Only Baseball Until September

 

            Since the NBA and NHL season has concluded, the MLB is the only major sport currently going on for a couple of months. This is a perfect opportunity for those who view baseball as boring to start to pay attention to the MLB more and start to see why it isn't so boring after all. 

            For sports fans that are not really into baseball as much, they will have to wait until early September for the next big sports to start up again. The NFL and College Football will begin then and then shortly after the NHL and NBA will start again. But for now, baseball is on center stage for some time. 

            We are about 70 games through the MLB regular season with still around 90 games remaining for each team. As a big fan of baseball, the season has been a blast so far. From the new rule changes to the drama going on between teams that have well overachieved, it has been a great season so far.

            It's always fun seeing teams that in past years have underperformed in the past, perform well this year. Seeing teams like the Arizona Diamondbacks, Pittsburgh Pirates, Baltimore Orioles, and Miami Marlins play well after multiple years of misery before this season has been great to see. 

            This year the season has been very unique compared to other seasons. Baseball is the one sport without a salary cap. Sometimes this can be beneficial for the sports, and other times no so beneficial. Usually we see the teams that pay the most succeed the most, but that is not the case this year. On the other hand, the Tampa Bay Rays, who are in the bottom five payrolls in the league, are the best team in the league by far through their first 70 games. 

            Teams with the biggest payrolls are commonly found in the largest markets and have the most pressure on them to succeed. These teams include the New York Mets, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres, and more. 2 out of those 3 teams are currently not even in playoff contention showing that payrolls have meant little to nothing this season. 

            One of my favorite things about the game so far this season has been the new rule changes. This includes the new pitch clock and batter clock, no more shift, and bigger bases. The new clocks have made the game so much faster and more intense as well. In the past we've seen long at bats last minutes, while this season they rarely last over a minute. 

             The shift has made the game more like it used to be when analytics and statistics wasn't so important to the game. Instead of having three players on one side of the second base bag, on both sides of  the bag there must be two of them. It takes out a lot of strategy and we have seen batting averages from players who used to be shifted on rise substantially. 

              Baseball is starting to become more global and expand to countries that never really picked up the sport before. For instance, the Cubs and the Cardinals are playing in London this year, in a country that's main sport and secondary sports are not baseball. The World Baseball Classic also did a great job in helping to expand the game involving many countries from all different parts of the world as well. 

            For the next couple of months, it's only baseball so give it a shot and pay attention to it. The people that say the game is boring have never actually sat down and truly appreciated what the game is all about, so don't listen to them and make your own judgements about America's pastime.