2024 Major League Baseball

The 2024 Major League Baseball season was the twenty-fifth season in which the two major leagues, the National League and the American League, were consolidated into a single entity under the authority of the Commissioner, Rob Manfred.

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The 2024 Major League Baseball season came with some rule changes, as had been the case in most recent years, although those introduced this year were not as radical. Now that a pitch clock was part of the game, it was shortened slightly, from 20 to 18 seconds with runners on base (it remained at fifteen seconds with no one on). While this may have looked to be significant, the average pitch in 2023 had been delivered with seven seconds left on the pitch clock, so the effect was expected to be subtle. The running lane between home plate and first base was also clarified, with a dirt path marked on both sides of the foul line; before that, runners had to officially run to the outside of the line, although violations were rarely called, and when they were they were always controversial. The number of mound visits allowed during regulation innings was also diminished by one, from five to four. While these may have seemed to be minor, certain players, like P Chris Bassitt, complained that MLB should stop tinkering from year to year - although, to be fair, this had been going on ever since baseball was first played professionally.

2024 was a busy year in terms of international games, as not only was the experience of playing a series in Europe repeated for a third time, on June 8-9, but the season opened with a two-game series in Seoul, South Korea on March 20-21, the first ever MLB games played in that baseball-mad country. The Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres were selected to play these two games. For the second straight year, there was a series in Mexico City, on April 27-28, while the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays traveled to the Dominican Republic during spring training - perhaps a harbinger of future regular season games in that country.

One unexpected controversy came as spring training opened, as many players complained about the new uniforms designed by Nike and whose manufacturing was sub-contracted to Fanatics. Complaints touched both on the aesthetics (the lettering and numbering was of lower quality than in previous years) and the fit of these new duds, particularly the pants that were considered too close fitting and too revealing (they appeared to be quasi-transparent on early pictures). On a more serious note, there was a rash of pitcher injuries in spring training and in the first couple of weeks of the season, with big names like Gerrit Cole, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Jordan Romano starting the year on the sidelines, and others like Shane Bieber, Spencer Strider and Eury Perez being hit by injuries after only a couple of appearances. One reporter calculated that there were over 100 pitchers on the injured list across MLB after one week of action. The Players Association issued a statement that the pitch clock was to blame but MLB replied on April 6th that scientific studies had failed to establish a link between how quickly pitchers worked and injuries, but that instead the trend had been years in the making, often starting as early as high school, and was caused by the search for ever-higher velocity and spin rates, to the detriment of young pitchers' proper physical development.

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2024 Major League Baseball

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