The New Rules and Player Health?

Happy February, we’re just a couple weeks away from pitchers and catchers reporting, then shortly after, we will see the MLB players ease into the new rules that include the pitch clock and shift restrictions. AC also spurred some thought with a share of pitchers with weird arm angles in the previous post, which is a fun excuse to use this gif that you will read in Ian McDiarmid’s Palpatine voice.

Have you heard the tragedy of Darth Plagueis?

Regardless of funky deliveries and the associated deceptiveness to opposing batters, the idea was that a pitch clock would remove a built-in “break” for pitchers on the mound, and they would have to know the pitch sequence and selection more expeditiously while having less time to recover between pitches, which may mean fewer maximum effort pitches (which might need a Deadpool gif but maybe later). The limited disengagements from the pitching rubber also removes another break, and of course the limited mound visits per game means they wouldn’t get a breather that way either since the catcher can’t do the buddy-buddy thing anymore to reset his batterymate. So one theory was that the pitcher does have to reduce max effort to avoid injury, or if they’re unwilling to adapt, could mean more risk of injury.

Another angle I hadn’t thought about was the whole sleep thing. I’m usually someone who gets maybe six hours of sleep because my body is weird now and won’t let me sleep much past about five or six in the morning (I’m usually up earlier) but it seems that sleep is of huge value to baseball players to recover since they play nearly every day for six months and then more if they make the postseason, and that doesn’t include the ramp up in spring training. MLB sends me a morning digest every day and the top article from Castrovince was about how the pitch clock could benefit player health, which is obviously counter to what we thought earlier. This article starts with Brandon Guyer, who you might know as one of the guys the Cubs traded to get Matt Garza way back when, and then he was on the Cleveland team that blew a 3-1 lead (and the Cubs won the World Series, people forget that). Anyway, he has some thoughts on the great benefits of sleep in postgame recovery that you should read about.

The immediate impact on the field of play is that the game would shorten by 20 to 25 minutes or so, and maybe even half an hour if they could do picture-in-picture commercials over mound visits and dead time in between plate appearances, and maybe they can also shorten the ad breaks between innings so players aren’t just waiting for the two minute timer to expire when they’re already set to go. Since games are over three hours long as of last season, shaving 20-30 minutes off that time means less time on your feet, and also more sleep when you get home:

Think, though, about the longer-term impact the removal of that dead time can have on the players themselves. A single game wrapping up 20 or 25 minutes earlier than they are accustomed to does not make much of a difference. But the cumulative effect of shorter games over the course of 162 games could be substantial.

From MLB.com

The interesting tidbit was from the minor league data, which actually showed fewer injuries:

When MiLB adopted the pitch timer across all levels last year, some expressed concern that speeding up pitchers would result in an increase in injuries. On the contrary, pitcher injury events decreased 11% from 2021 to 2022, and some players espoused the benefits of the better pace.

“Just from a recovery standpoint, getting back in at a reasonable hour and getting a good night’s sleep is a game-changer,” Dodgers pitching prospect Nick Nastrini said last year. “It could be the difference between being able to play for five years and being able to play for 12. Because there’s the accumulation of getting back at 11:30 [p.m.] and 12:30 [a.m.] and getting into bed by 1 [a.m.] and having to do it all again the next day for 132 games in our season or 162 games in a big league season, it takes a big toll on your body.”

Trevor May has a fun YouTube channel and one of his more recent videos talked about perks of being in MLB, including a nap room. It actually makes sense to fit sleep into the workout regimen because the body needs at least some rest to fully recover, and it’s probably better not to do it in the dugout or bullpen where the benches are probably not the most comfortable. So even with less recovery time on the mound, pitchers and their defense will be on the field less with the pitch clock, and get home earlier, which means more sleep in a comfortable bed, and then they have more opportunities to squeeze in power naps along with their baths in the cryo cubicle or whatever. We likely won’t see a lot of challengers to Cal Ripken’s iron man record due to the knowledge gained regarding the management of work loads, but that should make for a better game for fans and a longer career for players if they’re not succumbing to as many injuries, and perhaps the pitch timer actually helps here, but I guess we’ll wait for the end of the season for someone smarter than me to compile the data and compare to 2022 and prior.

