Baseball's Choice: Change or Die

Rob Manfred officially donned the Major League Baseball commissioner's tiara for the first time on Monday, and didn't waste any time dismaying the game's commentariat. In a weirdly well-lit interview with ESPN, Manfred conveyed a sincere, thoughtful openness toward changing the on-field product. The adjustments mentioned by the new commish included the pitch clock, already slated for use in the upper minors in 2015, and a surprise: the restriction of defensive shifts.

The pitch clock is easy enough to understand: less time between pitches equals a faster game. But why target defensive shifts? Because scoring has fallen almost a full run per game in the past 15 seasons, and shifts are at least part of the reason. Costco-sized strike zones and evolving plate approaches from hitters likely account for far more of the offensive shrinkage, but drastic, predictive defensive repositioning has contributed to suppressed run totals as well.

While Manfred only indicated a willingness to consider a ban on extreme defensive realignments, baseball traditionalists immediately freaked out. Of course, that baseball superfans don't care for (even the suggestion of the possibility of future) change is less news than a law of nature—if you revise it, they will complain.

In fact, one of the few baseball traditions older than traditionalism is the sport's track record of reinventing itself. If you think Daisuke Matsuzaka takes too long between pitches, it's probably for the best that you missed game 3 of the Atlantics versus Excelsiors series in 1860, when the starting pitchers combined for 665 pitches in three innings. In the seminal 1845 rules of baseball, there were no such things as called balls and strikes. Batters were free to lay off as many bad pitches as they wanted.

Unsurprisingly, the golden era of 100-pitch innings didn't last long, because it made baseball no fun to watch or play. The notion of calling pitches—forcing the batter to swing at decent offerings—saved baseball upon its introduction. Countless other necessary revisions litter the sport's history. Players started wearing gloves. Balls were replaced when they became too dirty for batters to see. The mound went up, the mound went down The game changed, almost always because it needed to change.

Tradition runs deep in baseball, far deeper than in any other big-time American sport. Many baseball fans are still mad about the introduction of the DH, which happened during the Nixon administration. This is after all the sport where every ball is anointed with magic mud from a specific river, the sport where multiple stadiums have hand-operated scoreboards in the year 2015, the sport where it is not considered overly weird to intentionally build a hill into the field at a brand-new stadium just because that happened in the past.

Manfred, in explaining his openness to rewiring the sport he now effectively runs, said only that it's "important for the game to continue to modernize itself." He watered down his heady reform line a bit in a Tuesday interview with Fox, speculating that batters might learn to beat shifts without any help from rulebook changes. But even as Manfred walked back the shift ban talk, the response has been overwhelmingly skeptical—at best. Dave Cameron applauded Manfred's willingness to change, but wonders whether baseball fans even like offense. Ben Lindbergh posits that banning shifts is dumb, because increased strikeouts are the real enemy. These are two of the more thoughtful, but still negative, responses to Manfred. The typical response is much more knee-jerk: we like our baseball the way it is, thank you very much.

Baseball's rich history is inarguably part of the game's appeal for many fans. But baseball—as a business, and as a cultural institution—can't get caught up in fan service. In movies and comics, "fan service" usually means female characters getting naked, or gratuitous nods to backstory to stroke "real" fans. In the case of baseball, perhaps it's not changing for not changing's sake that threatens the game. Tradition-minded baseball fans run the risk of becoming otaku, so devoted to the obsessive details of their fandom that they can't see the larger picture.

What baseball fans actually want (a true fan service, as opposed to the gross boob-centric sense of the term) isn't a firm data point—they most likely want their team to win, they want close games and big plays. But more than anything else, what baseball fans should want is for baseball to exist, to sustain, to thrive. Baseball's mutations—especially the type of mindful, managed change that Manfred suggests—are not only necessary but inevitable if the sport is to compete for fans, dollars, and talent.

Baseball is too big to be pure. For the game to stay big, to stay major, the purists will necessarily have to lose. From a business perspective, the shepherds of the game know that they can tweak away without alienating the game's most intense fans. Any fan who loves baseball enough to ardently resist change most likely loves baseball too much to stop watching. Even if there's a pitch clock, or shifts are banned, or the cyborg umps unionize.

The timeless—in not having a clock, and in never changing—notion of baseball possesses undeniable appeal, just like any warm memory. We want to keep baseball the same just as we want to keep ourselves the same, to live endless summer. But that soft-focus, dadcore idea of the game has a fatal glitch: like any memory, you can't put your arms around it.