They're making changes in the minors
And things will never be the same...unless they undo them later
The new minor league rule changes are here! The new minor league rule changes are here!
I KNOW, Navin!
Major League Baseball announced the new rules for the 2021 minor league season last Thursday. They’re broken down by level, so as to not change things too much in AAA, and to get more data overall. So, let’s get to the changes!
AAA: The bases are larger.
The bases have gone from squares with 15-inch sides to squares with 18-inch sides. If you have a strong opinion on this, I am happy for you and your ability to have strong opinions on irrelevant things.
It seems good to me? Makes it less likely for a runner to step on the first baseman’s ankle, and makes it harder for a fielder to entirely block the bag at second base on a steal attempt, which has been the style lately. But also, it’s not that big of a deal, I think.
AA: The defense must have four fielders on the infield dirt
When teams played the Giants 20 years ago, they’d put the second baseman in shallow right field against Barry Bonds and it was an absurd novelty. “Ted Robinson calls it the wishbone defense,” Mike Krukow would remind us every time. It was a symbol of how feared and great Bonds was that teams would have to resort to such unorthodox methods to get him out.
The pitcher would then walk Bonds on 5 pitches (the one in the strike zone was a mistake), but that’s neither here nor there.
Now, that exact shift is commonplace. Every left-handed hitter with any pull tendency — which is most of them — sees it every time he steps up to the plate. Left-handers’ batting average plummeted leaguewide too; they hit .239 against right-handed pitchers and just .223 against left-handed pitchers.
But that was an extreme outlier in a shortened season. BABIPs have gone down over the last few years, but (other than 2020) not a massive amount. Batting averages have gone down much more, because strikeouts are way up. Strikeouts are way up because batters are selling out in search of more power. People like home runs, and hitters aren’t ashamed of striking out anymore, so this is the natural progression of the game.
So Rob Manfred and company are raging against the dying of the light here, by incentivizing hitting the ball in play instead of selling out for the dinger. But the shift was already the natural disincentive for selling out for the dinger: try and hit the ball hard to your pull side, lefties, and you’ll likely just hit it right into the teeth of the defense. You’ll make more outs. Your numbers will be worse.
They didn’t care because they wanted the dingers. Or maybe they did care, but they just weren’t able to change their swings enough to make a difference. Or maybe their coaches and front office analytics staff told them to keep trying to hit those dingers, even if their batting averages dipped below .230. Regardless, the true culprit here is the strikeout, and, if anything, this rule change is just encouraging strikeouts.
Also, since minor league BABIPs are so high anyway due to bad fielders, I’m not sure that evaluating the rule based on minor league BABIP changes will give particularly good information. And I don’t know how often AA teams even put those extreme shifts on — I’ve seen them some at AAA games, but I don’t think they’re that common that the rule would have noticeable effects.
Assuming all goes well with the no-infielders-on-the-grass rule in the first half of the season — this is as much of a gimme as you will ever see in your life since there is no real baseline and MLB will be able to interpret the results however they want — in the second half, AA will implement a rule where there have to be two fielders on each side of second base, eliminating the part of the wishbone defense (TM Ted Robinson) where the shortstop or third baseman moves over to second base.
Before we move on: It’s entirely possible that banning shifts means the next Mark Grace or Tony Gwynn or whoever gets to do his thing, spraying line drives all over the place without a care in the world. Maybe I’m wrong! But I don’t think teams will be satisfied with those players in today’s game. I don’t think the incentives are there for teams to develop those kinds of players, or to stick with them when they might have the next Adam Dunn waiting in the wings.
Also, it’ll be really funny when a guy blows through AA by hitting Texas Leaguers all day long, and then gets to AAA, where they can still shift however they want, and immediately can’t buy a hit.
Funny to me, anyway. Not him. Sorry, guy.
Hi-A: Making pickoffs harder
Right now, when left-handed pitchers make a pickoff throw to first base, they can do it with their back foot on the rubber. In High-A ball, that will be amended this year, so they have to step off first. This will eliminate those grey area moves some lefties have that are probably a balk every time they do it, but it never gets called so they just get to keep doing it forever.
