This thread was provoked by the fact that Yelich just hit his 13th HR of the season and 8th of this week. He might legitimately challenge the single season home run record this year. Yelich is obviously great, but there is literally nothing in his past to suggest he would ever be a 60+ or even just 50+ home run guy the way it appears he has a good chance to be this year.
On top of that, the game is currently at the highest percentage of hits going for home runs ever. I pointed this out in the game thread yesterday, but Jay Bruce currently has 13 hits for the Mariners, 9 of which are home runs, which was somewhere around a .170 average last time I checked. That’s not even all that unusual anymore, Joey Gallo has sit near the top of the home run leaderboards the last few years while struggling to hit .200.
Just speaking for myself, this iteration of baseball is probably the least interesting that’s ever existed in my life. Even the steroid era, guys hit for pretty good averages and the majority of the game wasn’t based entirely on the three true outcomes.
I miss teams being able to string together a number of basehits together for a rally, or teams making good defensive plays to rob those hits. I miss players having to actually run the bases.
All the pace of play stuff has wildly missed the mark, those rules changes aren’t going to fix anything. What HAS hurt the game is juicing the ball and encouraging this style of play and making it viable, and I thought maybe they unjuiced the ball last season and things were normalizing, but if they did, it’s clearly been completely reversed since and baseball couldn’t be worse off for it.
If Manfred truly wants to fix the game, he’ll stop micromanaging stupid rule changes and make them play the game with a normal ball again.