More Tweaks to the Rules Will Push Baseball's Evolution Forward in 2024

The headline-grabbing change coming to baseball in 2024 is a further truncation of the interstices between pitches. Instead of starting at 20 seconds with runners on base, the pitch timer will count down from :18. That's a small change, but it emphasizes the seriousness of the league's commitment to maintaining the gains we saw in pace of play after the timer was implemented. The justification for the change was a slight upward creep in average game time as the season went along, but as I've said before, the real benefit to fans isn't the few minutes a shorter timer might shave off of a game. 

Rather, the chief benefit will be that the shorter timer will further subject players to the squeeze of the clutch moment. We watch sports to see grace under pressure. The pitch timer stops players from escaping and neutralizing that pressure. Shortening it increases that pressure, and makes the grace or poise a player shows within it more compelling. I say, bring it on.

For the same reason, I'm excited about the fact that the league is reducing the allotted number of mound visits for each team in each game, from five to four. My least favorite thing about the NBA, until the last couple of seasons, was always that teams were allowed too many timeouts. At the other end of that spectrum, of course, lies soccer, where the players have to do almost all their own gameplanning and adjustment-making once the game gets moving. I much prefer that, because while I appreciate and value the role coaches play in giving the action of sports structure and purpose, I want the players to feel a bit alone. I want them to have to make or break the play themselves. At the very least, though, calls for timeout and the attendant conferences with non-player personnel should have a cost you can feel. Eventually, I'd love to see the number of visits allowed whittled down to three, but this is a good start.

Speaking of my problems with the NBA, though, by far my biggest one these days is that fouls are reviewable. I don't have blanket disdain for instant replay, but I'm a big believer in keeping its application confined to the important, the obvious, and the objective. I also don't think badly disrupting game flow is a price worth paying to get a call right in most cases--and certainly not in nitpicky, subjective ones. For that reason, I'm very much on board with the other big change being applied in 2024. The runner's lane along the foul lines will be widened. Rather than a runner heading to first base needing to stay within the three-foot lane just outside the foul line, they'll have the right of way to be slightly inside the line, too. All they have to do is clear the grass and get onto the dirt track on which the line is painted. That's an overdue fix for a bad rule. 

Way too many times in the last several years, batter-runners have been called out for interference because a catcher's throw either hit them or was materially affected by that batter-runner being just inside the baseline. That shouldn't be the batter-runner's problem. A pitcher or catcher should have to clear the lane of their throw, within reason. Running straight to the bag but having the geometric genius and proprioception to take up the right space along the line to make a throw harder should be rewarded. I love that the league has figured those things out.

The final change made me chuckle, in a good way. Twenty-four times in 2023, teams removed a pitcher who had come out to warm up for an inning before that pitcher actually faced a batter. Presumably, in most cases, that was in response to pinch-hitters being sent up by opponents. That's not many times, but the annoyance of it--and, in all likelihood, the low-grade confusion it caused for fans--was out of proportion to any real benefit teams gleaned from it. The league made that illegal. Now, any pitcher who comes out to warm up for an inning has to face a batter. It's an easy win: a tiny, rarely needed rule that will nonetheless pulverize one of those sequences that makes even diehard baseball fans roll their eyes and say, "Oh, come on."

What do you think of this year's round of rule changes?