I did take a peek at the Cubs schedule again even after the preview, because I realized I forgot to check the off-days, not taking into account the inevitable rainouts or other natural disasters that will necessitate makeups or double headers. I won’t delve into Spring Training too much because guys don’t play every day anyway, and they don’t do back-to-backs or full games until the end of the Cactus League, so that doesn’t matter too much. However, they do get scheduled off days on March 13, 20, and 29 (the last one is the travel day to get to Opening Day) during which I assume there will still be light workouts unless David Ross just tells them to catch a movie or play golf.

Here’s the regular season breakdown with scheduled games and the off days sprinkled in:

  • First “stretch”:
    • Opening series – 3/30, then 3/31 off, then 2 more games
    • Travel to Cincinnati
    • 6 total games, 1 off day in between, then a travel day after (3 total off days, 2 for travel)
  • Second stretch includes six home games and then a travel day after (1 off day for travel)
  • Third stretch has six games on the West Coast and then immediately coming back for four home games
    • 10 total games, two in-stretch travels needed, off day after (1 off day at home)
  • Fourth stretch to end March
    • 3 at home against Padres
    • Then 7 games at Miami and Washington
    • Then 6 games at home
    • 16 total games, two in-stretch travels needed, then a travel day (1 off day for travel)
  • Fifth stretch is an extended road trip
    • 6 interleague games requiring one travel stop
    • Then an off day for travel
    • Then 3 at Philly to end the road trip before a travel day
    • 9 total games, two in-stretch travels needed (2 off days for travel)
  • Sixth stretch is a homestand to end May with 9 total games, then the travel day (1 off day for travel)
  • Seventh stretch to begin June is a long West Coast road trip
    • 10 total games with two in-stretch travels needed, back-to-back-to-back
    • No off days between series, travel day after (1 off day for travel)
  • Eight stretch includes six home games and then three road games immediately after before two travel days to London
    • 9 total games stateside with one in-stretch travel needed
    • I assume only one of the days is used to fly across the ocean while the other one is where they go get fish and chips and spotted dick in London
    • Two games, then they come back to the USA (count 3 off days, at least 2 for travel)
  • Ninth stretch before the All-Star Game
    • 6 games at home
    • Then immediately go on the road for 7 games with one in-stretch travel before the All-Star Break
    • The All-Star Break is four full days unless someone on the team actually gets selected (I guess they need at least one representative) but most of the team will get to go fishing unless they also have to do Home Run Derby (we’ll say 4 off days)
  • Tenth stretch is a long home stand with 10 total games before their travel day (1 off day for travel, but not really because they’re still in Chicago)
  • Eleventh stretch is a home stand sandwiched around two road trips
    • Two games on the South Side before going to STL (one in-stretch travel here)
    • Immediately back home for 7 games before heading to 3 road games (so two travels to and from)
    • That’s 13 total games (1 off day for travel)
  • We’ll call this stretch 11.5 because they have to do a quick hop to Toronto and then come back stateside, 3 total games against the Blue Jays and then a travel day to come home (1 off day for travel)
  • Stretch 12 is wacky because of the two game set
    • Five game home stand with a day off in between (1 off day at home)
    • Immediately hop to 7 game road trip (2 in-stretch travels)
    • Then they’re home again for 3 before an off day (1 off day for travel)
  • Stretch 13 is a long hop too
    • Three in Cincinnati starts it off, then travel immediately home
    • 7 games at home
    • Then six games against the West with a travel day in between and a travel day to get back home (2 off days for travel)
  • Stretch 14 is a six game home stand with a travel day after (1 off day for travel)
  • Stretch 15 is the final stretch of the season as the Cubs are on the road for the last six games with one in-stretch travel and then they obviously either go home or go to whichever site they need to play the first series at, so they’ll either have four or five months off, or less than a week, it could go either way

That’s 25 days off although only about seven of them are true “you have nothing to do so relax” days because the rest they have to pack and tumble onto planes and buses and stuff. Hope they get plenty of sleep!

37 thoughts on “The New Rules and Player Health?”

  3. This is interesting to think about, but I don’t know that we’ll know much if anything about what the numbers tell us until there’s a much bigger sample. Even if nothing else had changed, I would have expected MiLB injuries to be down last year from 2021 just because I would assume 2021 injuries to have been high after a year+ off. And even if we did know for sure injuries were down from the expected rate, there’s still a lot of guesswork at this point about correlation and causation. The fact that MLB is changing so many rules at once makes it next to impossible to gauge which changes will have caused what shift in results.

