Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association will be tightening the rules on takeout slides, and trying to speed up mound visits, in rule changes announced his morning.
The change in takeout slides is likely in response to Chase Utley's play during last season's playoff series against the Mets. The Dodgers infielder broke up a double-play with a brutally vicious slide into Ruben Tejada at second base, which broke the Mets' player's leg - the slide was rules legitimate at the time, but the resulting controversy seems to have prompted MLB finally to address the situation [I guess the Twins' Tsuyoshi Nishioka, who suffered an almost identical injury back in April 2011, wasn't East-coast enough to justify any change] Here are details of the new rule, the poetically-named RULE 6.