This week is a big one for me. My second(!) book, The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball has been released and if you’re reading this right now, you might enjoy reading it as you lounge by the pool this summer. In the book, I’ve tried to trace how we got to this new analytically-soaked version of baseball with its strikeouts and five-inning starters and disposable players.
And yes, if you read my first book, The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking (which you can also enjoy by the pool) there’s plenty of both gory math and stories about my wife.
When I thought about writing The New Ballgame, it was those “not-so-hidden forces” that drew me into committing untold hours at night putting together and then editing and then re-editing and then re-re-editing 93,000 words. I learned two important lessons while writing it. One was that it’s hard to write a current events book about baseball, because very quickly, those events stop being so current. After I had turned in my initial draft, they banned the shift and turned on the pitch clock. Let’s just say I had to rewrite a few things.
The other lesson was about where baseball is going and growing and what forces will shape it as it goes forward. We know that there are forces acting on the game, and that MLB has decided to fight back against some of them. The shift ban and the pitch clock have become part of the sport, and they may even be “working” depending on what you were hoping they’d accomplish. If there is something that MLB will be remembered for in this era, it will be that the league decided to actively shape the game after a couple of decades of benign neglect.
There are two kinds of forces acting on the game, and it pays to know the difference between them. There are forces that can be changed and those that either can’t (or shouldn’t) be changed. That seems flippant to say, but it’s important because if MLB is going to try to shape the game, they’d do well to note the difference between the two.
To take the most obvious example, MLB can’t stop teams from using every legal (and um, sometimes… not) advantage that they can. If MLB is going to try to shape the game, they can’t rely on teams to do things that are against their best interest. The most obvious example here is that teams have moved toward a shared model of pitching. Starters go five innings on average and then give way to a parade of relievers, and in a baseball culture that has traditionally sub-titled its ballgames by the matchup of starting pitchers, that feels like the breaking of a norm. But there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why it’s done, just like there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why everyone dawdled between pitches and baseball games ended up taking more than three hours as a result.
That force right there covers a lot of the changes in the game. The baseball analytics movement itself is an outgrowth of that impulse. It’s been aided by some rapid advances in technology, but the basic idea—figure out the best way to win a game—isn’t new. It’s worth thinking back 25 years to just before the Moneyball era to consider how truly transformative the growth in computer power has been. There are studies that I and my colleagues have done here at Baseball Prospectus that wouldn’t have been possible back then. It’s not just Pitch F/X and Trackman and Statcast. The internet itself has allowed for standardized and automated data collection that can be collected easily and then widely and easily distributed. If you are old enough, consider how difficult it would be to coordinate collecting even a standardized play-by-play data set before the internet and then send it out via floppy disk.
If it feels like analytics changed the game rapidly, that’s probably right, but the driving force has been the acceleration of technology, and that is well outside the ability of MLB to control. And the technology doesn’t stop at the internet. Right now, there’s some kid standing in front of a camera with a pitching coach working on a slider. Don’t sleep on how important those cameras are and how much they’ve changed the game. It’s not that kids didn’t used to learn sliders before, but what has changed is the ability to get instant and granular feedback when training. The difference between an electric slider and an achy breaking ball is a few inches of break. It’s the sort of thing that can be seen by the trained naked eye, but you’re not going to get all of that break at once. Using the cameras, a coach can slowly build a pitcher and work on different pieces of the puzzle, all while showing incremental improvements. You got an extra tenth of an inch on that batch. You can’t see that with the naked eye, but the camera can see it, and the brain can process that “it worked” even as the arm is recovering from the effort, rather than having to wait to watch the video later.
One of the things we’ve seen in baseball is the slow burnout of the heater. Twenty years ago, two-thirds of all pitches were fastballs. In 2023, we’re below 50%. It’s not that sliders have gotten better. More pitchers feel more comfortable throwing them, and that has upset the balance of “sitting fastball.” That’s had some knock-on effects down the line in the game. One of them starts with the letter K.
MLB can’t fight any of that. Nor can they fight the other big force that’s shaped the game, which is the expansion of the talent pool. The game of baseball has expanded well beyond the United States and now is played in several different languages. That’s a good thing. There are more people around the world who are baseball fans and because MLB is a business, more people who are willing to buy merch. It means that the number of MLB players born outside the United States has increased to around 30%. It’s now possible to put together an international baseball tournament where the other teams aren’t just there to provide the US someone to win against.
When the talent pool is deeper, it means that on average, we see faster and stronger players. The fastest and strongest were always going to be in MLB, but at the bottom of the ladder, you don’t have to settle for someone who can throw 91 when there are pitchers who can throw 93.
If you think about all of the things that MLB can’t change, it leaves them with very few options to shape the game. They have their hands on two levers. One is that they control the rules of the game. The other is that they control the ball. We’re living through MLB playing very obviously with the first lever, and there’s probably going to be some trial, error, and refinement over the next few years. And while MLB has been reluctant to talk publicly about the ball, I’ve previously made the case that they should be a little more forthright about it.
For example, if the biggest problem in the game is the strikeouts, MLB didn’t help itself by accidentally(?) introducing a much bouncier ball into the game in 2015. In that year, rates of homeruns per fly ball spiked, and while MLB denies any tinkering, it had a real effect. With a ball that would go further with the correct pressure applied, hitters could feel a little better taking a chance with a big swing, because it was more likely to become a big home run if they made contact. Unfortunately, that meant more swinging and missing. It probably also fed into the rise of the infield shift. If you’re going to take a big swing, it might as well be a pull swing. If teams knew that hitters were playing more for pull power, they might as well set up their defenses to prepare for the pulled ground balls that went with that.
If MLB were to play with the ball, they might change the incentives inherent in the game, but if there’s something else I realized when writing The New Ballgame, it’s that sometimes changing those incentives have different effects than people intended.
In writing the book, I wanted something that looked backward and answered the question “How did we get here?” but as I worked on it, I realized that I was answering another question. What possibilities does MLB have moving forward? There’s more to the game than just figuring out who your favorite team’s fifth starter will be, or whether the Red Sox will break .500, or who’s hitting .400 this month. There’s another struggle going on and MLB is locked in another battle for the soul of the game of baseball itself. What will it look like in 20 years? How far will MLB go to shape the game? Will it seem too much like mutant baseball when we do get there? None of those questions is going to have an easy answer.
I wanted to write a book about those forces and that struggle. If that sounds like something you’d like to spend 93,000 words thinking about, then may I gently suggest that you read it.
Thank you for reading
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