Look at you, sitting there as though baseball is gone. Baseball never leaves! It just sort of hovers there by the exit after claiming it was going to leave, moving with purposeful slowness toward the door and turning to say “What was that?” upon the utterance of anything approaching its name.
“We didn’t say anything,” you reply.
“Ah,” baseball says, then fingers the blinds a bit and mumbles about how dark it’s getting.
Then it just hangs around for a while, all winter. It lives in the Arizona Fall League and the Dominican Winter League and the Premier12 tournament. It lives in the trade rumors and prospect lists and increasingly tragic Scott Boras puns. It lives in the aggregate sites; an army of rats racing across keyboards to churn out vague headlines on shitty articles that link out to a Jon Heyman tweet about teams “surveying the market.”
And it lives here at Baseball Prospectus, where writing like this piece exists only occasionally. Much of it is analytic and intelligent; thoughtful and moving; in-depth and on-the-scene. Articles like this one are like opening your coat closet and getting attacked by a bird: Infrequent. Aggressive. And requiring great resolve in order to emerge unscathed.
Because no matter how much of the internet’s best baseball content BP publishes, from the PECOTA projections that everyone definitely remembers getting the Yankees exactly right and is apologizing on social media for doubting, to the BP Annual you’re probably about to pre-order, some of you just may not be convinced that a subscription to this website is in your best interest.
And what this article will now do is tell you all of the reasons that you are wrong.
Baseball is changing, and it is scary.
I’m sure we all recall the change that ruined that baseball. Sure, people sat there and found a way to enjoy themselves after it had come, but the players were pissed and even a former legend, safely retired years before, weighed in on the new version of the game, claiming his playing career wouldn’t have been nearly as long if he’d had to play under such tyranny.
“Night ball,” Red Sox manager Joe Cronin said, “has made it utterly impossible to compare great players of today with the stars of the pre-light era.”
That’s right, you thought I was talking about the “Golden At-bat,” but I was talking about baseball at night. That legend I mentioned? Babe Ruth. Quite a twist, mm? Don’t you feel silly, panicking about change, when I’ve so expertly shown you that history repeats itself and that we ultimately accept every change baseball throws at us, no matter how deranged the current commissioner may be?
That’s the kind of fresh take you can expect from articles like this, which again, I assure you are exceedingly rare.
Change. Isn’t it awful? Despite exquisitely crafted literary parallels, we here in the commonly referred-to post-light era have also not been saved from baseball’s hideous sweeping changes, like making players leave their lodgings after sundown. Remember when they decided to cut down on catcher obliterations, inventing a poorly defined rule that nobody knew how to enforce? Sure, eventually it all just got shrugged away as it always does. And yes, the number of catchers who’ve been physically or emotionally harmed by Scott Cousins since the Posey Rule went into effect has dropped to zero. But now Rob Manfred wants to keep adding fun little Instagram filters to the game you love.
Have you heard about the “Golden At-Bat” rule Manfred mentioned? Of course you did, it’s all anybody’s complaining about. You don’t want that! But how will people know you don’t want that? Good luck getting your passionate cries heard over the wailing of virginal Nazis on Twitter and the self-congratulations of its alternatives.
We here at Baseball Prospectus are listening. You’ll need stewards into baseball’s twisted future, a human shield of disposable nerds between you and the madman Rob Manfred.
Have you ever considered how baseball will look in five years? Ten? MLB charging you broadcast fees by the out? A top prospect tearing an ACL doing a Savannah Bananas dance which is now required across all of minor-league baseball? Scott Boras’ barely functioning body being pushed out in a hover chair to deliver a press conference of pun-filled zingers in front of the last living Christmas tree?
Be honest. Are you emotionally prepared for this? Hell, you aren’t emotionally prepared for January. If only there were a baseball outlet that could appear from the darkness with a torch and take you by the hand.
Baseball isn’t changing, and it is scary
Here’s another horrifying thought: What if baseball doesn’t change? What if it’s this gloomy mess of caked-on tobacco spit forever, with half of it trying to take itself apart and build back cheaper and more efficiently, and the other half just dumping money into a furnace in an attempt to become the sport’s new god-king?
Then there’s teams threatening to leave town and getting the go-ahead from their 29 best friends to do so while we all stand here yelling, “Don’t!”
“The future of baseball seems to be a bright one,” read one newspaper in 1937. “For it is a good sport.”
Well, quite a bit about the sport has changed since 1937, meaning that somewhere along the line, it went from “good” to Rob Manfred scribbling down new rule ideas on his hand after winking at a server to bring another round of mimosas.
But of course, how they defined “good” in 1937 was also different in ways that we won’t even be touching here, but we all know the kinds of reasons I mean. The racial ones. As well as all of the other normalized atrocities that were a part of everyday life before we got the internet to calm everybody down.
