This week, a new MLB season commences, and after the electric primer we got from the World Baseball Classic, I could not be more excited for meaningful baseball.
You can argue all you want about how baseball as a sport is flailing for relevance and losing ground to other sports, but there’s just something different about Opening Day in the big leagues.
How can you not be romantic about baseball? -Brad Pitt in Moneyball (2011)
Just look at the latest edition of the World Baseball Classic. I’ll admit: I wasn’t hugely excited about it going in, but by the end of the tournament, I was fully captivated by the spectacle. Meaningful, playoff-caliber baseball in March? Sign me up!
If you don’t like the WBC, you don’t like fun. You don’t like excitement. You’re a chump. I don’t care about the injury risk or anything else like that.
A lot of people were anti-WBC because of that injury possibility. Unfortunately, we saw the worst of it with Edwin Diaz’s season-ending injury during the tournament. Those fans took that and used it as ammo to ban the tournament as a whole, which is so wrong.
By that logic, should we cancel Spring Training? Should we cancel the first 2+ months of the regular season? All those games are so much less meaningful than anything we saw in the World Baseball Classic!
Injuries will happen no matter what, by the way. Rhys Hoskins wasn’t at the WBC when he tore his ACL last week. He was at Spring Training.
My point is this: MLB has led up to its season with truly meaningless games forever. Wouldn’t it be cool if those games actually meant something every once in a while? That’s what baseball needs.
Look at soccer and how it performs in World Cup years. Viewership goes up. Fanhood goes up. Player buy-in goes up. Those players work around their team seasons just to have the opportunity to represent their countries in the World Cup.
Why can’t the WBC be the same for baseball – a unique event that any player would do anything to participate in?
It was really cool to see the emotion from Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout, and others as they represented their countries. These are the biggest stars in MLB, and clearly, that tournament meant the world to them. That kind of energy and passion is what makes baseball fun.
So point one as we head into the 2023 MLB season: Let’s keep the WBC, shall we? Moving on…
I think we’re in for as fun a baseball season as we’ve had in the last several years. Rule changes will completely change the game, mostly in favor of greater offense. Here’s a rundown of what’s new this year:
The shift is gone. Over are the days where teams can load up one side of the infield and take away hit after hit from would-be baserunners.
Joey Gallo might be relevant again. Somehow, Yordan Alvarez becomes even more dangerous. Juan Soto, who was one of the league leaders in outs hit into the shift, stands to have an immediate stat jump.
Sounds awesome to me.
Bases are bigger. For some reason, the newest CBA made a big deal of increasing the size of the bags to look more like pizza boxes. I’m all here for it, though. There will be fewer ugly collisions, but more importantly, players will have much more incentive to steal bases. Infielders will have a harder time getting tags down now that the bases are too big to cover.
Oh, did I mention that pickoff attempts are limited now, too? Pitchers can only attempt a pickoff twice per at-bat. Any more than that will be a balk. There’s nothing a pitcher can do after that to stop a runner from getting a large lead and stealing on the bigger bases.
Some experts predicted that major-league steal numbers could double. Sounds awesome!
But perhaps the biggest change is the addition of the pitch clock. Pitchers will have 15 seconds without runners on-base, and 20 seconds with runners on, to pitch the ball. Hitters must be in the box with eight seconds left. This will result in much quicker games, but more importantly, also make pitchers more susceptible to mistakes.
Without time to carefully consider pitch type and location, catchers and pitchers will have to be on top of their game to make consistently good pitches. This sounds awesome if you love offensive baseball.
All of these changes combine to produce what will likely be a much more exciting and watchable product on the field. I am more than excited to see how it will all play out on the field.
So get ready, baseball fans. We’re all the way back. To naysayers and haters – just let us enjoy ourselves, okay?
Follow Nick Hedges on Twitter @nicktrimshedges or Instagram @nicktrimshedges