How New Rules Turned Back the Clock on Baseball

Baseball’s future may look a lot like its past.

Nearly two months into the season, a series of rule changes — including the new pitch clock, enlarged bases and a ban on the infield shift — has translated into a game that evokes the 1980s more than the 2020s.

At 2 hours 39 minutes, the average game is almost half an hour shorter than it was last season, and about the same length as it was in the 1980s.

And it’s not just overall game length that has changed. The new rules have also meant significantly fewer very long games. In recent years, about one in five baseball games lasted at least 3 hours 30 minutes; this year, just 2 percent have.

That change is largely a result of new time restrictions, including the pitch clock, which forces pitchers to throw within 15 seconds when there are no runners on base, and within 20 seconds with runners on base.

Fans are having less time to check their phones during at-bats this year. The median “pitch tempo” — essentially the length of time between two pitches thrown to the same batter — is now meaningfully faster than any year since 2010, when available data starts. (This is not the same time measured by the pitch clock, but it’s a useful metric to show how quickly pitchers are moving now.)

The typical batter has recorded a median tempo of around 15 seconds, down from 18 seconds last year. It’s similar to the median tempo a decade ago, but the numbers now are notably more compact: Almost no pitchers this year have had a median tempo higher than 18 seconds.

The difference is particularly stark for some pitchers. The pitch tempo for the Red Sox closer Kenley Jansen, who typically took more time than most pitchers, had climbed all the way to a median of 26 seconds per pitch by last year. This year, it has fallen to 17. That means more pitches, and more hits, per hour of baseball.

More stolen bases

Stolen bases are almost at a 25-year high. It’s partly a result of a change in the playing field itself. Major League Baseball increased the base size from 15 inches square to 18 inches square, which means the edges of first and second base are now 4.5 inches closer. The wider bases are also easier for base runners to slide into, contributing to a change in steal attempts and steal successes.

Not only have stolen-base attempts rebounded, but the success rate continues to climb. Altogether, successful stolen bases are up sharply.

Fewer pickoff attempts

There’s another reason stolen bases are up: a new rule that limits how often pitchers can throw to first base.

Pitchers can now disengage from the mound only twice per batter without penalty, which means they have less power to hold a runner close to first.

Pickoffs remain rare. On average this season, there has been a successful pickoff once every 10 games, on par with recent years. The number of attempted pickoffs, however, has gone down by more than one third. In other words, while successful pickoffs haven’t changed much this year, there are significantly fewer failed ones, which means the success rate has meaningfully increased.

No more infield shift

Then there’s the shift ban.

Before this year, teams could improve their chances of stopping a hit by using the infield shift. That is, they could crowd three (or more) infielders on one side of second base even if it meant placing one beyond the infield dirt in the shallow outfield. The maneuver wasn’t truly widespread until the late 2010s. For a century, only a small set of players, like Ted Williams or David Ortiz or Barry Bonds, drove the opposition to use the strategy, with some of the players even having particular variations of the shift named after them.

But its popularity surged in recent years. From 2016 to 2022 (the only years when data is available), teams’ usage of the shift rose to nearly 34 percent of all plate appearances, from around 14 percent. And in the last three seasons, it was used more than half the time against left-handed batters.

The result of the ban is a fielding strategy that more closely resembles how baseball was played in the past.

Before the season, many analysts predicted that banning the shift would help increase the number of ground balls that got through the infield for hits. This was expected to be especially true for left-handed batters, who, among other factors, would no longer have to contend with an infielder in shallow right field who could make a relatively short throw to first base. This year the batting average on balls in play, a useful measure because it eliminates home runs and strikeouts, has increased noticeably for left-handed batters. But there has always been high yearly variance for this measure, including a sudden drop after the 2019 season, so it may be worth waiting until at least October before declaring a verdict on the scale and cause of any change.

Other parts of the game remain relatively unchanged: The number of home runs, strikeouts and walks per game have stayed in the range of recent years. But because the game is speeding up, the number of home runs, strikeouts and walks per minute are all up. So it’s not just a faster game, but a more dynamic one as well.

[Read Tyler Kepner on how the game has gone into overdrive]