The 2023 Major League Baseball season will have a new look to it — and MLB Network is here to help break down the rule changes for the upcoming season.
MLB Network will debut a special, “MLB Tonight: What’s New in 2023,” on Thursday at 7 p.m. ET. Co-hosts Adnan Virk and Tom Verducci will be joined by former executive Theo Epstein, who now serves as an MLB consultant for on-field matters, to discuss new pitch timers, shift restrictions and the use of bigger bases. It will be simulcast on MLB.com and in the MLB App.
The show will also analyze the implementation of the new balanced schedule, which will have each team play at least one series against every other Major League club.
“There’s no doubt the game has evolved a lot over the last two to three decades,” Epstein says during the special. “Some of those changes have been driven by optimizations that were led by front offices and people like me, pushing them. While it might have helped you win some more games, it didn’t necessarily change the game for the better for the fans, in terms of the game that is played on the field aesthetically.”
“So credit to Commissioner [Robert Manfred], the owners, the players, who all got involved and worked on these new rules, tested them out in over 8,000 Minor League games. [We] threw out the ones that didn’t work, improved the ones that did work, and now we’re excited to have these new rules that’ll make the game better for the fans.”
The special will also feature interviews from this offseason in which current players like Cody Bellinger, Andrew Benintendi, Joc Pederson, Max Scherzer and Taijuan Walker discuss the new rules and how they will impact the game in 2023.
Along with the discussion, MLB Network analysts Dan O’Dowd and Sean Casey will conduct demonstrations of how the new pitch clock and shift restrictions will impact hitters. Meanwhile, fellow analyst Harold Reynolds and 14-year big league veteran Rajai Davis — who now serves as MLB’s senior director of on-field operations — will have a segment dedicated to how the bigger bases will affect the running game.