Could this be the end of situational relievers? Major League Baseball made a proposal on Jan. 14 suggesting a rule requiring pitchers to face a minimum of three batters, sources told The Athletic. The Athletic also reported the Players Association made a counterproposal, addressing concerns the players have about service-time manipulation and competitive integrity. Sources also told the website that one of the changes the union proposed is a lowering of the team’s draft position for failing to reach a specific win total in a certain number of seasons. The Players Association also reiterated a long-time request, proposing that the designated hitter be implemented in the National league, too. That move likely would increase offense, but could meet resistance from NL owners, who may not be enthusiastic about paying more for an extra offensive bat. The proposal from the two sides for different ways to improve the game is likely just the beginning with more ideas and trade-offs expected to be discussed in the coming weeks, according to the report. If no deal is reached, however, commissioner Rob Manfred still can make some pace-of play changes. The collective bargaining agreement empowers the commissioner to unilaterally implement three elements he formally proposed last year, according to sources — a 20-second pitch clock, a reduction of mound visits from six to five and a rule placing a base runner on second base in spring training games and the All-Star Game when the score is tied after the 10th inning. The current proposal by MLB includes a slight tweak from the above provisions, reducing mound visits from six to four in 2019 and four to three in 2020. It also includes an expansion of rosters from 25 to 26 in 2020, with an accompanying reduction from 40 to 28 in September. According to a previous report by the Associated Press, baseball also has proposed increasing the minimum time a player spends on the disabled list and amount of time an optioned player spends in the minor leagues from 10 to 15 days. If the three-batter minimum rule is approved, it likely would increase the importance of the starting pitcher and also could limit the number of openers — relievers starting games.<doc-sep>Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association are discussing major rule changes that would impact the league on and off the field, an official with knowledge of the negotiations confirmed to USA TODAY Sports. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because negotiations are ongoing. The proposals were first reported by The Athletic. Some of the more dramatic changes include a universal designated hitter, a three-batter minimum for pitchers and a 20-second pitch clock. Other proposals include a trade deadline before the All-Star break, the expansion of rosters to 26 players – with a 12-pitcher minimum, draft benefits for winning teams and penalties for losing teams, regulations that would allow two-sport amateurs (like Kyler Murray) to sign major-league deals and a study to lower the mound in the majors. One of commissioner Rob Manfred's major initiatives during his tenure has been to improve the game's pace of play, something the pitch clock and three-batter minimum for pitchers would theoretically address. While baseball's collective bargaining agreement doesn't expire until 2021, both MLB and the players' association have agreed to revisions in recent years, including a 2018 amendment that limited the number of mound visits to six per game. HOT TAKE: Be careful what you wish for with rule changes MLB 2019:100 names you need to know for new season PEDROIA:Red Sox stalwart plans his comeback<doc-sep>Baseball is a sport in crisis. The drive for profit has swallowed, transformed, and expelled the drive for on-field victory like yesterday’s yogurt parfait. Attendance is down, a work stoppage after the 2021 season looks increasingly unavoidable, and after three more years of noncompetitive behavior from a majority of the 30 MLB teams, a work stoppage will probably feel like an act of mercy when it comes. But fear not: The league and the MLBPA have ordered the band to strike up “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and are considering rewriting some of the rules to liven up the in-game action a bit in the meantime. Over the past month, MLB and the MLBPA traded proposals for rule changes, reported by Jeff Passan of ESPN and Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark of The Athletic. Some minor rule tweaks could be implemented as soon as this season, while other more significant changes, like a universal DH, would probably have to wait until the next CBA in 2022. Regardless, the leaked rule proposals present a decent preview of where the sport will be heading in the next few years. The Ringer’s 2019 MLB Preview Check out all of The Ringer’s MLB coverage leading up to Opening Day Generally speaking, it’s good news that the people who run baseball are giving serious thought to tinkering with the rules. Almost every other popular North American sport, from football to hockey to auto racing, actively directs the evolution of the game. Baseball tends to take a more deist approach; it’s not that the rules never change, but baseball too frequently treats rule changes like amendments to the Constitution and not a subtle nudge to direct the style of play in one direction or another. If that attitude is changing, the sport will be better for it. But even if considering rule changes is a broadly positive development, each potential adjustment should be judged on its own merit. So let’s rank these rule proposals from best to worst, based on how much potential they have to improve the on-field product, weighed against the risk of implementing them. 1. Adding a 26th Roster Spot This feels like a win for everyone—it means 30 new full-time jobs for the players and added tactical flexibility for managers, particularly as expanding pitching staffs have shortened benches, in some cases, to a backup catcher and just two pinch hitters. The ability to carry another bench bat would allow position players to excel in more specialized roles—the Astros, Dodgers, Indians, and Cubs have done this to great effect even with 25-man rosters—and reduce the probability that a game could be decided because one side runs out of pinch hitters. Under the league’s proposal, a roster expansion would also come with a 12-pitcher limit for non-September games and the reduction of September rosters from 40 to 28. Both of those seem like obvious positives as well. Reducing the number of pitchers a team can dress would reduce the number of tedious mid-inning pitching changes, and capping September rosters at 28 would keep the game from changing too much under expanded rosters. Currently, teams with 40-man September rosters can take situational substitutions to an extreme—last year’s Brewers are just one example—where the demands on players change just as the regular season is at its most tense. 