America's Presenttime

We live in the Golden Age of Baseball. To those of you who follow the sport, this might seem like a ludicrous statement. Over its 154 year professional history, baseball has had multiple epochs of greatness and a cursory glance would suggest the current one doesn’t stack up. After all, baseball has witnessed titans like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, and Walter Johnson, and while it was once America’s most popular sport—today, it’s probably third. How can baseball be at its peak when it seems to have fallen from the esteem of Americans for decades on end? And how can we compare it to past eras that were filled with such skill, intrigue, and greatness?

Firstly, a sport should not be measured merely by the number of people who follow it, just as we do not rank the best seasons of television by their Nielsen Rating. I liked M*A*S*H*, but I don’t think anyone would claim the finale was the greatest episode of all time¹, nor that NCIS deserved its spot as the most watched show in season 2015-2016. I adore NCIS, but Season 13 was past its prime. Baseball might have fallen from its heights in the American consciousness, but that does not mean that decline was earned. The popular will is not always the correct one.

Much of baseball’s heyday coincides with its darkest chapter. Although these two are not related, I think it’s a useful indicator of the uselessness of popularity as a determinant of quality. From baseball’s creation until 1947, absent a brief period in 1884—when Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Weldy became the first Black players in the major leagues—professional baseball was segregated.

Babe Ruth never had to hit against Satchel Paige, Walter Johnson never pitched to Oscar Charleston, and we never got to see Joe DiMaggio and Josh Gibson on the same field. That’s not to minimize the careers of Ruth, Johnson, DiMaggio, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, Rogers Hornsby, or any of the superstars of early baseball. But if we couldn’t see the best play each other, even setting aside the moral arguments against this period, there’s no way we can call it the best era of baseball.

Since 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, there have been other great eras of baseball. The 50’s and 60’s saw some of baseball’s greatest stars, while the 70’s were filled with great teams like the Big Red Machine and the Oakland Athletics. Afterward came the Steroid Era, a complicated web of superstardom and tragedy that allowed us to see the very pinnacle of baseball achievement, and experience the sorrow of its hollow shell. But I think that today is the best that baseball has ever had to offer, for three distinct reasons.

The first of these is the analytics revolution. Baseball has always been the most analytical of big American sports; it’s what drew me as a 6-year old to keeping score, and it launched my lifelong interest in strategic data analysis. For as long as baseball has been around—people have sought to measure baseball players’ abilities. Over one hundred years ago, men like Henry Chadwick and F.C. Lane were not only creating statistics, but opining on whether they were effective tools of evaluation. In 1980, a man named Bill James gave this longstanding practice a name: Sabermetrics, and defined it as the “search for objective knowledge about baseball.”

Over time, these methods have become more sophisticated, and with it, they have changed how baseball operates. Teams, scouts, players, and fans all have far more tools at their disposal to make better decisions, create better teams in the aggregate, improve play, and for fans most importantly, argue about who is better. No longer do we have to rely on antiquated stats like batting average and ERA, but we can better isolate the individual ability of each player by controlling for fielding quality, whether runners are already on base, the speed of hit balls, and adjusting by weather, era, and location. Players can use this data to make subtle adjustments to their approaches, to prepare for their opponents, and with it comes better baseball.

Rule changes in recent years have also made the game more exciting and interesting to watch. The most controversial of these adjustments was the adoption of the Designated Hitter (DH) by the National League in 2022. For those who aren’t baseball fans, an important lesson I probably should have mentioned earlier: baseball is really weird. It, like most other sports, has multiple conferences (think the Eastern and Western Conferences in Basketball or the AFC and NFC in football). Unlike these other sports, these, while existing under the same umbrella, have unique histories and therefore have had different rules in the past. In this case, pitchers did not bat in the American League, but instead their placement in the batting order was taken by a person who only hit the ball (but did not field). In the National League, pitchers were required to hit.