    It’s especially tricky because you’d expect the shift restriction to improve BABIP, but you’d also expect the pitch clock to improve the quality of contact and, right with it, improve BABIP. So after one season, we won’t know if it’s the clock, the shift, or dumb luck that made a difference yet we’re certain to be subject to articles telling us two weeks isn’t enough time to draw any meaningful conclusions and then peppering us with grand sweeping conclusions. Then, no matter what happens to deGrom, it will be blamed on/credited to the pitch clock.

    But will we really know anything until we have two or three seasons of data?

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  4. andcounting,

    I think the small sample size overreactions are a staple of the media and even respected bloggers and outlets like B-Pro and the like, so you won’t avoid those (dying laughing)

    I agree, I wanted to see what the full season was like and am only offering my theories. I think you’re most likely right that we will need to see the results over the course of this entire CBA (after which they’ll put in the automatic balls and strikes unless Manfred just mandates it next year) before we will know, but there’s so much noise in baseball on top of the noise introduced by the multiple rules changes at once that we simply won’t know, all we will know is that things happened but we won’t know exactly why, and that again is kind of a cop out but it is the nature of the beast with baseball. I admittedly haven’t read nearly enough to consider myself an expert in any of this, but just thinking out loud from my own little point of view.

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  5. Rice Cube,

    Well, shoot, almost everything I say boils down to guesswork anyway (dying laughing). FWIW, Sosa attributed his success in ‘98 and beyond to getting lots of sleep (he swore he got 10 hours a night IIRC). Now, other sources have suggested alternate causes for his sudden surge in homers, head size and acne, but I think it was the sleep.

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  8. Rice Cube,

    I don’t actually know how much lawyers bill for in this case or if it’s baked into the agent’s commission but it seems like lawyers and stuff would be expensive, plus someone has to pay the arbiters…

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  20. Re: my Twitter experience, while I have been fortunate enough so far to shield myself from all the Nazis, it’s also fun to see Tim and Andy Dolan do their grumpy old man act while the other part of Cubs Twitter toes the company line. I’m probably somewhere in between where I wish they’d done more and I’m not all-in on the farm system or the plan, but I’m also excited to see what this hodge podge can do before they do more next offseason lest I start throwing rotten fruit for real.

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  21. The Cubs get to keep one of their DFAs for now, probably has the general June opt-out if not in majors stuff

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  25. Rice Cube:
    andcounting,

    Oh yeah, sleep, especially with the, uh, melatonin pills. Yeah it was totally melatonin.

    Thing is, it’s not like Sammy and Mark were taking more steroids than everyone. There were undoubtedly a ton of guys using PEDs, including pitchers. You had to do more than just ’roid up. The fact that baseball’s writers turned a blind eye to the obvious usage while it happened but then suddenly became blind to everything but “THEY USED PEDS” after Bonds exploded has created a giant hole in the history of baseball. Sosa did take care of himself (PEDs aside) extremely well and went all-in on baseball performance. It still disgusts me that suddenly everyone who covered the sport just kinda stopped doing their jobs.

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  27. andcounting,

    I think they kind of conveniently forgot that the literal baseball and park dimensions changed drastically over the years as well to affect the power numbers…I did something about that once on the old WSD but all that went poof when we pulled the plug.

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  28. #myrtlebeach on twitter is pretty funny following today’s news.

    We saw the air force circling around the balloon when we went to the movies today. No, we didn’t see Top Gun or Plane.

    Hopefully they got the right balloon and not the guy trying to recreate Up.

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  31. berselius,

    Right?! I mean, we have submeter spatial resolution of every point on earth now, no?

    I was thinking they could have easily shot it down over some plains state and not hit anyone, but a 7 mile long debris field is longer than I thought.

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  36. OK holy fuck I know we joke about the “bag of baseballs” trade a lot but I didn’t know they actually did it

    https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2023/02/join-our-live-chat-with-former-mlb-pitcher-and-current-scout-tim-fortugno.html

    Fortugno was eventually traded to the Phillies, who went on to sell his contract to the Brewers for $2,500 and 12 dozen baseballs.

    Is the bag of baseballs lumped into “cash considerations”?

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