By Evan Drellich
Nov 8, 2022
LAS VEGAS — Major League Baseball will be played differently next summer, and that means teams are already behaving at least a little differently this winter.
At the general managers’ meetings on Tuesday, several top club executives acknowledged they’re evaluating players in a fresh context this offseason because of MLB’s new playing rules for 2023: the ban on the shift, the pitch clock, the restrictions on pitchers checking runners and the new larger bases.
“We have done work to try to predict what the effects of these rules will be for individual players,” said Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom, “and we have and we certainly will do work to see as a team, the way we play the game, how do we win with these new rules? And that’s important too.”
Ultimately, all the changes are explicitly intended to alter the results on the field. MLB tested the changes in the minor leagues in an attempt to measure impact, and commissioner Rob Manfred and his group liked the numbers they found.
“Fans will appreciate the bigger bases which promote player safety and more stolen-base activity,” Theo Epstein, a league consultant, said at MLB’s headquarters in September. “And I think fans will cherish the moments, absent the extreme defensive shifts, when games are decided not by whether their team’s infield is positioned by the perfect algorithm, but by whether their team second baseman can range to make an athletic dive and play with everything on the line.”
Naturally, then, some players’ stocks will rise in the new look, while others’ will fall. Left-handed hitters — who are often significantly hurt by the shift — and base stealers will be more valuable, said Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto, “at least in theory.” Hitters for average, as well.
“Everybody would like to get a little faster, a little more athletic, but the bigger bases certainly give you a head start,” Dipoto said. “I don’t know that you have to have Rickey Henderson on your roster to do something, to take a step forward, in a base stealing perspective. But that’s an area where we would like to get better.”
From there, one could theorize that pitchers who are quick to the plate and catchers with the best arms and pop times might become more valuable too.
“It’s a question of, does that rising tide lift all boats, right, or does it disproportionately affect a certain percentage of guys?” Astros general manager James Click said. “Are there a certain group of guys who are always like just two inches shy of a steal that now will be able to steal more bases? If there are guys that are always safe by a 10th of a second, I don’t think it’s going to have much of an effect on them.”
Meanwhile, infielders with more range who can make up some of the ground that used to be covered by the shift could be newly coveted. But it could be more difficult to evaluate the future contributions of a middle infielder if that infielder is coming from a team that heavily shifted in recent years.
“Can’t really do that,” Dipoto said. “But we can, through Statcast data, get a pretty good idea of what that player’s natural range is.”
“I think we’re so good as an industry now and measuring just about everything,” said A’s general manager David Forst. “You see how guys move, you see their reaction time, you see their sprint speed. I think we can make the adjustments.”
Particularly at this moment, before the clubs are working off a pile of major-league-level data, the impact of the rules will be in the eye of the beholder.
Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak thought that between all the rule changes, the effect on his winter would be “pretty minimal.”
“When you look at some guys that had like extremes, that looked like they were more frustrated with the shift than the others, yeah, you can probably pencil in like five or six more hits depending on how frequently they hit,” Mozeliak said. “But overall, I don’t think it’s gonna be like that big of a change.”
“It’s very difficult to predict, especially when so many of these hitters have been in these shifts for so long,” Click said. “You never know what the behavioral effect is going to be when all of a sudden they see a different defensive climate. Are they going to change their approach or not? One of the things I’ve been surprised by in the game is that we haven’t seen, at least in my experience, the pivot from the hitters. You would think that if baseball wanted to encourage guys to put the ball in play, that the best way to do it would be to leave half of the field completely undefended. And we just haven’t seen hitters adjust that way.”
Rangers general manager Chris Young said one of his hitters, Corey Seager, will “benefit immensely.”
“He was one of the most punished hitters by the shift, and we’re excited for him,” Young said. “I think it’s going to affect every player slightly differently. I think that, in general, the game will adjust, and we’ll factor that into some of our personnel decisions. But by and large, I think that we’re excited for Corey; that should have a positive impact.”
One executive The Athletic approached on Tuesday, Chris Antonetti of the Guardians, didn’t want to discuss the impact on his evaluations at all. Likely, Antonetti declined for the reason GMs and presidents often don’t like to discuss interesting things: because they think it’s a competitive advantage to stay quiet.
Another general manager said he would speak candidly only if he could speak anonymously.
“Defensively with the infielders, at least from our team, it doesn’t seem like a forefront-of-the-conversation type of thing,” the GM said. “Offensively we’re definitely being very mindful of left-handed hitters, and I think it’s gonna benefit hitters. I don’t know if that’s all going to show up in the market this offseason, but whatever is gonna happen, it’s gonna happen here in the next couple years.”
Player evaluation isn’t the only hurdle for teams as spring training approaches. Simply making sure players adequately follow the new rules, particularly the pitch clock, will be its own task.
“The biggest thing will be, how do our key players adjust to the pitch clock?” Mozeliak said. “I’m talking about veteran players. The younger guys that came up, I mean, you watch Nolan Gorman, he never leaves the box. He’s ready to go. So for him, this is business as usual. But I think when you look at some of the older, experienced players, it’s like, how are they going to do it? Watching the World Series or postseason this year, I was just like, uh uh.”
But ultimately, there’s only so much that can be ascertained ahead of time. In a game where so much can be measured, a prediction built on the results of a different environment is just an educated guess.
“We have to stay really humble about what we think we can know before we see 30 teams competing in this new landscape,” Bloom said. “It is likely that there will be some changes with certain guys that are not what we would consider to be the most predictable right now. So I do think we need to do work. And we have done work on how they might affect certain guys. But if we let that distract us from correctly evaluating the fundamental building blocks of good baseball players, I think we are going astray.”
— The Athletic’s Levi Weaver contributed to this story
Evan Drellich is a senior writer who covers the business of baseball for The Athletic. He was previously a reporter for the Boston Herald, the Houston Chronicle, MassLive.com and MLB.com. He lived the television and radio life at NBC Sports Boston and WEEI. Follow Evan on Twitter @EvanDrellich
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