The headline of this article, Yes, Sabermetrics Ruined Baseball is more extreme than the article itself. Freddie deBoer provides a very nice account of why baseball became unwatchable to him.

I recognize that the analytics people set themselves the task of quantitatively identifying the strategies teams could pursue to produce and prevent the most runs, and I understand that they have been very effective in doing so. I understand that it is the job of teams, their front offices, their managers, and their players to optimize their number of wins over the course of a season. None of that is nefarious. The problem is that the resulting product is dogshit. I recognize that safeguarding the popularity of baseball is not the job of the analytics departments. But it is most certainly the job of the teams, as corporations that are part of the entertainment business, whether you like it or not. And the league is made up of the teams.

freddiedeboer.substack.com

I actually am looking forward to the pitch clock to speed the game along, but I also wonder if it’s time to devalue the three-true outcomes. If we want to take this to extremes, we can make a ball hit over the fence a single. It would create more base runners, and make line drives in the gap more valuable. It might even bring back higher triple rates.

We could make a walk worth two bases. This is a little double edged, since the batter will want to draw walks, but the cost to the defensive team is high. They no longer could pitch around a hitter with first base open and a man on second, since they will advance the runner on second and not set up a double play.

Finally, create a bigger strike zone. While you may postulate that this will cause strike outs to go up, I am willing to change that. In my lifetime, the strike zone shrunk a great deal, and strikeouts keep going up anyway. A bigger strike zone will limit walks, and force batters to swing more. Since home runs are not that valuable, batters should try to make more contact.

These are radical proposals, but it’s tough to make small changes to the game like they do in football. Without changing the value of the three-true outcomes relative to other results, we’ll continue to see lots of plays just involving the pitcher and the batter.