Major League Baseball (MLB) is instituting a ball-bucket full of rule changes this season. They include shortening the time between pitches, limiting pick-off attempts, stipulating where the infielders can stand, using an automatic runner in extra innings, and shortening the distances between the bases. On the horizon is an even greater revolution: Having cameras and computers instead of home umpires call balls and strikes. The 2023 changes are being welcomed by some but scorned by others. The argument is reminiscent of the debates about originalism in the justice system.
Why the Changes
The new rules are intended to reduce the times of and increase the action in games. In the “golden era” of post-war baseball, 1950 to 1959 (when baby boomers like me first encountered the sport), MLB games averaged 2 hours and 29 minutes; since 2010, they have averaged 3:04, 35 minutes, almost 25 percent, longer.
Longer games would be no problem—NFL games also average about three hours and have less action–if the extra 35 minutes had brought a half-hour of more balls in play. It hasn’t. The average number of runs per game has not changed (9 in both the ’50s and since 2010) nor the average number of plate appearances per game (77 and 76). What seems to have increased are pitches per plate appearance (at least since 1999 when such data became available) and, as any fan can clearly see, the time between those pitches. The game has moved to one, as I described in an earlier post, dominated by home runs, walks, and strikeouts, all of which add time but little action. Thus: longer games with less baseball.
The fixes are meant to redress those developments. So, for example, the extreme defensive shifts that modern data analysis showed can cut down on base hits led teams to respond by training their batters to swing for home runs, which in turn meant fewer plays and more strikeouts. Thus, the logic in the new rules is control the shift and you’ll get more ground balls that need to be chased down.
The Changes in Historical Context
Critiques of these changes—which seem to come from the political right (the National Review, though not from George Will or Rich Lowry)—seem to suggest that they are corruptions of true baseball, the pandering of greedy club owners to the short attention spans and hype addictions of younger fans accustomed to the special effects of superhero movies and the violence of football.
This is where a sort of originalism creeps in. If the game is not the way Abner Doubleday mythically drew it up or at least the way “Mickey, Willie, and the Duke” played it in the 1950s, it’s not genuine. In jurisprudence, originalism (as I roughly understand it) holds that the interpretation and application of a constitutional provision or a law is dictated by the practices and understandings at the time that provision or law was enacted. Later developments—say, rocket ships, personal machine guns, leveraged buyouts, smartphones—are irrelevant. If something would or would not have been done in 1789 or 1868, so should it be now. In one notorious example, a federal judge “ruled that it was unconstitutional to take guns from domestic abusers in part because men who beat their wives rarely were prosecuted, let alone forced to relinquish their firearms, until the 1970s.” That family life, women’s roles, and the acceptance of domestic violence have undergone total revolutions since 1868 matters not.
In the much less serious case of baseball, originalist views falter on at least two grounds. One is a misreading of the history. Baseball has a turbulent past. In the 19th century, catchers stood ten feet behind the plate, fielders wore no or thin gloves, and walks required five or six balls. Indeed, in 1901, the rules called for a pitch clock!
More importantly, rule changes are largely responses to organic developments in the game. For example, in the late 1960s pitchers had become so dominant and offenses so feeble that the MLB lowered the heights of mounds, shrank the strike zone, and upped enforcement of rules against doctoring the ball. Batting averages went up. But the cycle turned again. Pitchers started throwing harder, in part because of new analytics, technology like motion sensors, and training programs, and in part because of new strategies calling for using more pitchers per game, each throwing harder to fewer batters. Batting averages went back down. A similar story can be told about the data-analytic developments which revealed so much that they changed team strategies, mainly working to weaken offenses. The new 2023 rules are a response. And they will surely spur new counter-adjustments. (Spring training had hardly started before Max Scherzer tried to finagle the pitch clock.)
Baseball rules change because baseball changes. Should our laws change because we change?
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