The arguments against the Designated Hitter were twofold: tradition and also, it’s funny to see pitchers hit. Pitchers spend all their lives learning to throw the ball at ungodly speeds with inhuman accuracy; they are unsurprisingly very bad at hitting. The career batting average for the position is .174 (a bit better than 1 hit every six tries). In 2025, the worst hitter in baseball has an average of .175, and that’s substantially worse than the second worse hitter. I’ll be the first to admit that watching pitchers hit the ball could be fun on occasion (particularly because the Cubs had Carlos Zambrano, one of the best hitting pitchers in history), but it overall both lowered the level of play and likely contributed to a non-zero number of injuries.

Another, more obvious change occurred before the 2023 season, when the MLB decided to use a pitch clock. Baseball is a naturally slow game, which makes it fun when you’re at the ballpark going for the 9-9-9 challenge and less fun when you want to watch baseball and also do other things in a given day. But in recent decades, its become even longer. There are multiple culprits: more commercials, more pitching changes caused by the analytics revolution, but the biggest reason was simple.

Between each pitch, pitchers just took a lot longer. One analysis found that the time between pitches (when a pitcher was facing the same batter) rose by nearly twice as much from 1984 to 2014, from 32 minutes to almost 58 minutes. Think about that. Almost a whole hour of every game between the time the catcher caught the ball in his glove and the time the pitcher threw the next pitch to the same batter. It’s no surprise that people think baseball is boring.

So baseball, after way too long, figured out it had to do something. It instituted a pitch clock, which trims the time between pitches to fifteen seconds. This drastically cuts down on the mindnumbing affair of pitchers scuffing the dirt and making frowny faces, and ensures that games are quicker. The change was marked; baseball games became 30 minutes shorter the year the pitch clock was instituted.

The last reason that baseball has hit its peak is a person. There are a lot of great, even generational players in baseball right now. The Yankees’ Aaron Judge doesn’t have the longevity, but there’s an outside shot he’s the greatest right-handed hitter ever (left-handed hitters include Ruth, Williams, Bonds, Gehrig, Cobb, and Musial). Consider the statistic WRC+, which stands for Weighted Runs Created Plus and is meant to measure hitting when adjusted across years and ballpark (every MLB ballpark has different dimensions, remember baseball is weird!). Including this year so far, Judge has 3 of the top 25 seasons all-time. That’s 4th most after Ruth (7), Williams (6), Bonds (5).

There are other superstars, including Mike Trout—who pre-injury struggles was on pace for one of the greatest careers ever—Clayton Kershaw, one of the best pitchers of all-time, and a number of young superstars like Bobby Witt Jr., $765 million man Juan Soto, Paul Skenes, Tarik Skubal, and of course, Pete Crow-Armstrong.

But none of these players come close to the superstardom that is Shohei Ohtani. When people make comparisons to Ohtani, they only talk about one person: Babe Ruth, the embodiment of baseball. As I mentioned earlier, pitchers suck at hitting, and unsurprisingly, batters suck at pitching. Shohei Ohtani does both, not just well, but extraordinarily well. Last season, Ohtani became the first player in history to hit fifty home runs and steal fifty bases in the same season. He’s not only a top 2/3 hitter in baseball today—with the 20th highest WRC+ all-time—but he’s also one of the best pitchers in the league. Even Babe Ruth stopped pitching once he became a full-time hitter, but Ohtani manages to do both.

There’s something particularly special in sports about watching new heights reached. Each time Mondo Duplantis raises the world record by a centimeter, each Messi slalom through five defenders, LeBron stepback three, or Simone Biles floor routine, we are witnessing the pinnacle of human achievement, and that in turn makes the sport all the better. Today, we are watching the most talented baseball player in history. He may not have twenty years of counting stats behind him, but Ohtani is doing what 150 years of baseball would have said was impossible. For all the legends that shroud this sport, we are witnessing something that no one has seen before.

Baseball has captured our imaginations for a century and a half, but so much of it a backwards looking nostalgia, a longing for better days. Good news, we are living those better days of baseball. A baseball that is more exciting, talented, and perfect than any that have come before. When Simon and Garfunkel ask: “where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio,” I can answer: the greats walk among us now, they’re right here.²

1. I stopped watching after season 6. Frank > Winchester

2. The poems used to be better, I’ll admit that much