How The New Rules Give the Guardians an Advantage.

Well, the inevitable has happened, after years of back and forth between the MLB and MLBPA, the pitch clock, 18-inch bags, plus shift and pick-off restrictions have invaded baseball. The reactions have been a mixture of either defeated acceptance or downright refusal of the new reality. As I sift through the clips of pitch clock violations and the moaning and groaning of MLB fans, I've come to find something out that most fans might not realize: the Cleveland Guardians might have a leg up on most of the league. Actually, there might be a case that the team was one year ahead of the curve, and diving into the numbers it might be safe to project that the Guardians can continue to thrive with their style of play.One of the points of emphasis that the league has wanted to improve was that teams have slowly drifted away from stolen bases. In 2000, the league average on stolen bases by a team was 97, in 2022 the average dropped to 83 stolen bases. One of the reasons the Guardos had success last year was their aggressiveness on the basepaths. They ranked 3rd in MLB in stolen bases with 119, with the Guardians having 5 players that stole more than 20+ bases in 2022. With the new rules in place for this season and beyond, accompanied by the 18-inch bases and limits on pick-offs, the early spring training results showed a 74% jump in stolen base attempts which if you are a guardians fan should make you giddy. The thought of the team that stole 0.73 bases a game, having the opportunity to run even more wild on the bases should be salivating. With the speed and savvy that most of the roster possess, on top of Sandy Alomar's keen eye for detecting and creating advantages for Guardians baserunners to get great jumps everyone involved should be in line for career years in the stolen base department. While stolen bases will probably be welcomed with open arms, the pitch clock has had a more contentious unveiling. With the pace of play being a topic for many years the pitch clock is supposed to increase the tempo while cutting out the dead time, which for some players has been a tough adjustment so far in spring training, the Guardians on the other hand are pretty well equipped when it comes to tempo. Last year the league average time between pitches according to Statcast before the pitch clock was 18.1 seconds, the Guardians as a whole were the fastest in the league on average with 16.6 seconds in between pitches. To put that into perspective, with the pitch clock set at 15 seconds for the pitcher to deliver a pitch, the Guardians won't have to feel rushed since they are already used to pitching at a quicker tempo. Most of the pitchers on the staff have been used to these conditions with the pitch clock being instituted in Double-A & Triple-A back in 2015, so the number of times a pitch clock violation might happen this year should be pretty slim. The same can be said for the hitters; outside of Josh Bell, Jose Ramirez, and Mike Zunino, all of the Guards' key core pieces have played with the pitch clock in some form or fashion in their pro careers before reaching the big leagues so the majority of the roster isn’t even worried about it. Not to mention that the Guardians won’t have to worry about the shift restrictions, they were one of the teams that shifted the least in the league, and with 4 glove winners in 2022 it's hard to argue against them. This was a group that was a top 10 in most defensive metrics, including a “Def” score (which measures defensive value relative to the league) of 18.8 according to Fangraphs, which made them the 5th best fielding team in the big leagues.  The most important member of the group being the defensive savant in Myles Straw, who by himself posted a defensive fWAR of 16.3 last year! He’ll have a lot more responsibility as the new shift allowed under the new rules now moves a corner outfielder in the rover spot in the outfield.  https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1632335424151584769?s=20While some teams might not be able to mask the inefficiencies that were previously available, Myles Straw's value just got significantly higher with how much ground he’ll need to cover, and with his elite speed and instincts, he should have no problem adjusting. Obviously, success from year to year isn’t always linear, maybe my confidence is misguided and I'm just hanging on to the fact that Cleveland was a year ahead of the trend. Maybe the league will catch up and we might not be just the trend hipsters of the baseball world while our style of play becomes mainstream. The great thing about spring training is I can be as optimistic as I want but as I laid out if anything there's a reason to believe that last year's formula might be able to be replicated and might be even better.