All of this has been dictated by the stats departments that are now employed by every team; the changes I don’t like are ultimately their doing. The “old school” managers have evolved or retired out. (76-year-old Tony LaRussa defied expectations both in terms of his team’s success and his willingness to adapt - somewhat - to analytics.) To get the obvious out of the way, sabermetrics works, in the simplest sense of making it more likely for a baseball team to collect wins over the course of the regular season. I still sometimes hear of a stats vs. old school, nerds vs. jocks divide, but that is very old news. Advanced metrics won in a rout in baseball, as they have in basketball. (Arguably there’s a lot of work to be done in that regard in football, but the complexities there are astounding given the ruleset and number of players on the field at any given time.) Statheads have argued for years that balls batted into play are more or less random and stressed the more certain outcomes of homers and strikeouts, among other philosophies. The impact on the game is obvious, and for me, painful.
I recognize that the analytics people set themselves the task of quantitatively identifying the strategies teams could pursue to produce and prevent the most runs, and I understand that they have been very effective in doing so. I understand that it is the job of teams, their front offices, their managers, and their players to optimize their number of wins over the course of a season. None of that is nefarious. The problem is that the resulting product is dogshit. I recognize that safeguarding the popularity of baseball is not the job of the analytics departments. But it is most certainly the job of the teams, as corporations that are part of the entertainment business, whether you like it or not. And the league is made up of the teams.