The problem with Major League Baseball is players are too good at baseball

Let's talk about the state of baseball, huh?

Before I go further, I want to distinguish between two frequently conflated issues facing Major League Baseball in 2018: Pace of play and style of play. Both are lamented for the way they limit action in the course of a three-plus hour baseball game, but the former seems far, far easier to solve without significantly altering the fundamental tenets of the game.

Incorporate a 20-second pitch clock, dock hitters strikes for spending too much time out of the batter's box, and cap all regular-season replay reviews at 60 seconds (with the ruling on the field upheld wherever it can't be overturned in that span) and Major League games would swiftly quicken. The MLB Players Association, tail between its legs after the most recent CBA proved ruinous to free agency, has resisted such changes, and I'd guess - and it's just a guess - that MLB's petty, self-defeating efforts to enforce stuffy uniform policies have something to do with the discord between the league and its players union. It's silly. Both sides should be invested in putting a more accessible product on the field, and while die-hards might happily stick out a four-hour game, there should be little doubt that the sport and its players would benefit in the long haul from moving things along.

It's the other thing that's more perplexing. The league-wide strikeout rate has been climbing into unprecedented heights for more than a decade now and has surged ever higher over the past three seasons. Last year, for the first time in league history, Major League catchers recorded more putouts than first basemen did. This year, catchers are recording more than 10% more putouts than first basemen. There are now more strikeouts than groundouts, and first month of the 2018 season was the first in Major League history in which there were more strikeouts than hits.

The prevalence of defensive shifting robs some base hits as well, and league-wide batting average in 2018 is currently at its lowest point in more than 40 years. Combine all that with the uptick in homers in recent seasons, and you have a sport that features far less on-field action than ever before, and a game that increasingly hinges on true outcomes in the batter's box over the spectacular, thrilling randomness of balls in play.

But you know this already, and maybe you know it to be bad for the game. Only it hardly seems like Major League Baseball is reeling after exceeding $10 billion in revenue for the first time last year. And I would argue - and have argued - that while the decrease in defensive opportunities makes for a more boring event in person, the television broadcasts that butter so much of the league's bread primarily emphasize the pitcher-batter matchup, and all the strikeouts and homers only make that aspect of the telecast more compelling.

Regardless, consider what it is we're saying when we complain about that quirk of the contemporary game: If you want pitchers that strike out fewer opponents and batters that hit fewer homers and teams that do not optimize defensive positioning, you're essentially saying you want baseball to be crappier.

Any problems you perceive in the 2018 version of Major League Baseball ultimately stem from baseball players and baseball teams being way better right now than they ever have been in the past. Enhancements in training, technology and understanding of the game over the past couple of decades mean today's ballplayer is, on average, stronger, faster, better prepared, and likely more mechanically and philosophically sound than any of his predecessors.

Right? No player ever steals 100 bases in a season anymore, but it's not that the stolen base is a lost art. It's just an increasingly abandoned one, because teams recognized and communicated the fact that having a baserunner erased on a caught stealing is more costly than the value added by moving one base forward. Players learned and adjusted, and teams shifted development priorities away from volume base-stealing. Now, teams, players and coaches are learning about things like spin rate and launch angle and batted-ball tendencies, and adjusting to improve themselves based on the new knowledge.

Take a look at this pitch Rays reliever Chaz Roe threw in the seventh inning of a lopsided loss over the weekend: