Why progressives and urbanists should love MLB's new rules
Good baseball, like good cities, is about connection and efficiency
Programming note: June is Pride Month, and in recent years there have been several controversies around Pride-themed events at MLB games. Out in Left’s position is baseball teams, players, and fans who are intolerant of or hateful toward the queer community can fuck right off.
With “plenty of time” for first pitch, I left for the Padres’ Out at the Park from my office downtown. My friend ditched his Lyft at Market Street and walked down Tenth Avenue to Petco, past all the drivers inching toward $50 parking stalls. We met at the right field gate and of course picked the slow metal detector. With the people we hiked to the 300 level and with the people we lined up for Bud Lights. When we arrived at our seats the Pads were down 5-0 in the third inning. The fans stuck in traffic were spared the drubbing.
If baseball before 2023 was Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner—painfully slow and usually late—then this year it’s a European metro. Thanks to the adoption of a pitch timer and other changes, average game length is way down and pace of play is up, as are complaints from folks who miss a third of the game after paying for tickets whose fees comprise a third of the price. Like them or not, the new rules are returning baseball to its urban roots and it’s a better sport for it. The car-addicted world on the other side of the turnstiles needs to wake up and smell the beans.
Railroads created baseball. They’re what allowed for organized intercity games. Train schedules and the sun dictated start times, and teams had to play fast, lest games end prematurely due to darkness or one side needing to catch the last train out of town. Until the 1940s, when air travel and night baseball became common, nine-inning games generally lasted no more than two hours. Baseball’s anachronistic travel and “getaway” days stem from when it took a full day to travel by train from Chicago to Boston, the two poles of the original National League. As for the logistical and cultural importance of intracity rail, the Los Angeles (née Brooklyn) Dodgers wear that across their chest.
Gate receipts paid all the bills then, so ballparks couldn’t be far from either the rail network or fans. This made baseball a physics problem: how efficiently could an association of traveling teams attract as many customers as possible? An answer emerged as early as 1882, when National League teams in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Troy, New York, were jettisoned for clubs in much larger and more accessible Philadelphia and New York City. “The league that liked to think of baseball as a game that represented the rural heartland had to concede that its economic future lay in the nation’s biggest cities,” wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger. One of those new teams became my Phillies, so I thank the extinct Trojans and Ruby Legs for their sacrifice.
Today’s Dodgers fans are famously late to the ballpark not because of a charming cultural trait, but because the laws of physics still apply. Dodger Stadium is surrounded by asphalt on a hilltop in a city that hates density more than poverty. Cars are practically the only way to get to the ballpark and cars require a lot of space. They engorge the city and push people away from each other. People are late to the game because Dodger Stadium isn’t accessible to efficient transportation or where fans live. One friend, a Dodgers diehard, explained this away by recalling Vin Scully’s radio broadcast ensured latecomers never missed a pitch. It’s sad hearing what Angelenos tell themselves to endure their souls draining into the steering column.
Dodgers fans are missing more baseball than ever this year. The pitch timer, which requires the pitcher and batter to move things along, lopped off about thirty minutes from MLB’s average game time, and game length is less variable than it has been since the early 20th century. Late fans are likely to miss more baseball and less likely to make up for it in the later innings, if they don’t leave early to beat the traffic. This math applies to fans everywhere. I’m sure there’s ballpark traffic in St. Petersburg, Florida, for Rays games. It’s just that the Dodgers play in a real city and their fans still have few transportation alternatives. The Dodger Stadium Express from Union Station keeps with the American tradition of calling things the opposite of what they are to mask our insecurities and inadequacies.
It’s impossible to pinpoint their effects, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the average game time first exceeded two hours following the rise of cars, planes, and stadium lights. The innovations dispelled the game’s hard stops, and more time at the ballpark made sitting in car traffic to and from the game almost worth it. It’s as if the 20th-century suburb seeped into baseball’s bones. By the 2010s, when Pedro Baez took nearly two minutes to throw a single pitch, baseball was your neighbor’s second car exploiting free street parking—no matter how much you stared at it and cursed its owner, it wouldn’t move.
It wasn’t shocking, then, that MLB imposed a pitch timer. All but the most stubborn knew baseball took too long and was often too boring. The shocking thing was how decisively and aggressively they did it. No pilot programs, no leeway, no compromise—in 2023, a better, more engaging sport was to be had and MLB regulated it into existence. For once, they didn’t appease a cranky minority of conservatives holding progress hostage.
When asked about the pitch timer, Phillies pitcher Matt Strahm ignited a controversy by opposing efforts to extend alcohol sales past the seventh inning, a move some teams contemplated to make up for lost revenue due to shorter games. The Hot Take Industrial Complex feasted on the story for a few days, but Strahm unwittingly addressed a deeper point: the way American cities are makes our lives worse. “The reason we stopped [alcohol sales] in the seventh before [the pitch timer] is to give our fans time to sober up and drive home safe, correct?” Strahm asked rhetorically. He presumes everyone drives to the ballpark and everyone drinks after they do so. Why wouldn’t he? Zoning laws in the U.S. often require even bars to have parking lots. It’s a depressing sentiment in a country where over 40,000 people die every year in motor vehicle crashes. Rather than make it safer and easier for everyone to get to and from MLB games (or anywhere) by, say, siting ballparks (or anything) in existing, walkable neighborhoods and offering fast, frequent, and accessible public transportation, we deprive ourselves: of time, of money, of cleaner, quieter cities, of the first three innings, and of a beer in the ninth if we so choose.
