pitching version of the mantra will be “pitch them where they can't” (can't hit, that is).
I think I like the pitch clock rule, along with the other new rules stated in the first paragraph, but we’ll ultimately have to see them in action to fully appreciate or bash them. All in all, I’m excited to see these changes in baseball and hope that they’ll be for the better. But what I know for sure is that baseball is going to get a lot more technical, and thus, a lot more beautiful.
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