2. Further Reducing the Number of Mound Visits Last year was the first year with a limit on mound visits—defined as any time a coach or player goes to the mound to talk to the pitcher—at six per game. It seems to have worked out pretty well; the average time per nine-inning game decreased by five minutes from 2017 to 2018. Limiting a coach’s on-field interactions with players forces them to succeed or fail on their own merits, and limiting the battery’s ability to stall encourages everyone to stop dithering around and play baseball, which is a good thing. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred can reduce the number of mound visits from six to five this year without the union’s approval. But the league sought MLBPA’s consent to go even further, asking for a reduction to four mound visits per team per game this year, then three in 2020. I say go for it—if there’s a real danger of running out of mound visits, it’ll force managers and pitching coaches to make tough choices when a pitcher is getting knocked around or signs are being stolen. Watching coaches sweat on the bench is fun. Sign-stealing kerfuffles are fun. Let’s have more of that and less of stopping the game for meetings. 3. Allowing Two-Sport Draftees to Sign Major League Contracts Currently, MLB draftees have to sign minor league contracts, which allow teams to pay players less and wait up to five years before putting them on the 40-man roster. The league was reportedly willing to bend this rule to keep Heisman Trophy winner and Oakland A’s outfield prospect Kyler Murray from entering the NFL draft. Murray didn’t find that to be enough of an incentive to give up football, but other two-sport athletes whose NFL futures are less certain than Murray’s might be more receptive. Baseball has been competing for athletes with other sports (usually but not always football), and in addition to being good for the athletes, this rule would give MLB another incentive to throw at players who can choose between the two sports. For every Andrew McCutchen or Joe Mauer who picks baseball, there’s a Murray or a Tom Brady who doesn’t. 4. A 20-Second Pitch Clock This is another reform Manfred can implement unilaterally this season, and Passan says that the commissioner will indeed impose a 20-second limit between pitches with the bases empty. The concept of timing anything in baseball feels a little wrong at first blush, but the pitch clock has been around for years in various college, minor league, and independent league settings, and seems to work just fine. I’ve been to numerous college games with a pitch clock over the years, and I promise you won’t even notice it; there will just be ever so slightly less dead time from one pitch to the next.<doc-sep>On Tuesday night, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic dropped a whopper of an article outlining the various rule changes MLB and the Player’s Association are considering for next season (Jeff Passan later expanded on it). Naturally this caused a bit of a fracas in the world of baseball fandom, mostly over the debate about bringing the designated hitter into the National League, 46 years after it was introduced in the American League. Now, we could talk about the DH all day if we wanted to (and, apparently, many people spent Wednesday doing just that). But that ignores seven other proposals that would also make an impact on the game. Here are all the proposals under consideration, arranged from least to most likely to see eventual adoption. It’s all based on #science (don’t ask to see the formula). ★ ★ ★ Tying draft position to competitiveness According to Rosenthal, the union is proposing if a team fails to reach a certain win total for too many years in a row, they will slide down the draft order. This seems to be aimed at teams fielding non-competitive teams to prevent them from losing to get the top overall picks for several years in a row. While the impulse is admirable, this doesn’t seem to be a solution with legs. A lot of teams are bad on accident (see the Royals and Pirates in the 90s and 00s, the Orioles more recently, and the 2011-2015 Rockies) and this would penalize those them right where it hurts the most. And there are always rebuilding teams in baseball, so why cut off one of the few areas they can actively work to improve? Would it change baseball much? Probably not as much as those proposing the rule would like. Is it likely to be adopted? This one is way too complicated to go very far. Extra innings extra base runner MLB has proposed placing a runner on second base at the start of any inning past the 11th. Look, I’m all for exhibition games like Spring Training and showcase events like the All-Star Game and the World Baseball Classic trying to end the game earlier rather than later. But the reason this is on the table is to see how it would work in real games. This seems like a gimmicky solution in search of a problem. Extra innings make up around seven percent of all games, and most of those end by the 11th inning anyways. Would it change the game in substantial ways? Well, it would change about 2.5% of games. Not only that, but anyone who remembers the WBC will recall this will inevitably lead to an intentional walk to create a force at every base, especially if someone like Nolan Arenado steps to the plate. There's enough downside, and little enough upside, to this that I wouldn’t count on seeing it anywhere meaningful anytime soon. Reducing mound visits (6 to 4 in 2019, 4 to 3 in 2020) This gets a big nothing-burger from me. I watch a lot of baseball games and I don’t think I’ve seen more than one where a team even used five of its mound visits, and yet game lengths are still over three hours long on average. Would cutting teams down to three visits change much? The only sure result I can see is frustrated managers and pitchers, everything else is a crapshoot. Three batter minimum This is the proposal that got the most attention from Rosenthal, since it’s the one most directly tied to pace of play concerns that have