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The new season of the North American baseball championship, the Major League (MLB), begins today with the traditional Opening Day. The Opening Day is a very heartfelt event in the United States, and for many it is equivalent to a national holiday, so much so that cyclically someone proposes to make it such. This year, for the first time since 1968, all thirty teams in the championship will play: the day will begin on the east coast at 7 pm (Italian time) with New York Yankees-San Francisco Giants and will end in the night on the west coast with Seattle Marines-Cleveland Guardians.
After the significant innovations introduced in recent years, also in response to scandals and cheating that have become too frequent, this season is particularly anticipated because, as the Major League itself claims, the game of baseball “will change as it has never happened in recent times”.
MLB is the oldest sports league born in America. Once upon a time baseball was also the most watched sport, but starting in the sixties it was supplanted and then largely superseded by football. Now the title of second national sport is shared with basketball, and the same goes for the two respective championships of reference. However, unlike the NBA, which compensates for the recent drop in national audiences with the large following it has obtained abroad, the Major League has remained rather confined in its bubble, where interests and audiences do not grow and indeed often decrease.
The desolate stands for an Oakland Athletics game (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Baseball is in a certain sense forced to remain isolated also due to the characteristics that make it a sport conceptually very different from the more widespread ones, and similar only to those in which a ball is hit with a bat: in fact only cricket. In fact, the most followed disciplines globally share certain basic characteristics that make them understandable or at least familiar even at first glance: a rectangular field divided in half, two teams lined up facing each other who must overcome each other in order to win, carrying or throwing a ball at a pre-established point (a goal, a basket, an end area).
In baseball, this assumption does not hold. The scheme of the game roughly foresees two players of the same team (thrower and receiver) who throw a ball within a diamond-shaped field, and an opponent between them (the hitter) who tries to hit it to have time to earn positions (the bases) which, if covered, all become points.
This scheme is made even more complex and articulated by a whole series of rules, customs and traditions inherited over more than a century of history. All this, put together, on the one hand has contributed to making baseball a very popular sport, albeit singular, on the other, however, it no longer facilitates its diffusion, above all due to its long times (often “dead time”) which do not they get along well with the tastes and tendencies of today’s audience.
In addition to not predicting draws, active playing time is continuously broken up and therefore lengthened by the time allowed to the players for a whole series of procedures which may concern warm-up, preparation or confrontation with teammates and coaches. In 2018, during the World Series — the championship finals and therefore the most anticipated event of the season — all this brought the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox to finish a game in seven hours and twenty minutes, the longest ever.
The new rules that will change baseball this year mainly concern these aspects: tempo, speed and fluidity of the game.
The first new rule imposes batting times on pitchers and hitters, who instead up until last season could effectively lose all the time they wanted in preparation or in psychological games between opponents. Pitchers will now have 15 seconds to pitch with empty bases, or 20 with occupied bases. If they do not respect the times they will be penalized with a pitch in favor of the batter (ball) which will therefore bring the opponents closer to conquering the bases. The batsmen, on the other hand, must be ready to serve when the timer reaches 8 seconds. Failure to do so will count as a strike, and if third, result in out.
I nuovi “pitch timer” (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
The second rule concerns the so-called shift defensive, the term which indicates the practice of placing players on the field according to the characteristics of the opposing hitter, for example if he is right or left-handed. From this year the shift will be banned: this means that the field arrangement will be distributed more or less equally in the presence of each batter, who will therefore be more likely to make valid hits. Conversely, this change will obviously complicate things for the defending team.
The other rule concerns the white squares that indicate the bases, which have been enlarged by about 7 centimeters per side. It’s a significant increase, considering that until now, determining whether a player was in the game or not was often counted in millimeters. With larger bases the game becomes more dynamic, but above all MLB counts on avoiding many injuries caused by frequent clashes between players (and consequently other interruptions).
In addition to these three new rules, there are other secondary ones that go in the same direction. For example, there will be a limit to pitches directed not towards the batters, but towards the bases occupied by runners: a way to eliminate them more quickly, which however fragments and excludes the hits. As far as the calendar is concerned, however, the number of matches between the same teams will be reduced (the so-called “interdivisional matches”). For organizational reasons, in fact, each team used to meet the same four teams of its division composed on geographical criteria for most of the 162 regular season games. With the introduction of a more balanced calendar, this year, for the first time with the current composition of the league, all teams will play each other at least once during the regular season, and some of them even abroad: a Mexico City and London.
Baseball at the London Olympic Stadium in 2019 (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)
These innovations usher in a new era for baseball and add to those introduced in recent years, especially last season: the expansion of the playoffs from 10 to 12 teams and above all a new electronic device to avert cases such as the scandal of stolen signals from a few years ago, when the Houston Astros were discovered using a ruse, even a rather homemade one, to decipher the pitch signals that opposing receivers made with their hands to teammates on the mound. The device is called PitchCom and is a small button that the receiver wears on the forearm to communicate to the pitcher the type of pitch to be made via an audio signal.
Otherwise, the regular baseball season will have the same rather slow but at the same time hectic pace and still difficult to understand for those accustomed to European sports. Until 5 October, the games will be played every day, more or less at every hour of the day: some teams will even do it twice in the space of 24 hours.
The defending champions are the Houston Astros, considered among the favorites again this year together with the Atlanta Braves, San Diego Padres, Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers and the two New Yorkers, Mets and Yankees, with the latter still chasing victory of a title that has been missing for 14 years despite the huge investments.
Finally, at a certain point in the season, a sponsor could appear for the first time even on the famous striped Yankees uniforms. In fact, the latest big news in baseball is that from this year the thirty Major League teams will be able to apply a sponsor’s logo on the sleeves of their uniforms. Some have already found and sewn them, others not yet, but they will be able to do so during the season.
– Read also: Even baseball uniforms will have sponsors
