SoylentNews

dalek [soylentnews.org] writes:

Several days ago, a New York Times article titled "How New Rules Turned Back the Clock on Baseball" [nytimes.com] was posted over at Hacker News. The 2023 Major League Baseball (MLB) season has adopted several rule changes including implementing a pitch clock, limiting pickoff attempts, increasing the size of bases, and banning extreme defensive shifts. The results have been dramatic, with a much faster pace of play and a large increase in stolen bases. It is an effort to undo many trends in the game that have been influenced by the rise of advanced metrics.

Statistics have always been a part of baseball, whether it's trying to hit .400, strike out 300 batters, or trying to hit 60 home runs in a season. In the 1990s, typical statistics to measure hitting success were batting average (BA), home runs (HR), and runs batted in (RBI). Pitchers were evaluated with statistics like strikeouts (K), wins (W), earned run average (ERA), and walks and hits per inning pitched (WHIP). During this era, there was an increase in the amount and type of data collected during games, providing far more details for statisticians to analyze.

Some of these statistics like BA, HR, RBI, K, and W really aren't great indicators of the value of a player. For example, wins are heavily influenced both by a team's lineup and the defense behind a pitcher, so they don't correlate well to the quality of a pitcher. Home runs are valuable to an offense, but it's a count instead of a rate, meaning it's influenced heavily by how many plate appearances a hitter receives and how often the hitter takes walks. Statistics like ERA and WHIP were better because they presented as rates, though they were still influenced significantly by the quality of a team's defense. The development of advanced metrics, which are newer and more insightful statistical tools, provided a lot of insight into what is actually valuable to a team's success.

In the present day, statistics like weighted on-base average (wOBA) [fangraphs.com] and wins above replacement (WAR) [fangraphs.com], in addition to many others, are commonly used to measure the value of players. These statistics attempt to determine the true value of each play to a team's success and present them in a single metric. For example, examining the seasonal constants used to calculate wOBA [fangraphs.com] shows that stolen bases aren't particularly valuable compared to even outcomes like taking a walk. It also shows that home runs are more than twice as valuable as a single. This was one factor in changing the typical approach taken by batters.

In some cases, the advanced metrics also differed significantly from conventional wisdom. For many decades, hitters were generally expected to change their hitting approach with two strikes, sacrificing power for just trying to make contact with the baseball. However, advanced metrics revealed that strikeouts weren't much worse for a team's success than groundouts or flyouts. The result was a more aggressive approach to hitting with two-strike counts, accepting much higher strikeout rates in exchange for more doubles, triples, and home runs. Additionally, there is significant value in just getting on base, and walks (BB) are valued almost as much as singles. Hitters generally swung more aggressively at pitches inside the strike zone but also avoided chasing pitches outside of the strike zone.

The result was a trend toward an increase in the three true outcomes [baseball-reference.com] (HR, K, and BB), which are plays where only the pitcher and catcher are involved in the defense. In front offices, nerds displaced people who had significant experience playing baseball, because teams coveted their skills in processing and analyzing data. But for many fans, the game had become much less interesting, with slower games and less action involving defense and baserunning. Baseball had been largely optimized with more data collection and many advanced metrics to evaluate players, but the result was a boring product for fans.

There's no way to take the analytics out of baseball, and teams aren't going to start replacing the nerds in front offices with people who have more playing experience. Instead, MLB introduced several new rules this season designed to make the game more entertaining and reduce the negative impacts from expanded use of advanced metrics. Although it has not completely reverted the game of baseball back to the 1990s, the statistics in the New York Times article show that the rule changes have created a faster-paced game with more baserunning.

Original Submission