Running Down the Rule Changes

OK, so I wrote a fairly massive story for Esquire Magazine that will be coming out in the next few days about all the rule changes in baseball. I go in pretty deep.

Until then, I just want to talk about my overall philosophy about the changes.

I’m really excited about them.

More to the point: I’m really excited that the powers of baseball are finally trying to help shape the game rather than just letting it go in whatever direction the winds blow. See, I used to be a laissez-faire baseball guy — I guess we called it being a “baseball purist” — and I believed in the power of the game to correct itself, to self-balance, I believed in the holiness of 90 feet between the bases and the sanctity of a game without a clock.

I believed, as I think most baseball people believed, that the best path forward for baseball was to leave it alone and keep it the same.

As it turns out, though, those last two things — leaving the game alone and keeping the game the same — are at war with each other. What we have found over the last quarter century or so is that the surest way to change the game is to leave it alone.

I’ll get into the rule changes in a minute, but let me start by talking about steroids because I think there’s a point to be made there.