Baseball was born as the perfect sport, which is at its essence, America’s pastime. A relaxing game where you can spend your whole day at the park with a beer in your left hand and a good friend sitting to your right as you complain to each other about the umpires.  

Somewhere along the line someone got confused. Someone thought ‘big number good’ and decided that ‘no baseball is not a relaxing pastime, it needs constant scoring to satisfy the ever shortening American attention span – it needs more hits’.

This infectious idea, this poisoning of the mind started in 1973 as an experiment that went on for too long. Initially this contagion was confined to the American League. It was one of the beautiful oddities of baseball – where one league had the designated hitter (DH) and one did not.

That was until the Covid-19 pandemic. Under the guise of ‘player safety’ the owners saw an opportunity to increase offense and implemented the universal DH. 

Apparently batting is suddenly far too dangerous for a pitcher – while conversely asking a pitcher to speed up their pitches with the pitch clock is A-okay: A practice the MLBPA has blamed for the astronomical number of Tommy John injuries. So what is it MLB, do you or do you not care about player safety? 

Once the National League got its hits it, much like a junkie, couldn’t give it up, and in 2022 it permanently added the universal DH. 

With the universal DH we would never have beautiful sports moments like when no-name pitcher Koo Dae-Sung had an entire stadium chant his name after he hit a double off first ballot hall of famer Randy Johnson.

This idea that pitchers should be protected from hitting is like saying Shack should be protected from shooting free-throws. If pitchers aren’t good at hitting, they should simply work on their hitting like Madison Bumgarner or Shohei Ohtani. With the advent of the universal hitter the value of these two-way pitchers is greatly diminished.  

The next step Major League Baseball took in ruining the game of baseball came recently, in 2023: the pitch clock. A truly perverse idea that comes from the school of thought that believes baseball is a boring game that takes up too much of our valuable time. 

To help get us on with our day and out of the ballpark, which we were apparently bamboozled into entering, the MLB has begun setting a time limit on pitchers. 

It used to be that pitchers in the MLB had personality. Some were methodical pitchers who took their time (like Aroldois Chapman who thought over every pitch carefully), and there were no nonsense quick pitchers (like Mark Buehrle who got the sign from their catcher and rapidly threw that pitch).

Baseball fans could look up who would be on the mound and decide for themselves if they wanted a quick or a slow game. But apparently, your average baseball fan is too stupid to do this, so the MLB decided to strip this aspect of a pitcher’s style away from them. 

This rule did not just hurt fans, but it hurt ballpark workers as well. With a 24 minute drop in average game length that’s 24 minutes a game where ballpark employees aren’t getting paid. With 81 home games a year that means 32 hours a season that employees will no longer be paid for. 

To top it all off, in 2023 the MLB decided that defensive strategy in baseball is no longer important if it means it prevents the all-mighty hit. Major League Baseball accomplished this by outlawing the shift by forbidding any infielder from touching the outfield grass. 

I am curious as to why the MLB stopped there? If the goal is to ban defense, then why not just get rid of it entirely? Every game should just be a home run derby, the team with the most home runs would win – no need for the pointless art of fielding. 

A reason MLB gives for these outrageous rules is TV viewership. It is a fact that MLB viewership has been down in recent years. But here is an outrageous idea: Maybe instead of ruining the game of baseball, the MLB should maybe allow baseball fans to actually watch baseball? 

Here in Seattle, and in many other baseball markets, baseball games are locked behind Root Sports or what are called Regional Sports Networks or RSN’s in the biz. These RSN’s lockout the younger generation of baseball fans by locking baseball behind a new cable bill instead of online where the younger generation of potential baseball fans typically consume their media. 

The MLB is bringing about its own downfall. Major League Baseball is not banana ball, it is professional baseball. America’s pastime has a storied past, deep traditions, and is rife with rituals, and that’s one of the many things that makes it so great.

It’s time to start preserving the sport we love.