The State of Baseball: Inside the biggest questions MLB is facing with the future of the sport at stake

Baseball finds itself at a crossroads.

The players on the field have never been more talented, but increased velocity from pitchers has led to record strikeout totals and low batting averages. There is new generation of stars emerging, but with every bat flip comes another conversation about whether it violates the unwritten rules. Major League Baseball is exploring new rules that could help solve its pace-of-play issues but is also balancing ways to appeal to traditionalists hesitant to embrace change. Meanwhile, labor issues loom that could threaten to put a stop to any potential progress.

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As MLB faces these challenges with the future of the sport at stake, we are embarking on a season-long look at The State of Baseball, examining the storylines that will determine how the game looks in 2021 and far beyond. To start, Howard Bryant, Bradford Doolittle, Doug Glanville, Alden Gonzalez, Tim Keown, Tim Kurkjian, Joon Lee, Kiley McDaniel, Buster Olney, Jeff Passan, Marly Rivera, Jesse Rogers, David Schoenfield and Clinton Yates weigh in on what they believe are the most pressing issues facing baseball today.

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Big decisions ahead | Action (or inaction) on the field
The marketing dilemma | Making MLB more inclusive

Watch: An in-depth look into the state of baseball

MLB's looming battles

AP Photo/John Minchillo
Baseball must decide what it really wants baseball to be

The state of baseball is eternally in flux. It's subject to the whims of the athletes who play the game, the billionaires who run it, the technocrats who populate front offices, the analysts foraging for the slightest advantage, the scientists exploring unseen frontiers, the lawyers tasked with keeping it afloat, the doctors who perpetually put Humpty Dumpty back together again and especially the fans, whose divergent passions and desires make striking a perfect balance between the game's history and future a near impossibility.

Its present is a mishmash -- a historically great array of young talent unleashed in how it celebrates itself but hamstrung by the game becoming too smart, too efficient and, consequently, too plodding. There are levers to pull that could free the game from the weights dragging it down -- and the fear that doing so would alienate the core fan at the expense of the hypothetical one. The past and the future intersect in the present, and baseball's present is confusing: exquisite players playing a fractured game.

This is the time to examine not only what baseball is now but also what it wants to be. Because that's the sort of thing that will drive the decision-makers, the people who are supposed to be the game's stewards. For all of its issues and all of its foibles, baseball's greatness remains on display every night, from April to October. It is the century-old house with good bones. But upgrades are necessary. Change is imperative. And it's incumbent on all the game's stakeholders, from those on the field to those in the ivory towers to those in the stands, to find a shared vision that best fits the modern expectation of what a professional sports league can and should look like. -- Jeff Passan

Can MLB and the MLBPA actually get along?

What we have in baseball is a failure to communicate, and that could not have been borne out more clearly than in 2020. Millions of people in the U.S. were losing their jobs -- including many working under the MLB umbrella, from longtime scouts to minor league coaches to devoted ticket-office employees -- as the coronavirus surged. Yet even against that stark backdrop, the representatives of the league and Major League Baseball Players Association continued to talk past each other, and an ugly, unseemly labor dispute over what would turn out to be a 60-game season spilled into public view in the midst of a pandemic.

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The working relationship between the union and MLB appears to be the worst in decades, with the two sides struggling to find any common ground -- let alone sharing the videoconference time necessary to sort through extremely complicated issues that will require collaboration and cooperation. With the current collective bargaining agreement set to expire Dec. 1, the most important question in the industry is whether the two sides will communicate less like angry, bickering divorcees and start working together on behalf of the kids -- as in, the next generation of baseball patrons who want everything fast/faster/fastest and might not have the patience to wait for baseball if a long labor stoppage obliterates some or all of the 2022 season.

The business of baseball appears to be at a tipping point. With an incredible generation of young stars like Fernando Tatis Jr. and a developing culture of fun and personal expression and fan connection, the game could grow -- or it could be devastated, by a lockout or strike.

The players' association and MLB have every reason to explore every possible solution together.

But will they? -- Buster Olney

The new CBA needs to address the root of MLB's competitive-balance issue

The complexion of baseball will change as a result of this next collective bargaining agreement. There's the headline-grabbing, big-picture stuff Buster spells out above. Months of posturing on both sides, who wins the economic battle of revenue splits, the discussions around salary caps, luxury-tax thresholds and associated penalties, along with the obvious potential of a work stoppage.

