How can we fix baseball without making everyone mad?

When Major League Baseball decided to consider employing its favorite laboratory animal — the independent Atlantic League — for two new bold ideas to make the game unrecognizable, the news (from the kids at Baseball America, who care about this far more than any of you ever will) didn’t move the needle as you much as you might think.

Then again, baseball’s news doesn’t do that much needle-shoving any more. In the 2018 season, MLB attendance below 70 million for the first time in 15 years. Between attendance drops and television ratings decline, baseball appears to be in a problematic spot as the 2019 season opens, which leads to the seeming need for bold ideas.

These two notions, though, should have. One is to move the mound back from its traditional (re: 1893) 60 feet, six inches, and the other is to try “robot” umpires for ball-strike decisions. In other words, baseball is experimenting with new kinds of arm injuries and more technology to remind the next generation that humans are part of the problem.

Then again, everything about baseball’s new existential angst operates well within the parameters of unintended consequences. In their urgent lurch to become more relevant to the younger demographic the people who run the sport, led by Commissioner Rob Manfred, are considering anything up to and including an old solution — the lockout. Why else would the Chicago Cubs, who are worth approximately $3 billion, send out owner Tom Ricketts to explain how the Cubs had no money to splash in the free agent market?

But there is a greater truth here for baseball — it is operating on the defensive. The editor of this squalid corner of the internet pitched the story as a tome on “How To Fix Baseball,” when (a) “fixing” might very well end up being applied in the veterinarian sense, and (b) the real issue at hand probably isn’t baseball at all, but its perception.

This isn’t to say that the game couldn’t use a tweak or six. Not that any of them would make much of a difference. Getting Mike Trout to do more ads isn’t going to juice the sport; neither is making relief pitchers stay on the job an extra batter or two or ban defensive creativity.

Thus, in defiance of said editor, I come not to fix baseball by applying solutions from other sports. It can’t be the other sports, isn’t meant to be other sports, and frankly shouldn’t try to be the other sports. It is what it is, more or less, and what we’re really arguing about in the end is not its survival but its market share — and who gives a damn about that?

Still, it could help itself incrementally in some small ways if it wanted to change perceptions — which is always a dangerous idea because most people asked to change perceptions actually don’t know that their perceptions about perceptions are usually wrong. With that premise — that nobody actually knows what the hell they want in America any more but everyone wants to shout about what they think they should want — here are some notions that could make the game incrementally more interesting to a new demographic that people in the older demographics don’t get at all.

Yeah, this ought to end well.

1. Make The Game Look More Like Athletes Play It

Our children — bless the corrupt little lampreys — have gravitated to sports in which people run and jump and throw and catch and dribble and kick often enough to gratify their brief shards of attention. Meanwhile, baseball, in its infinite mathematically-driven wisdom, has become a game in which the ball is infrequently put into play so that the employees can display their skills. The truth in The Three True Outcomes (walks, strikeouts and home runs) is that they are static results that require no, almost no, and only a moment’s visually consumable exertion. Baseball has always had standing around as one of its principal components, and while game times have been reduced to the point where the average game ends quicker than the average football game, the pace of said game remains decidedly sclerotic. It’s a highlight world, and baseball’s highlight is a throw, a swing, an outfielder going back to the wall and pretending to jump to catch a ball that is 40 feet over his head, and a large man trotting in a counterclockwise circle. Giannis Antetokounmpo vomits into a bucket just thinking about it.

SOLUTION: Devise algorithms in which general managers can achieve greater success with athletes who actually need to athleticize more often than merely walk or trot. General managers like launch angles and spin rates. Commissioners like making rules that put a Band-aid next to a gaping wound while covering none of it. Fans like watching people do things that they’ve never seen before.

2. NFL-itis

The National Football League — the place you go to when you want to know which septuagenarian billionaire needs to get his freak on the morning of a big game — is also a sport tilting toward an older generation, It is also worried, albeit quietly, that the young’uns aren’t as engaged in the fun-filled days and nights of watching Bill Belichick make a lemon pucker and the Oakland Raiders book moving vans. Thus, the league has gotten all handsy with the rule book in recent years to the point where it only recently figured out that a catch is a pretty simple concept once you get the pedants out of the competition committee meeting rooms.

The NFL is stuck in its own existential crisis, changing its nature for a massive audience which believes the game should be less and more violent, permit and prohibit head shots. It also changes and restores arcane notions like a catch, and in general wants to be all things to all people before half the high schools in America give up the sport for financial reasons and shrink the fodder supply. Baseball is equally keen on changing the rules by which it operates by eliminating shifts (great, seven huge circles on the pristine greens to ruin the whole ambiance of geometric shapes cut into every outfield that spell out “Buy More $22 Beers”), limiting trips to the mound to replace the 11th best pitcher on the staff with the 13th and demanding designated-hitter uniformity. None of these things will bring a single youth currently not watching baseball into the fold. It’s tinkering to tinker, and there will be no boost in sales or interest whether the rules are changed or left the same.

SOLUTION: Have a philosophy about pace that everyone agrees on and adhere to it. Changing rules just to see what sticks isn’t innovation, that’s admitting you have no idea because you’ve offered 30 of them. Besides, if the kids aren’t watching you now, they’re not going to watch your pitch clocks count down from 20.