Like the AAA change, this one doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. It’s fine, though, I think, unless it turns out badly, in which case I never thought that.
Low-A: Limited pickoff throws, and also miscellaneous
Across all of Low-A, baseball will be limiting the number of pickoff throws a pitcher is allowed to make during an at-bat. Currently, pickoff attempts are unlimited — around the third straight one, fans start to really boo the hell out of the pitcher, which is always fun — and it is occasionally moderately annoying to see a pitcher throw over again and again and again in an attempt to control the running game.
On the other hand, that situation really doesn’t come up that often, and when it does, it adds what? Two minutes to a game, if it’s a really bad example? That’s almost nothing. This is legislating a fix to a problem that isn’t really a problem.
Individual Low-A leagues will have other changes, though. The Southeast lLeague — no longer allowed to be known as the Florida State League — is getting robot umps behind the plate. This is the kind of idea that seems good, but will almost certainly lead to some kind of ridiculous situation where, like, the machine is obviously out of alignment but the umpire refuses to step in and call the game correctly because either he’s mad about the machine being there at all or he wasn’t trained on how to do it.
Anyway, people have been advocating for robot umps for a while, so trying it out is fine.
And finally, in Low-A West, formerly known as the California League, the league will be enforcing a pitch clock. Now, they’ve had a pitch clock in the minors for a few years, but I guess this one will be shorter? Not 100% on what the difference here will be.
Very possibly my Worst Baseball Opinion is that I’m in favor of pitch clocks. The reason that I’m in favor of pitch clocks is that I have watched Pedro Baez pitch on multiple occasions. The game involves throwing the goddamn ball, so throw the goddamn ball. Nobody likes seeing a pitcher stand there for 10 seconds holding the ball before pitching. Pitching is your job. Pitch. Then get the ball back and pitch again. That’s the game.
If a pitch clock helps with that, good. It’s a good change, and I’m for it.
If you don’t like the new rules, people might tell you that it’s just in the minors, and it’s fine, and they’re just trying them out, and if they don’t work then they just won’t use them in the majors, and you’re an idiot for panicking about the death of baseball at the hands of Rob Manfred. It’s not hard to see the argument either, because that’s how things should work.
But things don’t work that way. Manfred imposed the new extra inning rule on the minors in 2018 — where runners start on first and second in every extra frame — with the idea that it would be a trial balloon and that they’d see how things went. As I documented after that season, things went fine, because the quality of minor league baseball wasn’t too much of a priority to the players.
”For the major leagues, I don’t think it’s good because I don’t feel it’s true baseball,” Gregor Blanco told me, in one characteristic quote.
It’s not that they don’t care about the games at all, but basically, once they’ve played nine innings in the minors, everyone’s ready to just go home. It’s different in the majors. It matters more there.
Anyway, the extra inning rule is in the majors now. It doesn’t matter that players didn’t want it moving there, because Rob Manfred wanted games to be shorter. They’re claiming it’s a COVID thing, but if we’re being honest, it’ll stick around post-COVID because that’s what management wants. It’s here and it’s here forever, and it’s absolutely reasonable to think that’s what’ll happen with these changes too if MLB decides that’s what they want to happen.
But on the other hand, they might be good changes. I’m in favor of most of them, and my objections to banning shifts are more rooted in skepticism of efficacy than in any aesthetic problem with it. I mean, I DO think it would be super cool if a new generation of lefties regularly hit the ball to all fields, thus nullifying the effects of shifts, but that’s a really hard thing to do, and probably too big of an ask.
As things stand, we’re going to see a lot of experiments at the minor league level. It will probably be a little disconcerting to the players, having to adjust to new rules every time they move a level, but they’ll get through it. That’s the price of the move-fast-and-break-things philosophy, and at least in this case the things aren’t quite as important as the fabric of our democracy.