MIAMI – Baseball is flourishing, healthier and wealthier than ever before, increasingly more popular with its customers and profitable for its players and owners.
Baseball is dying, drowning under a flood of strikeouts and pitching changes, slowly but steadily inching toward a cliff of boredom and paralysis.
Whatever scenario you want to indulge in, your view was represented in Miami last week, where the sport's best players and most powerful executives gathered to celebrate and/or eulogize the sport they love. It really was a remarkable dissonance, with some citing record revenue, and others lamenting the length of games and loss of market share to football and basketball.
Even the events themselves demonstrated the different interpretations: The Home Run Derby on Monday, a gimmick to further spotlight the game's best players, was a raucous and prodigious success. But the red-carpet parade through downtown Miami on Tuesday attracted an embarrassingly sparse crowd, and the much quieter All-Star Game included noticeable swaths of empty seats.
Commissioner Rob Manfred held a private question-and-answer session with the game's beat writers and did nothing to douse rumors that he intends to implement a pitch clock next year, as he is allowed to do under the new collective bargaining agreement, and perhaps limit mound visits or even relief pitchers.
"Our research suggests that the home run is actually a popular play in baseball. Strikeouts, if by a single pitcher, fans really like," Manfred said. "Where it gets troubling is when there are tons of strikeouts and no action, just a lot of pitching changes. That's troubling to me."
Manfred cited the average time of game — 3 hours, 5 minutes this season, up almost 10 minutes from two seasons ago — as a call to action. He clearly believes that fans, particularly young fans, are being turned off by games that drag on because of longer at-bats and more time between pitches.
Yet it was difficult to detect much support for his position — and especially for the notion that umpires will be enforcing pitch-clock violations next spring — in the players' clubhouses. "They want to rush the players more, when we're trying to play the game the right way," said Seattle second baseman Robinson Cano, whose 10th-inning home run won the All-Star Game for the American League 2-1. "But the games are fine. People watch. Why must we change how we play?"
