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I have a mild amount of light buzzing. Is that OK?

That’s because Rob has got his mic on in that control room. But he’s going to turn it off now.

Bye, Rob.

Yeah. See ya.

See ya. That’s a home run call.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Oh, really? What’s the — wait, can you just explain that to me?

So I think the lead announcer for the Yankees on television, when they hit a home run, goes, see ya!

Oh, because the ball is gone?

Yeah, yeah.

Not like, it’s going, it’s going, it’s gone!

The other Yankee ones — it is high. It is far. It is gone!

See ya!

The best is when they get it wrong. It is high, it is far, and he’s shaking. And it’s caught by the center fielder.

[LAUGHS]:

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

On opening day of baseball’s 2023 season, Mike Schmidt on a historic plan to save the sport from the tyranny of the home run. It’s Thursday, March 30.

So I can’t believe that I’m actually going to tell you this. I grew up playing baseball. I remember a handful of memories from my time. The top two are when I gave up home runs.

Gave them up? Oh, meaning you were the pitcher?

Correct. Etched in my memory.

Uh-huh.

There is nothing more humiliating than standing on the mound after someone has hit the ball over the fence and is running around the bases, celebrating.

I know. I guess it’s just like an endless shame spiral.

Correct.

Everyone’s looking at you. You did that. [LAUGHS]

I mean, I think about these moments fairly often.

Right. And then you would later grow up to cover baseball as a journalist, among many other bits you’d have for “The Times.” And the last time that you came on the show to talk about baseball was when the sport was weathering — and in some ways, not weathering — the pandemic. And the reason we asked you to come back is because baseball is now experiencing another major change. So tell us about that change.

This season, baseball will operate under new rules that are the biggest changes in on-the-field play certainly in my lifetime, if not the history of the game.

Wow. Just give me a couple tastes of this change.

Well, the first one that you’ll see is a pitch clock.

Kind of a shot clock, sort of — yeah a shot clock. But in this case, a pitch clock.

A pitch clock.

That is a big change. What else?

The players will be positioned differently on the field. And the bases are getting bigger. You won’t be able to notice it with your eye —

[LAUGHS]: But they are bigger.

But they’ll now be several inches wider, longer.

Hmm. What is driving these changes, Mike?

Baseball is facing a semi-existential threat in terms of its appeal to fans. The game has become not only too long, but too boring. The non-baseball fan or baseball hater will sort of be laughing at that because they’ll say —

It was always boring.

It was always boring.

[LAUGHS]:

But it has tipped over the edge. And I think, as a fan and as someone who has covered the game, who keeps a close eye on it and still talks to people within the game, that the home run is to blame.

Hmm. That is a provocative thesis.

Yeah. Look, the home run is the cornerstone of the game. It’s the most exciting play of the game. It’s part of our lexicon in this country. You just knocked it out of the park. But the game has become addicted to the home run. And because of that addiction to the most exciting play in the game, the whole game has become boring.

So explain how it is, why it is, that the home run goes from something to be celebrated and becomes part of this boring problem of baseball, how we got to this point where we need these reforms.

So to understand that, we need to go back to the early days of Major League Baseball where the home run was this engine that powered the growth of the sport. Way back in the early 1900s, home runs were not the key driving force of the game. But then came the 1920s.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

A hard-hitting lefty named Babe Ruth —

— comes along and is a power hitter.

And Ruth captures the country’s attention through his slugging.

And helps the sports popularity grow and set it on a trajectory that it follows in the decades that come.

The home run comes to create and define the iconic moments and players of the game.

The Bobby Thomson shot heard around the world.

Figures like Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris.

Hank Aaron.

The home run and the power behind it, with a bit of the Americana of how strong you are and how far you can hit it, becomes a central part of the game.

And then, the story of the home run takes a dramatic turn in the mid -‘90s.

Remind us what happens.

1994.

The sport is ground to a halt because of a strike.

The World Series is canceled.

And as the sport comes out of the strike, it’s at its most diminished state. No one wants to go back to the park.

Right, there’s a sense of betrayal. You didn’t play.

