Baseball’s Magnificent, Transformative Season

As the playoffs loom, 2023 has already been an unqualified success for a sport that finally embraced change.

Baseball is a sport that exists to dissatisfy. As glorious as it can be (and, I’d argue, largely is), baseball is so rooted in tradition and nostalgia that the present can’t help but pale in comparison to the version fans fell in love with as children. People always — well, almost always — remember the past as better than it actually was, and certainly as better than the present. This means that from a longtime fan’s perspective, any change to the game they love often feels less like evolution and more like betrayal. It’s the perpetual Back In My Day sport. No wonder everyone’s constantly complaining about it.

Which is why it’s remarkable that as the playoffs get underway on Tuesday, Major League Baseball just completed perhaps its most complaint-free regular season of the last 25 years. After criticism over too-long, too-boring games reached a crescendo, the league made several dramatic rule changes last offseason, from adding a pitch clock to banning the shift — changes it rolled out with a Bryan Cranston commercial, which aired so frequently every baseball fan I know can still recite it by heart months later. (“Get that shift outta here.”) These were radical alterations that you’d think would mortify at least some of the baseball purists who make up the game’s core fanbase. But incredibly, the tweaks haven’t just worked to shorten games — they’ve been pretty much universally accepted and even celebrated by fans, players, front-office members, television executives, and umpires alike. Minus all the dawdling, games have felt tighter, snappier, and more urgent, without losing the core appeal of the sport itself. It’s like baseball games were a saggy bed sheet that the rules ironed the wrinkles out of. Now the sport is back to being taut. You can bounce a quarter off it.

At an average of two hours and 42 minutes, baseball games are the shortest they’ve been since 1984 — and 24 minutes shorter than last year. Attendance is up, with six million more fans passing through the turnstiles than last season and the highest overall numbers since 2017. Television ratings have improved too, which is particularly impressive considering the extent to which last year’s numbers were juiced by Aaron Judge’s home run chase. (And that doesn’t even account for streaming numbers on Apple TV and Peacock, both of which have centered the sport this year.) Shohei Ohtani is the league’s signature crossover superstar, but the last few years have also introduced fans to a slew of young, charismatic talents more comfortable in the spotlight than the last decade’s superstar, Mike Trout, who is famously modest, quiet, and, well, a little boring. Players like Ronald Acuña Jr., Elly De La Cruz, Julio Rodríguez, and Adley Rutschman (a.k.a. the Driving Crooner), are exciting and personable and preternaturally talented; they’re the perfect players, at last, to market a whole sport around.

But I feel like the best marker of baseball’s successful year is simply the lack of grousing. A sport that has lately been in crisis mode every season has been refreshingly free of them since April. Over the last few years, MLB has dealt with, among other things, the Astros’ trash-can-banging scheme, PED issues, and the Spider Tack controversy, which led to umpires and pitchers playing patty-cake after every inning. But ever since last year’s labor nightmare ended, the coast has mostly been clear. You could make an argument that certain stories should be scandals; if you’re an Oakland A’s fan, you’re righteously angry at owner John Fisher, who is (probably) moving his team to Las Vegas next year in traumatic fashion. And two of the best young players in the sport, the Rays’ Wander Franco and the Dodgers’ Julio Urías, have been put on the restricted list after being accused of some truly horrifying offenses. (Urias was arrested on domestic violence charges a second time, and Franco is under multiple investigations in the Dominican Republic for alleged relationships with underage girls.) It’s actually pretty shocking that neither story has blown up into a full-on scandal; imagine how the NFL or NBA would handle, say, Tua Tagovailoa or Jalen Brunson being sidelined over such accusations just before the playoffs started.

That these stories haven’t metastasized is, I think, mostly a result of the good vibes of this season — the fact that baseball is getting back to feeling like baseball again. It’s the simplest, if most amoral, explanation: If the game is good, fans will ignore the ugly stuff. This is also how the NFL gets rid of bad press; that baseball is able to do it too is a good sign for the league, financially if not ethically.

This postseason is primed to be riveting as well, with fun upstarts like the Baltimore Orioles and Texas Rangers, traditional powerhouses like the Houston Astros, Atlanta Braves, and Los Angeles Dodgers all in the mix, and a TV-friendly format that is making the baseball season feel more and more like, again, the NFL’s. Even better: You might be able to stay up to the end of some of the games this year.

This won’t last forever, or even long. We’ll always complain about baseball. Surely, the era of good feeling will fade. But that it has even happened at all is noteworthy. Baseball had a year of good press and positive news. Don’t get used to it. But don’t forget to enjoy it while you can as well.