I suppose the conclusion is that baseball, like everything, is always changing. It is not itself a living organism, but it’s made up of them, and as the world evolves, baseball is dragged along, sometimes unwillingly, into the current era. What we believe will make it better or worse doesn’t really factor into it, because all Manfred has to do is get us talking and then, well, his job is done. The strategic dump of his latest brainstorming session with people who don’t like baseball is probably a part of some other, bigger, dumber plan that will ultimately make the league more profitable for the mewling billionaires who sit atop it. Now, we’re going to spend a few days talking about it, debating it, finding new angles on it; basically doing the market research Manfred needs to gain data on the concept. All the while it’s normalized into the lexicon and years from now, when the 14th-seed Phillies bring a 37-year-old Bryce Harper out to win a playoff game, we’ll all watch him clobber a home run that gets called back after it collides with a drone advertising murder hornet repellent and shrug like he just took ball two.
No fan reaction has ever stopped a commissioner from doing something they really wanted to do, so how important are your reactions, anyway?
Here at Baseball Prospectus? Very important. Why do you think we still have a comment section? Because we like being corrected, screamed at, or told that someone is canceling their subscription due to an article having too much cursing in it (Again, so rare)? No, because baseball is a community, and while Rob Manfred can’t hear your complaints from his office that I assume is adorned with dead animals he didn’t kill, we can hear you. We will hear you. We enjoy hearing you.
Because that’s what a community is: An article about baseball, followed by five to seven comments about that article, some of which are aimed at each other or about another topic entirely.
Baseball Prospectus: We’re better than baseball.
I’m really just scared, mostly?
Oh right, I forgot about the call and response format. Have you tried drugs and alcohol? Yes? Well, then there’s still one more option: A subscription to Baseball Prospectus.
All that time you used to spend doom scrolling? Spend it here reading about previously unearthed statistical gems from 2024, a breakdown of bounce-back candidates for the following season, or a lengthy, intensely-researched profile of a player who died on this day a hundred years ago.
Lose yourself in post after post worthy of your eyeballs. Hell, maybe you’ll even find an internship with the Red Sox that changes the course of your life.
“And how did you hear about this position?” they’ll ask at your interview.
“I read about it on Baseball Prospectus!” you’ll reply.
“‘Baseball Perspective?’” they’ll ask.
“No,” you’ll say, thinking less of them. “Prospectus.”
“Oh, you mean that site with all the cursing?”
“No, I mean the site with the award-winning baseball coverage and annually released book covering every team and player in the game!”
“Hmm, looks like they have a paywall,” your interviewer will mumble disgustedly as they look at their laptop. “That’s a shame, and totally unheard of in this day and age.”
“That’s rich, coming from the team that paid Pablo Sandoval $90 million!” you’ll reply with a wink.
“We’ll be in touch,” they’ll say, shuffling some papers in a way that makes it clear they will not be in touch.
Well, you blew that interview. We can’t help you there. But you never know which BP posting is going to change your life. That one didn’t, but you only have yourself to blame. Why would you correct someone who was interviewing you? You’ll learn quickly that when somebody says “Baseball Perspective” it’s easier to just smile and nod.
Part of overcoming fear is ignoring it entirely, and BP is here to help you do that in the years ahead. Your fear may be coming from what you will lose or who will be hurt and in those moments, there is little more to do than turn to those whom you trust to hold you up. Chances are, you have those people. And in the baseball world, you have us.
We are here to decipher, discuss, and demand better from baseball, even as we know, deep in our souls, that baseball absolutely will not listen to us. It is going to change, and we are going to hate it. It’s going to be played and we are going to love it. Players will say irredeemably dumb things, commissioners will make rules we don’t like, managers will protect players who don’t deserve it.
But there will be slow Sunday afternoon games when three players collide on a pop-up. There will be no-hitters taken late into games and ruined by utility infielders. There will be playoff darlings hard-charging into the whirling blades of the postseason. There will be pitchers who made adjustments in the spring and accidentally invented a new kind of pitch. There will be eye-bulging stat columns and foreign substances on hats and malfunctioning robot umpires and the same ad played with such intense repetition your brain will come to think of it as your pulse.
Despite the multiple apocalypses descending simultaneously on the stadium, there will be the game. And Baseball Prospectus will be here to talk about it with you.
Because again, baseball never really leaves.
“Did you say something?” baseball asks, now outside waiting for an Uber. It’s cupping its hands against the window in order to see inside.
“No,” you reply, closing the blinds, and go back to reading Baseball Prospectus.
“Ugh, a paywall?!” baseball will complain, peeking through a sliver in the blinds.
Thank you for reading
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