Lockout just part of MLB's problem. The game is also at odds with your brain

In her excellent book, "Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do," author Jennifer L. Eberhardt, PhD, has a section on how our brains categorize things that are familiar as they pertain to race.

There was a passage with a broader implication that stopped me in my tracks: "The brain begins to disengage when confronted with stimuli that are not novel."

It's a phenomenon neuroscientists call "repetition suppression." Presented more simply, it means to me that we stop paying attention — or needing to pay attention — to things when they don't change.

That was an eye-opener in the context of the COVID pandemic, which caused our lives to shrink and become repetitive in many ways.

And in a roundabout way, it led me down a path thinking about Major League Baseball and the problems facing the game that go far beyond the possibility of missing games if a labor deal is not reached by Monday — a subject I talked about on Thursday's Daily Delivery podcast.

Baseball's larger problem is a decline in interest. That has been charted in many different ways, but try this one: a recent poll of 1,570 adults showed that more than half have no interest in MLB.

I've been tempted in the past to blame that decline on our diminished attention spans combined with the pace of play and the length of games.

I now think those play a role, but they're more symptoms than cause.

The root problem is that MLB has changed, but not for the better. That's an opinion in some ways, but a fact if we think about it in the context of that idea of repetition suppression.

All sports evolve, and we're at a point where athletes are bigger and better than ever. The NFL has adapted its schemes and rules to showcase that ability. Same goes for the NHL and NBA. All of those leagues are thriving on relative scales.

MLB has plenty of short-term financial health with massive rights deals through 2028. But the sport itself has suffered in some ways from increased skill and knowledge. Designer pitches, shifts, bulky hitters, juiced balls and swing planes have turned a lot of at bats into "three true outcome" affairs: They either end in a walk, strikeout or home run.

In 2021, 35.1% of all MLB plate appearances resulted in one of those three events. In 1991, when the Twins and Braves staged that epic World Series, the number was 25.9%. In other words, baseball has changed in a way that has made it increasingly the same. The walks and strikeouts — non-events in many ways — are particularly damaging.

Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot — a little over a third compared to a little over a fourth.

But to the brain, it matters.

Baseball is increasingly devoid of novel experiences, those unexpected bursts of action that make you tune in or head to a ballpark. If one of the wonderful things about sports is that you never know what is going to happen that day, it applies less and less to baseball.

Repetition suppression, a key function of how the brain works, is causing you to disengage with the way baseball is being played. That this disengagement is happening in concert with longer games and limitless options for other things we could be doing only compounds the damage.

That's a far bigger problem than bonus pools, draft changes or the number of teams that might play in the postseason.