Incredibly damaging to the game. And in 1998, as the sport is still trying to get its legs underneath it, fans witness this extraordinary chase —

[CROWD CHEERING]

— between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to break the single-season home-run record, which, at the time, had been held by Roger Maris at 61 home runs.

A feel-good story of two sluggers crisscrossing the country as they try to hit the most home runs.

[CROWD CHEERING]

On the night of September 8, 1998, McGuire and Sosa are actually playing against each other. And with the commissioner in the stands and the whole country watching —

McGwire breaks the record. And in this wonderful moment, McGwire and Sosa embrace on the field.

And the home run has never been more central.

Correct. And everyone’s trying to hit home runs. It’s not just that these two players are. Home runs are up across the league. Everyone’s hitting home runs.

Mm-hmm.

But what happens is that in the years that follow, we find out that that chase that felt so good, and that brought everyone back, was built, in part, on a lie — that the players were using banned drugs.

Steroids.

Correct. And not only does it tarnish and create questions about these new records, but it sets off a series of other problems for the sport that go on for the decade-plus that follows.

Mm-hmm.

As it’s haunted by federal and congressional investigations into the use of steroids by players.

And Mike, I have to imagine that steroid use that Sosa and McGuire were involved in was at least somewhat inspired by the game’s emphasis on home runs. So does this scandal lead to any kind of reckoning around the place of the home run, its primacy, in the sport?

It leads to a reckoning, in the sense that the sport needs to police itself from performance-enhancing drugs. But by no means does anyone turn away from the home run.

Why not?

Because a new phenomenon further fuels the drive for the home run. And that’s the Moneyball-ification of baseball.

All right, just explain that for the 25 listeners who didn’t read the book or watch the movie.

Teams become very focused on statistics in trying to come up with the greatest chances, mathematically, of scoring and preventing runs.

Right, this is the firm application, not just of instincts, but of math in the game.

Correct. And numbers proliferate throughout the sport.

Mm-hmm.

Let me give you an example of what this looks like.

Teams have so much data about where players are hitting the ball, that they begin to rearrange their defenses —

— in a way that makes it much harder for a player actually to get a hit, because they’re able to put a fielder exactly where the ball is likely to land.

And as the sport is grappling with all of this new data and these changes on the field that are responding to it, the home run emerges as, far and away, the most appealing way to score.

Right, because it’s the only way to cut through all these data-driven defenses that you just described.

Unless you’re going to put your players on each other’s shoulders in the outfield to try and stop the ball from going over the fence, there’s nothing your fielders can do.

So in the wake of a steroid scandal that was, in part, inspired by perhaps an overemphasis on home runs, we get a data-driven system that still overemphasizes, arguably, home runs. All roads keep leading back, in baseball, to the home run.

And it becomes so extreme, that it leads to the problem of boredom that the sport is now confronting.

We’ll be right back.

So Mike, how exactly do home runs become boring? Home runs, almost by definition, cannot be boring.

Home runs themselves are not boring. But everything else that comes with everyone in the game concentrating on them is. Because instead of trying to learn how to spray the ball around the field, or someone that can leg out a single to a double or triple, hitters start to concentrate on doing everything they can to just try and hit a home run.

Players become even more patient at the plate, because they’re looking for just that perfect pitch that they can drive over the fence. They change their swing to have more of an uppercut, to try and hit it out of the park. But because you’re swinging up, you’re also more likely to miss.

So in the process of this happening, you end up with one of three results. A strikeout, a walk, or a home run. And home runs don’t happen all that often. So the action on the field goes way down, because you don’t have just regular, good old-fashioned hits.

Right. You don’t have good old-fashioned baseball anymore. You just kind of have an endless home run derby.

The time between batted balls in play — that goes from, in the 1980s, being under three minutes, to being almost every four minutes last season.

So about a minute more time between every single ball in play. And of course, a minute doesn’t sound like much in isolation, but over the course of an entire game, I have to imagine that starts to really add up.

