Royals Wade Davis rares back to fire the 1-2 pitch to the Mets Wilmer Flores. The Mets are all but dead being down 7-2 in the 12th inning of Game 5 of the 2015 World Series and the newest version of the Amazin Mets down to their last strike on what was a resurgent season. The Mets were in a great position to win this game not long ago. Heading into the 9th inning the Mets had a 2-0 lead with Matt Harvey convincing manager Terry Collins to let him come out to try to finish what had been for 8 innings of brilliance in the most recent of many legendary World Series pitching performances over the history of baseball. The Royals Lorenzo Cain though would have a typical 2015 Royals at bat to begin the top of the 9th. Spoiling off many nasty pitches from the Mets Ace before earning a well deserved walk. Cain would steal second base (even though they were down 2 runs, these 2015 Royals would run with a reckless abandon stealing 104 bases in the regular season, but more impressively they stole 8 bases in the World Series including four in this game). Next at bat would be slugging first baseman Eric Hosmer. Hosmer would strike the ball to left field over the head of Mets left fielder Michael Conforto’s for an RBI double to cut the lead to one. Collins would lift Harvey for closer Jeurys Familia. Now with one out and Hosmer on third star catcher Salvador Perez would step to the plate. Perez would hit a grounder to third baseman David Wright. Wright would play the play perfectly looking Hosmer back to third before throwing to first for the second out. Eric Hosmer just didn’t give a damn and made a heads up baseball play that signified the 2015 Kansas City Royals. He went for it and sprinted towards home forcing Mets first baseman Lucas Duda to make a bang bang throw. A good throw gets Hosmer out easily. But Duda rushed the throw and threw it up the third base line and over Travis d’Arnaud’s head as Hosmer would slide home safely. It was one of those moments that makes baseball awesome. A play at the plate is an exciting moment in the fourth inning of a regular season game or the 9th inning of the World Series. Hosmer and Cain played with reckless abandon, they did not care if they would get thrown out they were going for it and putting the pressure on the defense.
Davis would locate a filthy 97 mph cutter on the inside corner and freeze Flores for a strike three call. Catcher Drew Butera would jump into Davis arms. The Royals had won their first World Series in 30 years. The following season the Chicago Cubs would win their first World Series in 108 years. The Cubs victory over the Indians game 7 is the best baseball game of this century in my opinion (Game 6 of the 2011 World Series and Game 7 of the 2001 World Series has a great argument). Since that fateful late October night in Cleveland it’s been all about Launch Angles, sabermetrics, horrible marketing decisions and pillow fights amongst the players association and the owners. What has happened? why is baseball so boring and so out of touch in today’s landscape of social media and short attention spans? Will baseball ever make it back into our hearts? Who knew that Crash Davis line to Nuke LaLoosh about strikeouts being so fascist and boring would be such an accurate statement. How did a sport that seemed to still be relevant just six years ago crash into the hockey of the summer months? Let’s take a look at what has happened since Cubs first baseball Anthony Rizzo put a very special baseball in his back pants pocket.
First off let’s review the 2015 Royals who was the most old school team in recent memory. The stole 104 bases which was only 5th in baseball (and actually 5 teams stole more bases than that even this season) so what made so old school? They hit 139 home runs (which would be 29th in baseball last season). The hit .269 as a team (which would have been best in baseball last season). But the stat that made them such a watchable team is that they didn’t strike out a lot. They struck out 973 times for the season (a modest 6 times a game). They put the ball in play and was an aggressive baseball team. You know what we like in today’s generation of short attention spans and billions being addicted to a 6 by 4 inch mobile device, things happening, action!!! The 2016 Los Angeles Angels struck out 991 times and that was the last team to strike out less than 1,000 times in a season. That is a lot of strikeouts.
Strikeouts are awesome in big spots (a closer getting out of a bases loaded jam in the 8th inning of a close game). But having a wave of strikeouts, walks and homeruns is a whole lot of not much happening for long stretches. Why did the launch angle (team philosophies across baseball to alter players swings to have more of an uppercut which would hit more fly balls but would create a hole in the swing which would create a larger percentage of swing and misses) become the official baseball swing of just about every player in today’s game. Well the answer is the shift my friends. In 2021 left handed batters had teams shift 52.8 percent of the time. In 2016 that number was 24.3 percent (so it more than doubled in a half decade thanks nerds!!). So lefties in particular were having every pulled ground ball die in a sea of infielders how do you counter that? Hit more fly balls. How do you counter react to this problem? Ban the shift. Don’t say baseball can’t do this either. NBA took away hand checking to increase scoring and allowed their great athletes to do what they do best (it worked!). NFL made the game more safe and explosive by not allowing Quarterbacks and Receivers to get decapitated and allowed for their best athletes to do what they do best (it also worked). More balls in play equals more action which equals more stolen bases, highlight catches, plays at the plate. Moments of friction that catches your attention that doesn’t occur often in today’s game. Baseball will never be a fast moving sport but it doesn’t have to be if we have wow moments that excite you on a nightly basis and get fans out of their seats. Also lower the mound to counter the increased velocity and spin rate pitchers have today (that is not going to change anytime soon pitchers are throwing harder than ever, an average of almost 94 miles per hour which is three miles an hour higher than just a decade ago).
