7 things I've learned about baseball in the last 7 seasons
Baseball is for fun, but it's not always fun.
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I planned to spend some time this weekend writing a breathtaking sports newsletter of dizzying beauty, but then the weekend got in the way. So I’m cobbling together and coughing up these thoughts at 5 a.m. on very little sleep and very much coffee, as is my custom.
I started covering baseball for USA Today and For The Win in February of 2013. Here are seven things I’ve picked up over the last seven seasons:
1. Baseball is for fun: I can practically guarantee there’s no phrase I’ve typed more frequently in my tenure here than that one: Baseball is for fun. Seems obvious, I know, and I probably knew it long before I began working here. But it’s a surprisingly easy notion to lose sight of when you’re covering the sport every day and finding yourself routinely sucked in to its never-ending culture wars.
Major League Baseball is a business, undoubtedly. But it’s an entertainment business. If anything I’ve written here should read as my personal baseball manifesto, it’s this listicle from 2016. A shockingly large portion of it is already obsolete, some of it for tragic reasons. But some pro ballplayer should absolutely do the “slugfest” thing.
Minor Leaguers in 2017 (Jasen Vinlove/USA TODAY Sports)
2. Minor leaguers get jobbed: Because baseball is for fun, and because baseball so often is fun, anyone endeavoring a career in the sport must make some tradeoffs. People around the game sometimes refer to it as “the baseball tax,” and no one pays a bigger toll than minor league ballplayers. Almost everything I’ve done in this career that I’d unironically call “journalism” has been on this topic: Minor Leaguers earn less than the federal minimum wage and do not get paid during the offseason or spring training. The league lobbies politicians to maintain the exploitative status quo, even though there is simply no denying that the $10 billion industry is better for the labor of guys it would deem “short-term seasonal apprentices.”
Just this past Friday, a court ruled that a lawsuit seeking to apply the Fair Labor Standards Act to minor-league players, first filed in 2014, can proceed as a class action.
3. Baseball will always defy complete comprehension: I understand the sport way better now than I did before I started here because I now recognize that neither I nor anyone else will ever really fully figure out baseball. I’m old enough to remember the sabermetric revelation that yielding grounders was nearly as valuable for a pitcher as striking batters out — which was true until lots of hitters adjusted their swings to better punish sinkers, which led some pitchers in turn to start throwing four-seamers at the top of the strike zone, which, for all I know, might ultimately usher the opposite-field single back into popularity.
And that’s a wild oversimplification, of course. There are so many elements to the sport and so many potential routes to success that as soon as something becomes established as a way to win ballgames, front offices will start working to undermine it. Over the past few years, teams and pitchers and data-driven trainers have conspired to make pitches fly faster and move more and better deceive hitters. Now offensive players are working to catch up.
A lot of analysis in 2019 — here and elsewhere — has focused on how the baseball itself is very obviously behaving differently than it has in the past. But that’s only part of the story. Everywhere you look, there is innovation. It’s endless, and it’s endlessly fascinating.
Mike Trout (Kim Klement/USA TODAY Sports)
4. But Mike Trout is by far the best: Perhaps the one indisputable truth about modern baseball is that Mike Trout is the best player alive. It’s funny to think that it was still a debatable topic in 2013, when some wondered if Trout played above his head in his phenomenal rookie season.
He did not! Trout was basically the best offensive player in the game from the day he became a full-time big-leaguer in 2012, and he has only gotten better since.
He is so good and so consistent that he almost defies hot takes, which, for better or worse, are now necessary for keeping a player’s name in the news cycle. I feel fairly confident that being famous is less important to Mike Trout than being the best at baseball, but I also get the strong sense that the secret is fully out about Trout’s greatness. Mike Trout Monday has been a lot more popular this year.
Trout’s cruising toward his third career MVP award, and he will likely wind up in fifth place all-time in MVP Shares after the voting. He tied Derek Jeter in career WAR this weekend, just a week after Trout’s 28th birthday. He may very well surpass Nolan Ryan and Pete Rose in career WAR before he turns 29. Nolan Ryan and Pete Rose! Nolan Ryan and Pete Rose are all-time greats who stayed healthy, never missed time for military service, and played into their mid-40s. WAR isn’t perfect, but that Trout has surpassed 137 Hall of Famers in career WAR since the start of the 2016 season is not an indictment of the stat so much as it is an indication of Trout’s greatness. It’s not like there are a bunch of active 28-year-old ballplayers flying past Derek Jeter in career value. There’s one guy who does that.
5. It’s not really dying: People have been predicting the death of baseball since the dawn of baseball, but baseball is going nowhere. Sure, it could do more to court young fans and it’d probably be more entertaining to watch if it incorporated a pitch clock. And it makes sense to root for its popularity, assuming popularity ultimately draws the best athletes to baseball fields. But Major League Baseball players, right now, play the game at the highest level at which it has ever been played, and the only thing that might keep you from watching baseball — good baseball! — in your lifetime would be a complete societal collapse. Could happen, but it won’t be because of a lack of balls in play.
(Noah K. Murray/USA TODAY Sports)
6. But it can destroy you: Since well before I got this job, I have maintained that part of baseball’s appeal is in providing an orderly plane to help us better understand all the ways randomness and fortune operate upon our lives. Sometimes there is karmic justice. Sometimes there is not. Sometimes you barrel up a perfect curveball diving toward the low-outside corner of the strike zone and smoke it right into the left fielder’s glove. Sometimes your lazy blooper finds a hole in the defense. That’s baseball.
7. It’s meant to be shared: I’m not here to tell you how to enjoy baseball, and if your preference is to sit in quiet isolation watching muted MLB telecasts while scrolling through spray-chart information on your phone and never discussing any of it with anybody, do your thing.
But baseball, again, is for fun, and to me “fun” is inseparable from those with whom we share it, whether that’s friends or family or a stadium full of jubilant fans or your circle of social-media co-conspirators or your man at the bar bickering over whether Bryce Harper is overrated. Whether we’re putting it at the forefront of our consciousness or just letting it chug along in the background as the crackly radio soundtrack to our summers, baseball is a social phenomenon that can draw us closer to both total strangers and lifelong loved ones. All sports do that, I guess, but baseball gives you that space to breathe, to chat, to argue, to contemplate, and to connect. That’s ultimately the point, I think.
A note
The program we use to distribute this newsletter allows me to click a button and see the email addresses of readers that opened any given day’s Morning Win. That particular function serves no real practical purpose, so I haven’t used it often. But every time I did, looking at the list felt amazing. Some email handles included names I knew as friends and family and colleagues and classmates. Some I recognized as belonging to longtime readers and professional acquaintances, and most represented complete strangers. To all of them — to you! — I am incredibly grateful. It is awesome to know there are people who want to read my work every morning, or, at the very least, people who believe me worthwhile of the favor. Thank you.
My time at USA Today and For The Win is coming to an end, so this is my last day writing this newsletter. I’m not sure where or when I might be writing again, but if you’d like me to alert you when that happens or if you just want to say hello, email me at AskTedBerg@gmail.com. I don’t know who’s going to take over the Morning Win, but if you subscribed for me, do stay on and find out what my very talented and funny co-workers have to say. Or don’t. I’m not gonna be here.