There's also a cascading set of secondary issues that will greatly affect young players who are increasingly the most valued and important players in the game.

On the simple end of things, changing Super Two arbitration and ending service-time manipulation will change when you see young potential stars on the field (hopefully sooner) and how good your team will be. One step deeper than that, the expected addition of trading draft picks, the addition of an international draft and the trading of picks in that new draft could completely change team-building strategies for years to come while solving some of the competitive-balance issues that have plagued the sport. If a new GM steps into a farm system with a big league club full of players who aren't their type, or an existing GM wants to change strategies on a dime, this additional talent-based liquidity will make trades much easier to pull off while also empowering scouts to have a real reason to scout every player on Earth. -- Kiley McDaniel

MLB must find one set of rules -- and stick with them

When Bud Selig "unified" baseball in the late 1990s by eliminating the National and American League presidencies and streamlining its umpires, it was an unsentimental business decision. The idea of two separate businesses under one roof by the turn of a new century was considered antiquated. The AL/NL nostalgia was dead, and the game was now one entity -- Major League Baseball.

More than two decades later, baseball is less unified than ever. The game built a skyscraper without first leveling its foundation. Baseball has been played under two sets of rules -- with the designated hitter in the AL -- for nearly half a century. The differences represented a unique quirk during World Series and All-Star Games -- but now that baseball plays interleague games every day, the rules of play are different in any given ballpark. In some games, the pitcher hits; in others, he does not. The game has added seven-inning doubleheaders (whose no-hitters do not count) and unearned runners in scoring position in extra innings -- taking the unprecedented step of changing the rules of play in-game. This is no longer an interesting quirk but an untenable situation that undermines the game's credibility. Baseball being played under the same rules really shouldn't be too much to ask. -- Howard Bryant

The action (or inaction) on the field

AP Photo/Ashley Landis
Time of game vs. pace of play

Major League Baseball is on a mission to reduce the amount of time it takes to play games. Under Rob Manfred, it's been close to an obsession. Seven-inning doubleheaders, a three-batter minimum for pitchers, a runner on second to start extra innings -- welcome to the only industry intent on persuading its consumers to enjoy less of its product. After all, who among us doesn't want a raucous extra-inning game settled as quickly as possible by a clumsy schoolyard contrivance? Setting aside the particulars, there's an inherent conflict: MLB is confusing time of game with pace of play, and its efforts at acceleration run opposite to the skills that teams are prioritizing and incentivizing.

You want to make big league money as a hitter? Hit homers, draw walks and don't sweat the strikeouts. As a pitcher? Strike out as many guys as possible. The metrics employed by every front office dictate a style of play that leads to longer games. There are more pitches, fewer balls put in play and defensive shifts that take longer to set up and alter our perception of the game's positions. Are these fundamental problems that threaten to ruin the game, or will they be forgotten as soon as the next wave of analytics decides contact hitters are the new market inefficiency? Either way, MLB is addressing a pace-of-play disease with time-of-game treatments, which puts baseball, once again, in a distressingly familiar position: at war with itself. -- Tim Keown

The pitchers are just too darn good

On April 29, the Red Sox beat the Mets, 1-0. The game featured six hits and 30 strikeouts. It was the fourth time in major league history that a game included six hits or fewer and at least 30 strikeouts -- once in 2015, once in 2018 and now twice in April. This is not healthy for the game.

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The pitchers are too good, too overpowering these days. If a dominant pitcher such as Jacob deGrom doesn't make a mistake, hitters have virtually no chance of getting a hit. The value of the hit has been lost. There were well over 1,000 more strikeouts than hits in April, a first in any month in MLB history. We're headed for a league batting average (currently .234) lower than 1968, the year of the pitcher.

It is not the hitters' fault. This is what the game has urged them to do: get the ball up in the air -- do damage. The players get paid a lot of money to hit that way. But it's time for our young GMs and hitting coaches to acknowledge that this way isn't working. The pitchers made an adjustment after getting their brains beat out 20 years ago. Now it's the hitters' turn to make a change; otherwise we'll have more and more six-hit, 30-punchout games. -- Tim Kurkjian

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Are too many strikeouts bad for MLB?Tim Kurkjian voices his concern over the higher number of strikeouts this season in Major League Baseball.
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