Marketing is terrible in baseball. Most casual sports fans (and even non casual fans) know who Tom Brady, LeBron James, Steph Curry and Patrick Mahomes are. Some of my friends who watch other sports don’t even know who Mike Trout or Fernando Tatis are, that’s a problem that baseball must fix. When I was growing up everyone knew who Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Bonds was. Ken Griffey Jr. was the most popular athlete in all of sports not named Michael Jordan in the 90’s. In the 2000’s we all watched a supersized Barry Bonds put up a ridiculous season at age 40 (.609 on base percentage and 1,421 slugging percentage). Juan Soto’s and his 145 walks was the only player in 2021 to even have more walks than Barry Bonds 120 intentional walks in 04. Pitchers were afraid to pitch to Bonds and it was awesome. He was so locked in that the one pitch he would get to hit on a given night had a high probability of ending up in McCovey Cove. This cyborg in an ERA of juiced up players is not even going to make it to the hall of fame. This is embarrassing by a group of sports writers that are still living in the stone age and are engulfed in a stubborn sense of moral entitlement. It’s hard to change a game for the better when the writers who cover the game isn’t even truly open to it.
When the pandemic hit in 2020 baseball powers that be were engulfed in an argument of how many games and
pay for all of the players for the season. They were able to strike a deal at the 11th hour to get a 60 game season in but the inability to come up with a more prompt and urgent deal was a public embarrassment. This tug of war which mostly was over salaries was obviously tough for many Americans to understand during a time that Americans needed a distraction from what was an unprecedented global pandemic that kept many of us grounded in our home for months. Baseball could have returned in June and taken over the sports landscape before the NFL started training camps and the NBA had resumed in the Orlando bubble. Baseball missed this opportunity as NBA games resumed a week after baseball started and NFL training camps opened up three weeks later. Baseball could have been the healing force that it was after the 9-11 attacks in 2001. Ten days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City the Mets played the Braves in an emotional night at the old Shea Stadium. Mike Piazza hit a game winning homerun in the bottom of the 8th inning to beat the rivals from Atlanta 3-2. I recently saw this video on youtube and it still to this day the waving of American flags in the stands as Piazza circled the bases gives me goosebumps. Top off another deep Yankees playoff run that scarred Diamondbacks reliever Byun-Hyun Kim for life and baseball gave New Yorkers and American’s everywhere a reason to believe again. Baseball had their chance to be that healing force we needed yet again but as Billy Madison once famously said, “YOU BLEW IT!”
Follow up the forgettable 2020 shortened campaign with one of the most boring World Series and playoffs of all time that was the 2nd least watched postseason of all time (next to 2020 sadly) and now you officially have a dying sport. So what do we do to try to alleviate this problem and start a plan to get baseball back into America’s hearts.. How about a lockout!!!!!!
We are now over two months into this lockout and there is still a tug of war between the players association and the owners. Spring training will almost certainly be delayed which in turn would threaten the beginning of the season. No better way to push fans away more in today’s world than greed and indifference. MLB salaries already dropped 4 percent from 2019 to 2021. If/when the games return salaries will drop even further for the 2022 season. But that’s not even the point here. The point is a game that used to take America’s breath away every fall barely even gets a peak from the masses in today’s age of television options.
The NFL is king, the NBA gets it’s time to shine every spring. College basketball takes us out of our slippers every March and even golf is trying new inventive ways to stay relevant post Tiger. But baseball is too stubborn to change, too stubborn to evolve, too stubborn to get out of it’s own way. A sport that used to bring Romantic storylines every fall hasn’t even been mesmerizing enough to be on the level of a terrible holiday romantic comedy. As I shed a tear on this Tuesday evening for a game that I love I ask for a miracle. Can anyone save Major League Baseball from themselves. Can anyone bring baseball back to it’s days of glory. A boy can dream, because right now this has dream is a nightmare.