Will the new wrinkles impact the defending World Series champions in 2023?
Manager Dusty Baker Jr. of the Houston Astros pulls Hunter Brown #58 of the Houston Astros from the game against the St. Louis Cardinals during the second inning at Roger Dean Stadium on March 06, 2023 in Jupiter, Florida.
Megan Briggs/Getty ImagesTeams across Major League Baseball are dealing with the sport’s new rules changes during Spring Training, though one projection system suggests the Houston Astros may be particularly hurt by the adjustments imposed by the league.
MLB has instituted a new pitch clock for the 2023 season as well as limits on pick-off attempts, which the league hopes will create faster games and spur more action. The rules changes appear to be working in the first respect. Game times are being trimmed by upwards of 30 minutes in Spring Training contests, with the pitch clock in particular eliminating much of the lag time during at-bats. As for the rules’ impact on the players, that’s a different story. Players on the Astros and other teams have grumbled about being rushed by the new rules, with many claiming the rules are largely at the aid of pitchers.
So why could the Astros in particular be dinged by the new system? Well, meet MANFRED. No, not the MLB commissioner, but rather a new metric created by Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight designed as a “Metric for Assessing Negative or Favorable Rule-Effect Dynamics.” So what exactly does MANFRED entail? We’ll let Paine take it from here.
“MANFRED takes every team’s 2022 ranking in categories that will be pertinent to the new rules—pitch tempo (which obviously matters for the pitch clock), defensive-shift frequency (since the shift is now outlawed) and sprint speed (since larger bases and restrictions on pickoff throws encourage more base stealing) — and combines them into a weighted composite,” Paine wrote. The composite scores then allowed him to “[rank] teams from those most likely to benefit under the new rules to those most likely to suffer.”
The Astros finished 30th in MANFRED rank, making them the team most likely to be hurt by the new rules in 2023. So why the Astros? Houston ranked No. 29 in pitch tempo last season, with the team’s arms now forced to deliver pitches at an increased rate compared to previous seasons. Dusty Baker’s squad also used a defensive shift more than all but one team last season, another advantage now limited by MLB’s rules changes.
Houston fans shouldn’t be too frustrated with the folks at FiveThirtyEight, despite the site’s MANFRED projections. The Astros rank No. 2 among all teams in the site’s Win Forecast projections for the 2023 season, trailing only the Los Angeles Dodgers.
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