Category: Rule Changes
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Baseball Attendance: Year End Wrap Up
We looked recently at the current state of MLB’s baseball attendance in our post titled The Baseball Attendance Myth. Now that the regular season is in the books we thought we would take a quick look at the final numbers. Total attendance was 71,752,722 in 2026, which represents an increase of 343,200 fans from 2025.…
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The Baseball Attendance Myth
“Statistics do not lie but liars use statistics” Major League Baseball has continued to promote that it is back and better than ever, mostly by stating that rules changes employed in 2022 have helped to increase attendance at ballparks. Those rule changes included the implementation of the pitch clock, extra inning ghost runner, and the limitation…
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Stolen Bases*
The number of stolen bases in baseball has fluctuated greatly over time. Some of those periods and the causes of those fluctuations include: The latest change in stolen base activity occurred with the introduction of analytics into the game in the early 2000’s. Prior to that, in the 1990’s there were regularly more than 3,000 successful…
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The Death of Sign Stealing: Part Deux
We covered in one of our more extensive posts to-date, the reason for the implementation of the PitchCom technology. In this post, we thought we would likely have to go into an equally in depth analysis of how MLB calculated the reduction in game time due to the implementation of PitchCom. Well, that is not…
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The Death of Sign Stealing – Part 1
Another aspect of MLB meddling in the fundamentals of the game, which has led to the …… dehumanization, standardization, homogenization, and over-regulation of baseball has been the introduction of Pitchcom. For those of you not aware of Pitchcom here is a bit of history: PitchCom is a wireless communication system used in baseball that lets…
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Wins and Innings
On October 31, 1973 Tom Seaver of the New York Mets became the first Cy Young winner to not win at least 20 games. Seaver only missed that mark by one win after recording a record of 19-10 for the 1973 season. How times have changed. There has not been a 20 game Cy Young…
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The Easy Starting Pitching Solution
MLB is now considering more rules changes to “reemphasize” the stature to their starting pitchers and to prevent teams from going through a myriad of pitchers throughout a game. In many instances, MLB teams now employ an “opener” which is a strategy where a relief pitcher starts the game to face the toughest hitters in…
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Ugh! More Changes to the Game Contemplated
Evidently, the extreme measures of adding a pitch clock, assigning a designated runner to extra innings and limiting the number of throws to first base, among other rule changes, were not enough for the MLB hierarchy. MLB based all of those recent changes on the premise that the game was too slow for the average…
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Combined No-Hitters
For 90 years from 1876 through 1966, major league baseball only had one combined no-hitter meaning more than one pitcher was involved in the effort. Overall, there have been 20 combined no-hitters in major league history. Although a combined no-hitter was a rarity prior to 1970 (there were only two) it has become commonplace recently. …
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Pitching Injuries: We Kind of Told you So
Another baseball season has begun and the main topic of discussion has been the rise in pitching injuries. Notable pitchers falling to injury so far this year include: These are just the most notable pitchers but on opening day, there were 132 on the injured list (IL). In total, there were 166 players on the…
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So Little Time
MLB was not satisfied with the original pitch clock rule changes they instituted prior to the 2023 season that shortened games a “whopping” 24 minutes from 2022 levels. As outraged as we were here at BP that MLB decided to implement a timer to the game of baseball that previously never had been on a…
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Keith Hernandez: Greatest Moments
In this post, we will look at some of the greatest moments of Keith Hernandez, who played for 17 seasons mostly for the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets. In Hernandez’s storied career he accomplished the following: In addition, many consider Hernandez to be the best defensive first baseman of all time. As…