The game finished in 2:29, an early sign that this experiment would be a success.
“Who’s going to watch that?” During this past off-season, Leibovich attended a boot camp that MLB had organized for the game’s 76 full-time umpires in Scottsdale, as well the first spring-training game of the year in Peoria, where he sat directly between Epstein and Sword as they rooted anxiously for the game to clock in at under two-and-a-half hours. “What’s it going to look like 10 years from now, when the league is hitting. They could see that the sport Moneyball had wrought was dooming the game to eventual irrelevance. Notably, Epstein and Sword are both figures from the Moneyball generation of baseball who, in using analytics to help teams win more games, helped usher in the unwatchable entertainment product the game had become: more strikeouts, more walks, less contact with the ball, less offense, less action, and (much) longer games. “Last year was so depressing, I just stopped doing it.” In addition to spending time with Manfred, Liebovich spent extensive time with key executives, including Theo Epstein-the wunderkind who, as a general manager for the Red Sox and the Cubs, broke century-old World Series curses and is now a consultant for MLB-and Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations (and the “quarterback” of the project to reinvent baseball). “It was not a good story,” Manfred told Leibovich. Leibovich reports that each morning in recent years, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred would review daily reports charting the advancing lengths of the previous night’s games. The feature follows his best-selling book from 2018, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times, which probed the NFL at the peak of its power.
In his first cover story for The Atlantic, Leibovich continues his sharp reporting on professional sports in America with “ How Baseball Saved Itself,” the fullest inside story yet of how the rule changes came to be, reported using his extensive access to the individuals most responsible for them. Instead, he discovered that some of the same Moneyball whiz kids who had made baseball games endless and unwatchable had been brought back in to save the sport––and, against all expectations, have implemented the transformations necessary to save it. It’s no one’s fault we move on to new things.” When staff writer Mark Leibovich started reporting his new cover story for The Atlantic, such was his thinking toward the sport Leibovich thought he would be writing its obituary. Times change, tastes veer, attention spans shrink.
June 6, 2023––“Baseball had a great run, a nice century.
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