Moneyball Broke Baseball
Photographs by Tony Luong
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Where in the name of human rain delays is Juan Soto?
The stud outfielder is late. Everyone keeps checking their phones—the antsy Major League Baseball officials, the San Diego Padres PR guy, the handful of reporters, and the assorted hangers-on you encounter around baseball clubhouses. Everyone is wondering when the Padres superstar will show up. He was supposed to be here half an hour ago, just after this baseball players’ sanctum opened and we were allowed to join them in their most elemental of baseball activities: waiting around.
Soto, who is 24, works at his own pace. He is a baseball player. Players do their thing and the game indulges their routines, at least to a point. But everything was supposed to be different today, the first day of baseball’s new, accelerated life. I had flown into Phoenix the night before to witness the first spring-training game of the year, in Peoria, Arizona, between the Padres and the Seattle Mariners. Normally, I would pay zero attention to this contest. Even if it counted in the standings—or, for that matter, even if it was a World Series game—I wouldn’t care. Baseball has been losing me for years, as steadily as its games have become more interminable every season: less scoring, less action, slower, more stagnant.
Yet here I am—here we all are—for a Padres–Mariners scrimmage on February 24, one of two games scheduled to begin just after 1 p.m. (The Rangers would be concurrently opening against the Royals not far away, in Surprise, Arizona.) These would be curious and newfangled specimens, the first major-league contests to feature rules enacted to revitalize a sport that had been heading toward cultural irrelevancy. “Time of game: three hours, 32 minutes”—or some such bloated number—had become a mocking coda to the nightly slogs.
In a few hours, MLB would introduce a novel ethic into its stationary culture: urgency. Limits would be placed on pickoff throws as well as time taken between pitches and between at-bats. The most radical change would be the addition of a pitch clock, a kind of pacemaker to reregulate the game’s lagging heartbeat. Pitchers would now be allowed just 15 seconds to begin their motion to deliver the baseball to home plate (20 seconds with runners on base), and hitters would have to be set in the batter’s box by the eight-second mark. Failure to do so would result in an automatic ball (for delinquent pitchers) or strike (for dawdling batters). The goal is to curtail dead time, the endless velcroing and re-velcroing of batting gloves and strolling around the mound. Also, in an effort to stimulate offense, MLB had banned infield shifts; to encourage aggressive baserunning, it had augmented the size of the bases.
How would this “best version of baseball,” as one of its architects calls it, play in Peoria? At the very least, hopefully it would play faster. The pitch clocks, which were deployed throughout the minor leagues in 2022, cut the average game time by 26 minutes. Pretty much everyone who experienced this sped-up rendering loved it. But that was the minors. And it’s one thing for a spectator to be anesthetized over several years and crave something new. But what would the royalty think?
And how would this affect King Juan, if he ever gets here? A Padres PR guy is apologetic, explaining to me that Soto is still relatively new to the team—he was acquired from the Washington Nationals last year—and that the staff is still trying to divine his propensities and quirks. After about 40 minutes, Soto appears through a side door and heads for his locker. He pauses and scrolls through his phone. I think about walking up to him, but my legs will not move. It’s funny that way with pro athletes, my earliest idols. They can be extremely scary to approach. I’ve interviewed presidents, Nobel laureates, and all flavors of tycoon and luminary over the years and never felt intimidated. But put me in front of a partially dressed man-child in pajama pants who can hit a baseball and I’m suddenly reduced to a puddle at his feet.
“Juan, hey,” I say, finally moving toward him.
“I gotta go over here,” Soto says, blowing past me and into a training room.
After another 10 minutes, Soto reemerges and starts bantering in Spanish with two of his teammates, designated hitter Nelson Cruz and star third baseman Manny Machado.
