ESPN has a baseball problem, and by the same token, baseball has an ESPN problem. America's pastime plays third fiddle behind football and basketball on The Worldwide Leader, which isn't great for the popularity of the sport that hasn't been number one in the hearts and minds of the majority of fans for a long time now. The disconnect between baseball and the biggest network in sports has never been more obvious, and it came to a head after MLB Network's Ken Rosenthal called out ESPN's Michael Wilbon after the host of Pardon the Interruption gave a lazy baseball take that essentially boiled down to, "Get off my lawn."
Wilbon used Pirates shortstop Oneil Cruz as an example of "the ruination of the sport for me" during a recent episode of PTI. Not Cruz specifically, but the way in which he is viewed in baseball circles as one of the most talented players in the game due to his ability to hit the ball with a higher exit velocity than nearly anyone else.
Wilbon cited Cruz's .260 average as the reason exit velocity is overrated, and he drew a strawman comparison to Tony Gwynn, who retired 23 years ago with a .338 average, to validate his point.
Baseball was a very different game back then, but we shouldn't need to cut down Cruz, who at 25 years old genuinely is one of the most talented and exciting players in the game, to prop up the players of yesteryear. Maybe I'm visiting the wrong message boards, but I don't think anyone is saying that Oneil Cruz is a better hitter than Tony Gwynn. At the same time, though, Cruz has the hardest-hit ball ever recorded. That's awesome!
Wilbon's complete dismissal of something as simple as exit velocity is a weird take, though, and Ken Rosenthal was right to call him on it recently.
Michael Wilbon is out of touch with baseball, and it's not helping the sport or ESPN
Rosenthal was careful to couch his criticism by saying that he has great respect for Wilbon, and rightly so, because along with his longtime co-host Tony Kornheiser, Wilbon is one of the pioneers of talking about sports on TV. At the same time, though, Rosenthal is spot-on in pointing out that Wilbon's, and by extension, ESPN's, refusal to get with the times is a bad look.
Listen, I'm an old man at heart, so I generally agree with Wilbon that baseball was better 20 or 30 years ago. Too few balls are put in play now, and most hitters would gladly strike out three times in exchange for crushing the ball in their fourth at-bat. To say that seeing exit velocity stats on the screen is ruining the sport for you, though, is silly. Exit velocity is just the modern equivalent of "Chicks dig the long ball."
Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. Any baseball fan loves to see a hitter crush one, and exit velocity simply tells us how hard they actually crushed it. It doesn't change what we saw with our eyes, it only confirms it. When Oneil Cruz or Shohei Ohtani or Pete Alonso square one up, it's pretty cool to see that they hit it 118 mph and that it went 445 feet. If Wilbon doesn't care about that kind of stuff, that's fine, just don't pay attention to it. But don't let it ruin your enjoyment of the sport, that's crazy.
There are a multitude of reasons that baseball isn't as popular as it once was, but exit velocity being shown on baseball broadcasts isn't one of them. Society has a collectively shorter attention span than it once did, so the rhythms of the game aren't as appreciated as they were in the past. There are more things competing for viewers' attention, and it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing that baseball's popularity has declined as ESPN has emphasized football and basketball over it.
Rosenthal is right that maybe it would be better if everyone stuck to one sport, but that's not the way ESPN operates. Wilbon, Stephen A. Smith, and Mike Greenberg are just a few examples of personalities that have a huge platform on the network, even if it's impossible for them to speak authoritatively on every single thing in the sports world.
This doesn't stop them from trying, though, but discussions like this one are needlessly harmful to baseball, which for all its flaws, is still a great sport. ESPN and its top personalities should be trying to promote the game, not tear it down as they sit in their rocking chairs and reminisce about the way things used to be.