3. Personalities and the Punishment Thereof

The mythical “unwritten rules” issue isn’t the problem we think it is because young players routinely ignore them now, and we are about five years away from them dying out on their own due to lack of use. Bat-flipping is now universally acknowledged as coin of the realm, players rarely fight to defend the code anymore because they are too large an investment for their team owners, and the new, younger-thinking managers are already on to the next level of encrypted sign-stealing that current technology can’t beat.

Baseball isn’t actually opposed to personality-driven players, but it still is nervous about the fact that personalities don’t always fit neatly into previously established norms — which is why they’re personalities. A bat-flipper isn’t the same as a personality, and neither is someone who will throw between a hitter’s shoulder blades because he stared too long at his last foul ball. The code is largely irrelevant to people’s attitude toward the sport, but it is an additional handy excuse for those who already don’t like it. What the game could use is to find some players who want everyone to know why they like playing, and the wisdom not to mock or shame them when they’re doing so, without dictating personalities to players who prefer to remain quiet. There ought to be that place where Trout and Not Trout can thrive equally, if only because phoniness on either end of the spectrum is actually pretty easy to spot and scorn.

SOLUTION: Stop obsessing about the unwritten rules, and stop enforcing them. They only reinforce the notion that the sport is devoted solely to the old fud while having no affect on the young folks who already weren’t paying attention. The absence of the code won’t make any more difference than its enforcement if you want to see audience growth or monetizable internet chatter, but if it lightens your mental burden, great. No more unwritten rules. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

4. Adults Watching Kids Play

No example of unintended consequences is more obvious than this. Parents caring about their kids and their interests is largely considered good, and helping them enjoy it a bit more is even better. But adults, who largely suck on procedural grounds when getting invested in their children’s athletic achievements, typically exceed their mandates by getting hyper-involved, from running healthy-snack only refreshment stands to belittling the other team’s players to calling their coach a cheating weasel to wanting to throttle the volunteer umpire to doing massive fund-raisers to send the team to tournaments seven states away so that the kids can even more of their summers stolen by rigidly-controlled activities. The bold idea of parents not going to their kids’ games (or at the very least sitting far enough away that can be seen but not heard) has long since gone out of vogue, but it’s an idea that should be reconsidered. Not because it will make the kids better citizens (most child experts say that’s done well or poorly long before Little League) but because it might convince some kids that baseball is something they can do without oppressive parental supervision and therefore isn’t something they will quit at the first opportunity.

(Note: This can applied to all other youth sports, but the name “Little League” parents didn’t spring from the lacrosse team).

SOLUTION: See if kids will play baseball if you promise to leave them alone. If yes, you have a winner. If not, you’re screwed anyway.

5. The Myth Of Marketing

Baseball’s crisis in this area is defined largely as “I have colored charts that show a slight but persistent decline in nine specific areas of potential audience growth and blah-blah-blah-de-blah-blah,” otherwise known as revenue stalking. This has morphed into “Baseball doesn’t know how to market itself,” which is code for “the sports chat shows aren’t leading with baseball stories any more because they only recognize LeBron James and Tom Brady.” All of which matters approximately zero percent.

Basketball is a marketer’s paradise because a few players can make an entire ad campaign by themselves, and in the NBA, a few players are actively shaping the job of the new general manager. This makes which-player-is-eating-with-which-other-player-to-make-a- super-team-in-which-city stories all the rage for about 36 hours until the next tinfoil-hat trade rumor raises its scaly head. Players now know how to work the system that makes reporters and pundits bark like kenneled dogs at a moment’s notice, and even toss off flat-earth and we-never-landed-on-the-moon theories to hear the barking from the other side of the wall.

Baseball isn’t that, and really wouldn’t work well if it aggressively tried to be. Again, asking Nolan Arenado to be a household name fails if Nolan Arenado doesn’t want to be a household name. You either have it in you or you don’t, and forcing someone to become an internet star whom doesn’t wish to be is more often not worth the libel. It’s an organic process, period. Players embrace the limelight when they want to and not before, and if they’re not good at it, the punishment for disingenuousness is swift and cruel.

In short, marketers don’t create, they react, and if baseball wants players and things to market, it will simply have to wait until someone comes along who combines talent, the ability to display joy on the job and a willingness to wade in the cesspool of public approval. And then another, and then another, and then another.

SOLUTION: Stop thinking baseball is a marketing problem. Saying so will make people back away from you at parties, force you to drink alone in bars, and you will eventually die alone as you so richly deserve.

In short, kids, baseball can adapt, but it can’t be “fixed,” nor should it be. It may lose a bit of market share, but it won’t regain it by pretending it is something it isn’t or that some other sport is. America is in a weird and dissonant place culturally, so survival may well be achieved by being different as much as by being like all the others. If popularity could be mandated, we’d all care about the Alliance Of American Football. We don’t.

So let baseball reward athletic plays and players, dissuade it from rewriting the rulebook every 15 minutes because some socially-arrested jackwagon in R&D thinks the outfielders should line up single file, stop obsessing about etiquette, stop stealing fun from your kids because you think you’re Earl Weaver, and stop thinking marketing makes everything better. Marketing being the festival of imitation that it is, it mostly makes everything the same, and baseball’s best skill is not being the same. It simply has to make its differences more, well, fun.

We will now await the first Atlantic League manager to be ejected for unplugging the ball-strike interpreter.

Now THAT would be a level of “well done” and “F-yeah” every generation could applaud in its own way.