After leaving a Padres game recently, I had to pick between running nine blocks to catch the bus—the blessing of half-hour headways—or accepting a ride from my friend. We ended up idling in his car for forty-five minutes as the six parking decks below us emptied out of the garage. I have no idea who benefits from the status quo. White single-family homeowners, the ultimate defenders of the realm, waste their lives in traffic, too. Baseball’s equivalent, billionaire team owners, finally recognized that failing to adapt was threatening the future of baseball. I think for the first time in my life we can learn something from MLB.
On TV, the hit up the middle is one of baseball’s best visuals. A ball struck toward second base is usually hit squarely, stays on screen longer than other batted balls, and presents several possible outcomes, all requiring the production crew to stay on the frame for an extra beat. We also get the pitcher’s initial reaction before we know what happens. That split second is baseball’s emotional core. People in one city brace for a hit. People in another dread the cut to a wider shot. Before expressing themselves, the crowd at the park must wait and see if three different defenders can field the ball. Some will have their anticipation rewarded, others will not. Naturally, MLB let the hit up the middle go extinct in the 2010s, after defensive shifts toward the hitter’s pull side exploded in usage and a defender parked behind second base became de rigueur.
I don’t think MLB team owners care about the tension of a hit up the middle or of any single play. They care about asses in seats and eyes on screens, but they came to realize how important baseball’s style was to their relevance and in turn their profits. Marketing patches and financialization of technology were not going to lessen the criticism of or improve a game product that had devolved into an unfulfilling drag. Theirs was a business decision to implement rule changes, including banning defensive shifts. There must now be at least two infielders on either side of second base and all four infielders must be on the infield dirt, and I am grateful for it. Few things in life frustrated me more than a Phillie smoking a pitch back through the box, only for the ball to be casually fielded for an out. Few things in life confused me more than third baseman Manny Machado making a catch at the warning track in right field. For my part, I don’t care about the optimization of defensive alignments through analytics or the old saw “hit ‘em where they ain’t,” and the data may ultimately show a marginal difference in hits before and after the shift ban. In modern parlance, the vibes were simply off.
“Building for cultural and social value always equates to economic value, while the converse is not always as true,” urban designer Howard Blackson wrote in 2017. And in June 2018. And in November 2018. And in December last year, and in March this year. Again, it seems the wider world has learned little while MLB owners corrected course—they achieved record revenue in 2022, the final year of the old baseball, and knew that that occurred despite their product quality. Plodding, interminable games turned off some would-be customers; I’m sure MLB’s market research quantifies that to the penny. More importantly, though, baseball by 2022 was unmoored from its values and history as an urban pastime. You can’t put a price on those vibes.
Do I think cities should base their infrastructure and land use solely on privately-owned professional sports teams? Of course not. A more instructive way to ask that question is: should cities base their infrastructure and land use on how to best connect people? I’ve written elsewhere about the cultural importance of the Padres and their ballparks to San Diego. Nowhere else do so many San Diegans get together so often than at Petco Park. Returning to Howard Blackson’s point, cultural and social values derive not from buildings and infrastructure but from human beings. What we create (or don’t) in the built environment is a reflection of who we are. New York City is New York City because it has a subway system that, before Covid, provided five million rides a day. New Yorkers apparently value connection, proximity, and efficiency and have imbued that in their physical world. In return, they are rewarded with economic and cultural dominance. The U.S. is already the richest, most powerful country on earth. Our adversaries are praying our ten largest cities never build subways within them and high-speed rail between them and homes and businesses on top of it all.
I don’t understand why industry doesn’t more forcefully advocate for better mass transit and denser and more affordable housing. With their product more appealing than ever, MLB should lead this charge, as a survey after last season found that the two biggest obstacles to attending more MLB games—cost, and distance from favorite team—connect directly to how we construct our cities. San Diego doesn’t need to be New York, but by deifying single-family homes and perpetuating car dependency we’re excluding people from the civic fabric and implying we’d rather stand and go it alone, no matter the consequences and externalities. I refuse to believe that’s how most people feel. We wouldn’t have built Petco if we didn’t think it was important for tens of thousands of us to get together night after night. Cities, like baseball, should be a place for everyone. When they finally are, we’ll all have richer lives, literally and figuratively.
This is the Substack I didn't know I needed. Bravo!
Another great essay. I’d love to learn more about how MLB suddenly wised up and how SD built Petco without parking. Also, we learned from the pandemic that baseball doesn’t work as a studio game.