Shifting the Rules - Baseball Takes a Swing at Bringing Its Fans Back To The Park
Today we turn to baseball for an example of the levers that organizational leaders have at their disposal to encourage and cultivate a change in behaviors and practices within their organization.
Major League Baseball has been facing significant problems with the quality and appeal of their baseball games. Their audiences have been declining in size for a variety of reasons. Some of the factors that they felt were driving this decline were the increasing length of games, which were taking over three hours to complete, and a lack of live action during the games given the predominance of home runs, strikeouts, and walks which caused a decrease in balls in play and a dearth of base stealing.
Over the past 5-10 years, certain patterns of behavior and strategy became prevalent. Pitchers and batters were taking lots of time between pitches to compose themselves, fiddle with their equipment, and perhaps even trying to mess up the mojo of their opponent. Driven by the hordes of analytics-minded people working in the league's front offices, young hitters were trained to focus on launch angles and exit velocities on their swings (increasing both home runs and strikeouts). Managers decided to hyper-specialize their bullpens resulting in lots of pitching changes. Defensive players learned to employ dramatic positional shifts of players in the field that diminished the ability of hitters to reach base safely on balls hit in the field of play.
Even though players, managers, front offices, etc. all wanted to see baseball continue to prosper, why were they all engaging in individual actions and behaviors that collectively were driving fans away and diminishing the appeal of their sport? Essentially, the answer is because individually, they were incentivized to do those actions. Hitters swinging for the fences (AKA "elevate and celebrate") was driven in part by the huge contracts that have been handed out to players who hit lots of home runs. Moreover, the introduction of analytics further pushed these behaviors through concepts such as expected runs added that raised the perceived value of home runs and walks while reducing the perceived value of "putting the ball in play", bunting, and stolen bases. Better information through hitting spray charts also optimized the ability of fielders to be in the spots on the field where the hitter was most likely to hit the ball, again reducing the value of balls in play. Analytics promoted a different way of playing that increased your chances of winning the game, but at the expense of the entertainment value for anyone watching the game.
Things finally reached enough of a crisis point that Major League Baseball decided to implement new rules for the 2023 season intended to improve the pace of play and increase the value of balls put in play. They enacted the following rule changes:
Pitch timing rules - pitchers now have 15 or 20 seconds to deliver a pitch and batters have to be ready to hit with at least 8 seconds left on the pitch clock. There are similar rules governing how quickly the next batter must be ready to hit after the end of the previous at-bat. Pitchers in violation of the rule are assessed a ball on the current batter. Hitters in violation of the rule are assessed a strike.
Pitchers and batters are both limited in the number of times they can call for time or disengage from the batter to compose themselves or address any runners currently on base. Pitchers who violate this rule are accessed a balk which advances every runner on base up an additional base.
Infielders are now restricted in where they can position themselves prior to a pitch being delivered. Unlike in recent seasons where infield shifts saw three infielders on one side of the infield or positioned in shallow right field, infielders now have to be positioned in the infield dirt and with two infielders on each side of the infield.
The size of the bases (except for home plate which technically is a plate, not a base) has been increased slightly. While enacted primarily for safety reasons, it has also shortened the distance between bases which will encourage more base stealing attempts since the shorter distance increases the likelihood of success in safely reaching the next base. Note that the disengagement rule for pitchers listed above also makes it less risky to attempt a stolen base.
Although we are still fairly early in the 2023 baseball season, what have the initial results of these changes been?
Let's start with the length of games. The average length of a nine inning MLB game has gone from 3 hours 3 minutes in 2022 to 2 hours 36 minutes thus far in 2023. Score that one a big win! If you read the linked article, you can even see that it has also reduced the variability in game time, not just the average amount.
What about the number of stolen base attempts? Based on data from Baseball Reference, stolen base attempts have increased from 4.97% of stolen base opportunities in 2022 to 6.47% in 2023. Likewise, the success rate for stolen bases has increased modestly from 75% to 79%.
How about the impact on balls in play? The batting average for balls put in play in the first month of the season has gone from .282 in 2022 to .298 in 2023. That is a significant improvement. However, the number of strikeouts (a negative proxy for balls put in play) has not decreased materially. Why is this behavior taking longer to change? Hitting is very dependent on long-established habits that are harder and slower to change because they are so engrained in the batter's identity. Changing these habits likely requires a longer time period with repeated reinforcement. Also, while the rule changes improve the batting average when putting the ball in play, it is not clear that the factors that drive higher salaries have changed significantly enough to create clear economic incentives to change their habits. Perhaps as players see that changing their habits will increase their team's chances of winning, this will encourage more players to work on changing their habits.
Unlike in your own organization where leaders can (note we didn't say should) often implement changes without the consent of the employees, the MLB could not unilaterally impose these rule changes. The MLB Players Association (MLBPA) signed off on the changes as part of the collective bargaining agreement they reached with MLB prior to the 2022 season. Why did they agree to these changes? There are probably several reasons, but I believe that one of the major reasons is because they understood that doing nothing and keeping the status quo wasn't a good option. After all, the players only prosper when the fans continue to attend ball games, buy merchandise, and consume lots of baseball on TV (which drives media rights payments).
Probably much like individual teams or departments in your own organization, each baseball team sees themselves as a distinct entity and that the only goals that they need to meet are their own goals. Now to be fair, that is the essence of the sport, one team competing against the other, and only one team wins. That should not be the dynamic in our organizations. However, what is similar is that sometimes the individual decisions of teams leads to outcomes that are not beneficial for our customers. In baseball's case, each team's quest to optimize their own chances to win resulted in a product that was no longer very appealing to its end customers, the fans who attend games, watch games on TV or through streaming, and who buy official merchandise. Thankfully, eventually MLB brought the fans back into the room (you can listen to this podcast with Theo Epstein as he explains to David Axelrod how they solicited fan opinion and how they tested their ideas in the minor leagues to understand the impact of the proposed changes before implementing them at the Major League level).
So what have we learned from this example? It is critical that everyone in the organization understand why a change is needed and what the vision of the new world will be after the change. It is important to have measurements that will help us determine if the actions we are taking are having the desired impact. As leaders, we have the unique power to make it easier or harder for people in the organization to use specific practices or behaviors. While in general we want to empower the folks in our organization to determine their ways of working and to give them autonomy, when it is vitally important that we change certain behaviors and practices as an organization, leaders can encourage the desired new behaviors through incentives, public recognition, and modeling (although modeling doesn't apply to the baseball example). This is basic change management.