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Second base has been in the wrong spot for more than 100 years. MLB is finally doing something about it.
Second base has been in the wrong spot for more than 100 years. Baseball is finally calling it an error, a geometry one. Major League Baseball will test a new rule in 2026 that moves second base in minor league games, including in the International League, where the Rochester Red Wings play.
The change, first reported by FanGraphs , will take effect in the second half of the season. For more than a century, second base hasn’t been positioned at a true corner of the infield diamond . Instead, it has sat partially inside it, a quirk of how the field was originally laid out.
This experimental rule would fix that. That’s because first and third base sit at the corners of the square, while second base is positioned along the edge between them, rather than at one of those corners. As a result, the distance between bases has been about 87 feet, 9 inches, not a full 90 feet.
By moving the base fully into the diamond, the distance from first to second and second to third will shrink by about nine inches. What changes for the Rochester Red Wings? Rochester will be one of the places where the new alignment is tested.