plagued sportswriters baseball for the last few years. Rockies fans can attest to how much Bruce Bochy’s compulsive bullpening slows down every Giants game, so maybe this would work? This could also reduce strikeouts, since there would be fewer opportunities for specialists to come in and blow hitters away. And with less bullpen flexibility for managers, it may even reverse the trend of the marginalization of the starting pitcher. What would be lost, other than all those anonymous relievers who throw in the upper 90s with a wicked slider infringing upon your consciousness? For one thing, the one-batter relief appearance often appears in the most exciting part of the game. That’s great television right there, and requiring a clever bit of strategy from the manager. The proposed change makes exceptions for getting the last out in the inning or an injury (which seems way too exploitable, but that’s not my job to police), but it still reduces some of that strategy. Also, per Rosenthal’s article, the overall percentage of relief appearances lasting less than three batters has been pretty steady around 15% for three decades, dipping down to 14.1% last year. So how much of a problem is this for pace of play, really? Three batter minimum for pitchers would require a huge shift in how pitching staffs are managed over the course of a long season, and in-game strategy would also change. Would this help pace of play that much? Personally, I’m skeptical. 28-man September rosters While the idea of reducing the expanded September rosters from 40-players to 28 seems a little drastic, the principle is pretty sound. Last September the Dodgers got to play with essentially two different lineups over the course of the game, with a righty heavy lineup starting against a lefty (or vise versa), with many of those batters ceding their lineup spot to their platoon partner. We also see a lot of those same anonymous relievers ever September and that parade sure seem to make those games feel longer. A compromise position could be reached: 40-man rosters stay intact, but only 28 are allowed to be on the active roster in any given game. That limits the manager’s toy box in ways that can help control pace of play, but it still gets those minor leaguers who had good seasons the opportunity to be rewarded with some time with the big club (and the paycheck that goes with it).<doc-sep>
There are at least eight new rule changes on the table for the upcoming Major League Baseball season and … actually, wait. Before we do anything else, let’s start this entire exercise with a caveat: Baseball loves to propose ideas for rule changes, even if they never actually come to fruition. In fact, every winter we have a day like this one, when a bunch of proposed new rules have leaked to the public and we spend a week (or longer; very often it’s longer) overreacting about things that aren’t actually happening. Like the pitch clock. We’ve talked about so much about a pitch clock over the years you’d think it was a real functioning thing. Nope, it’s just another of those things baseball talks about every year. [Batter up: Join or create a 2019 Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for free today] OK, so there are eight new rules being tossed out by the league and the players’ association. They started to surface Wednesday night, as The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that MLB wants to put a three-batter minimum on relief pitchers and then on Thursday ESPN’s Jeff Passan followed with a full slate of proposals, everything from the universal DH to draft penalties for tanking teams. Adding any rules right now is a very give-and-take process, since they’re being discussed outside the collective bargaining agreement. The process is like: If the league can do X, then the players need to be able to do Y. Therefore, any changes either have to be no-brainer-good-for-everyone type ideas or they have to come with a concession for the other side of the table. That’s also why we often get a lot of ideas but not always a ton of action. New MLB rules could affect relief pitchers, DHs and more. We point out which ones are good. (AP) For the purpose of this article, we’re just going to toss all that out of the window. I’m not going to worry about the union side and the league side — or even the likelihood that any of these rules will actually happen, this year or any other year. I’m only looking at it one way: Assuming all these new rules are happening, which are the best and which are the worst? Story continues 1. A three-batter minimum for pitchers This would pretty much do away with relievers who come in to pitch to one batter. There would reportedly be exceptions at the end of an inning or if a player gets hurt, but otherwise, it’s death to the LOOGY (Left-handed One Out Guy). While you don’t want to legislate people out of jobs, this seems like a better way to fix baseball’s pace-of-play than anything else proposed in the last few years. Who among us hasn’t grown tired of late-inning pitching change after late-inning pitching change? The strategy part of it is to be commended, but let’s face it: Baseball is too specialized sometimes. 2. One trade deadline To me, this is a no-brainer-good-for-everyone type idea. As it stands right now, MLB has two trade deadlines — the one we all know and look forward to on July 31, and the Aug. 31 waiver trade deadline. The Aug. 31 deadline has given us some memorable deals recently, but it’s still mostly just a bunch of confusion. Teams have to put players on waivers. Even good players that they don’t want to trade, just in case they want to trade them even though they don’t. Then everybody freaks out when Bryce Harper is on waivers. Streamline it, y’all! One trade deadline! 3. Draft advantages for winning teams; penalties for tanking Under this proposal, according to ESPN, small-market teams that do well would get additional draft advantages while teams that lose more than 90 games in consecutive seasons would face penalties in the draft. This is all about tanking and all about valuable players getting good contracts from teams. It’s something that both the players and the league office should like, because we all want competition. And it’s something that fans would love if they’re not too obsessed with becoming the next Chicago Cubs or Houston Astros. 4. Roster expansion and limits This rule would jump roster sizes from 25 to 26, adding 30 new big-league jobs. It would also cut back September roster sizes to 28 from 40.