This Was A Year
The things we'll tell our grandchildren, and the things our grandchildren will tell their grandchildren, about baseball this year.
Happy last day of the year. Carrying on a tradition I started in 2017, here’s a reckoning of what will still be remembered about this baseball season many decades from now.
1. What will Normal People remember from the 2023 baseball season?
I was watching Jeopardy! the other day. The category was 2023 Sports Highlight Reel, which we might consider a proxy for cultural crossover sports events, sports things that even non-sportzos saw covered somewhere. The category’s correct responses: The Kansas City Chiefs (winning the Super Bowl); the Women’s World Cup (and the United States being eliminated early); Novak Djokovic (winning three Grand Slam titles); LSU (winning the most-viewed women’s college basketball game ever); and Jake Paul (beating Nate Diaz in a boxing match).
I was listening to Hang Up And Listen the other day. The segment was “the most important and most memorable sports moments of 2023,” crossover events within the sportzos’ world. Subjects conversed upon: Damar Hamlin, Georgia football, the sexist Spanish soccer federation president, Sha'Carri Richardson, attendance and viewership records in women’s sports, Deion Sanders, Michigan football sign-stealing, Saudi money in soccer and golf, former Commanders owner Dan Snyder, Coco Gauff, Victor Wembanyama, Michael Oher and the Tuohys, a 16-seed winning in the NCAA tournament, and Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce. A good list.
You’ll note that nothing was mentioned about baseball, even though, to us baseball sickos, this year was wild. It featured perhaps the most talented player of all-time reaching peaks in both performance and storyline, the most new rules changes in more than a century, and the first international baseball tournament that really captured American interest. I guess many people have had this realization at various points over the past couple decades, but this week/this year was when it really hit me: It’s just us in here, friends. Baseball’s just ours now. No matter what happens within it, its energy stays on our baseball planet. We’re not a small group—there are hundreds of millions of baseball fans across dozens of countries—so it isn’t as though this is a failing enterprise. But people who aren’t baseball fans will probably never again feel the need to be up on what’s happening in baseball, the way I somehow feel the need to be up on what’s happening in football, the EU and crypto. Baseball is our little secret now. Nobody else will remember a thing about it.
2. What will we, Present-Day Baseball Fans, most remember from the 2023 baseball season?
I’ve struggled to find the best analogy for the pitch clock. It’s not like the shot clock in basketball or the play clock in football. Those are strategy-setting clocks, designed to make the gameplay fairer and more competitive. The clock in baseball, it turned out, changed almost nothing about strategy. Before it was implemented, we speculated on various secondary effects—that pitchers would lose velocity, or that they’d fall victim to more big innings, or even get hurt more. Mid-season, Mets manager Buck Showalter said the clock had made it harder for pitchers to “chase velocity,” but in fact leaguewide fastball velocity went up again. It actually went up a lot: The 0.3-mph jump in leaguewide four-seamer velocity—to a record 94.2 mph—matches the biggest year-to-year jump in at least a decade.
Anything you put in a game will get probed for strategic value—and so we’d occasionally see a pitcher trying to take advantage of clock dynamics to mess up the hitter’s timing, for example—but for the most part the clock dramatically improved the spectator experience without affecting strategy or gameplay or statistics at all.
The best analogy, I think, turns out to be something like the squeeze bottle. Try explaining to a kid that, when you were growing up, you had to just sit there and wait for the ketchup to come out. That you’d practically bruise your palm trying to knock ketchup loose, that you’d literally try to fling ketchup out of it, using centrifugal force. That when your efforts finally worked, you’d get a flood of way too much ketchup on your whatever, but that “way too much” was considered a success, because otherwise the condiment might take two minutes to ooze out of the bottle and your whatever would get cold. And tell the kid that not only was this obnoxious and inconvenient, but that you were expected to believe from marketing that this was a good part of eating ketchup. They had whole ad campaigns about how ketchup that wouldn’t come out of the bottle was the only good ketchup.
Then, one day, they came out with the squeeze bottle. No downside to the squeeze bottle. Didn’t change the ketchup one bit. You never even think about the glass bottle anymore. The only time it comes up is when you remember how ridiculous that whole thing was, waiting for ketchup.
But, so, that’s why we’ll remember this as the year of the clock. In the tradition of olds remembering the past as a series of long walks in the snow and uphill both ways, we will if anything exaggerate our memories of slow, anachronistic, inconsiderate pre-2023 baseball.
But people who weren’t here for 2022 won’t really care. Because, again, the clock is mostly invisible, mostly inconsequential to strategy, mostly irrelevant to statistics, and so obvious—as obvious as a squeeze bottle!—that it won’t seem like anything miraculous, not like flying cars or anything like that. The future will think about the pre-clock days the way we think about pressure plates in the road that tell traffic lights when to change. When were those invented? Who cares! (People back then cared.)
Another possibility:
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