'There's Going to Be a Learning Curve': Brewers Bracing for (Non-)Impact at Bases

[Matthew Trueblood]

In Tuesday's Cactus League contest against the Angels, Milwaukee Brewers first baseman Tyler Black was called for obstruction on a pickoff throw to first base--one of the early reminders of a new point of emphasis for umpires in 2024. It was the talk of the clubhouse Wednesday morning.

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

Early Wednesday morning, manager Pat Murphy approached a table around which sat several Brewers infielders, to talk more about how to make plays around the bases under what will amount to new rules this coming season. While it has never technically been legal for a fielder to block the path of a runner toward their base unless they possessed the baseball, the custom has long been for first basemen to plant a foot squarely in the middle of the lane to the base for a retreating runner, and for middle infielders to drop a knee in front of the base as an arriving would-be basestealer tries to slide in. This year, those will be automatic safeties for the runner, as the league (including Joe Torre, the special assistant to the commissioner; Torre was present in Tempe Tuesday) urges umpires to award those bases and discourage any setup by a fielder that invites or forces a collision.

While the call came as a bit of a surprise to Black, the Brewers seem largely pleased with the change, as long as it's implemented judiciously.

"I think there’s gonna be a learning curve there, for everybody involved," Murphy said in his Wednesday media session. "MLB makes changes, and if we’re objective, they get it right. They just do. There are a lot of people trying to do this, and they’re trying to get it right, and I think they deserve more credit.

"Now, the interpretation of it and how everybody calls it—how it affects the game, and the justification of calling it, and do you call it just because technically they did it, or do you call it because it had an impact on the play? And is that too much for anyone to digest? Just like when they put in the home plate rule in the beginning, there was a learning curve there."

While everyone wants the game to remain intense and hard-fought, safety is a priority on which everyone seemed able to agree.

"You want to keep guys safe," said Brice Turang, whose speed and position mean he's often right in the middle of the plays that will be most affected. "You don’t want guys getting hurt, dropping knees down and stuff. I get the rule change. Stealing a base and diving into second headfirst and a guy’s knee is down, and you have nowhere to go except for into him—you want to be healthy, you want to be safe. I get that you want to get the out, but at the end of the day, dropping a knee down in front of the base can be dangerous."

At the same time, everyone wants transparency about where exceptions or carve-outs might exist within the rule--not so that they can abuse them, but to avoid letting an out or a base go unclaimed due to hesitation that wasn't necessary. Turang said the team still didn't have that kind of clarity from the league as of Wednesday morning, but the clubhouse closed early for a position-players meeting focused on baserunning, in which the subject was discussed at greater length.

"Sometimes, you don’t purposely drop a knee," Turang explained, pivoting from baserunner to defender in his perspective. "That’s just kind of where the ball takes you, or it’s a little low, and you’re trying to pick it. You’re trying to read the throw, you’re going off the throw, there’s a lot of stuff going on. You just do what you naturally react to do."

Undoubtedly, there will be odd plays on which the unusual direction or urgency of the play takes over and a collision happens, even if everyone goes in with the best possible intentions and even after this rule change. Hence Murphy's demonstration and table talk Wednesday morning.

Garrett Mitchell knows all too well how quickly the stakes get high in this area. The play on which he sustained a season-wrecking injury last April was precisely the kind of strange, high-leverage, slightly confusing play on which the game might still break the bonds of the new rules and make things difficult. He was advancing to third base on a ground ball to the right side, in the top of the 10th inning of a tie game in Seattle, and the hurried movement to set up for and receive the throw by Mariners third baseman Eugenio Suárez might now be considered a violation of the rules. Certainly, the irresistible momentum of the play forced Mitchell into the hard, wide slide he attempted, which resulted in a severe shoulder injury that would cost him most of the campaign.

"I think, yeah, there’s a chance that it probably would have changed the way that play would have gone," Mitchell said Wednesday. "But more than anything, they’re making things a little bit easier for us to have a direct path to the base and not have it be blocked off, so that’ll be nice going forward."

As was true of the catcher collision rule instituted after Buster Posey's catastrophic knee injury on a play at home plate in 2011, this one is a matter of balancing probabilities against payoffs. Most plays at any given base will be more exciting if ungoverned by any rules about how players use their bodies to create space or force an opponent out of position. When things go wrong, though, the result has a chance to be career-altering for a player and a drag on the game, nationally. The league has decided not to risk those huge negative returns, even if it means making a large number of plays slightly less thrilling.

The same balancing act applies to the players' choices about equipment, but interestingly, they take the opposite tack when facing such dilemmas. Pitchers, for instance, have resisted various versions of protective headwear, electing the small but terrible risk of a line drive that could prove career- or life-threatening. Mitchell noted that his oven mitt-style sliding glove might have contributed to the injury, too. Because those gloves are designed to prevent impact injuries like jammed fingers on contact with the bag, they can make it harder to grip the base with one's hand on wide slides--leading to more strain further up the kinetic chain.

"I still wear it, of course, so I don’t wanna completely change the way I go about playing the game because of something that was a freak accident," Mitchell said. "I’ll still wear them, because like I said, I do want to be able to protect my fingers—or even my wrist, from getting jammed up on the base. But it sucked."

Maybe that makes the most sense, and is the right way for the game and its players to guard each other. The players err on the side of being daring, and the league errs on the side of protecting them from the negative repercussions of that risk-taking. For some old-school fans, it might feel strange to see lanes opened to runners and the physicality of the game diminished, but as Murphy said, that kind of change is sometimes necessary for just that reason.

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[Brock Beauchamp]

This will be an interesting rule change to see play out because it's such a natural movement by infielders, trained over years. And it's not *particularly* dangerous, as it's just a knee or foot placed in front of a runner (I'm not saying it's safe, only much lower wattage than the home plate rules changes).

I'm fine with the idea of this, just curious to see how it unfolds.