At the same time, teams that are pitching are trying to do everything to prevent that home run. So they’re bringing in different pitchers. They’re encouraging pitchers to give their max effort on every pitch to try and make sure that they get that strikeout, so there’s no contact to the bat.

And all of these things are slowing the game down.

Correct. And games become longer. They become 20 to 30 minutes longer, on average.

And so at what point does the league say to itself, all right, enough, we have got to do something about this, we’ve got to make this sport more fun, we’ve got to make it faster?

So it being baseball, it took a while.

It’s a slow sport. [CHUCKLES]

Thematic. In this story, there’s one person who made that call.

So I went directly to him. I went to the offices of the baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred.

And you guys have quite a long history.

We go way back.

So what does Manfred tell you?

So he knows there’s a problem.

He doesn’t say that baseball has a boring problem. But he confirms that there’s a real pace issue.

Right.

A speed of action and length of game. And he knows something has to be done, and he’s known that for a very long time.

The problem for him is that he’s not truly a baseball guy. Was not a player, was not an owner, didn’t run a team.

So he may have a kind of cred issue.

Correct. So he knew that as that lawyer, he needed to take his time and be methodical. So over many years, almost a decade, he plots this change.

Talking to players about them —

Getting the owners on board for it.

Testing at the minor league level what these changes would be.

Shepherding, ushering, cajoling the sport into this major change.

Right. Making sure everybody was comfortable with it, which takes time.

Correct. And all that work finally culminates in these new rules that are being rolled out this season.

So tell me more about these rule changes. You started to hint at them at the beginning of our conversation. Let’s do it in more depth — and how they’re supposed to actually fix baseball’s problems.

So again, there’s three big changes coming this season — the pitch clock, the bigger bases, and where fielders can stand in the field. So let me start with the fielders. Remember, we talked about those data-driven defenses — essentially, computers telling teams where players should be on the field.

Right, which, of course, encourages people at bat to just hit home runs over the fielders’ heads.

You can’t do that anymore. You have to have your infielders on the infield, and you have to have two on one side and two on the other. You can’t stack the defense on one side. And because of that, it opens up much more space for a player to hit a ground ball or a base hit up through the middle or through one of the holes.

Got it. And Mike, what about the pitch clock? What does that have to do with the home run?

On the face of it, it doesn’t have anything to do with the home run.

Sluggers will still be waiting for the perfect pitch. But the fact that there’s a clock means that the pitches will be coming more quickly, and the game will be moving faster. A ticker on your screen that gives the pitcher 15 or 20 seconds to deliver a pitch. And if the pitcher doesn’t pitch before the clock goes off, it’s a ball.

Got it.

And then, you have the larger bases.

Right.

One of the byproducts of the push for the home run meant that if you had a runner on base and you were looking at the numbers, you wouldn’t want the runner to try and steal. Because the risk of getting called out stealing was too great. Because if the batter hit the home run —

That person would never come home.

Correct.

And you wouldn’t get the extra run.

So it was worth it to not steal.

Mm-hmm. Of course stealing is exciting.

Stealing is exciting. It’s perhaps the most action packed non-home-run event of the game. And those larger bases — it just makes it easier to steal. And it also makes the game a bit safer. Because bigger bases gives more space and, potentially, less collisions.

Right.

At the same time, there’s a new rule that limits the number of times a pitcher can try and pick off a runner. The pitchers move to try and keep the runner close to the base, so they don’t steal.

Right, which is another thing that slows down baseball. I have endless memories of watching the pitcher seem like they’re going to pitch, stop, pivot. Oh, I might try to stop you from — it’s kind of endless.

Do you really have endless memories of that?

No, I have a couple of memories.

OK. [LAUGHS]

When the opposing team keeps on throwing over to first base, the fans start booing.

Right.

[SNORES]: Because it’s just slowing the game down. And now, there’s a limit on that.

So Mike, taken together, this is a campaign to make baseball more exciting by doing a few things — elevating the other parts of the game that aren’t home runs, like the base hit or the stolen base, and making those home-run-hitters just be less of a drag on the overall pace of the game.

Yeah. I mean, I think the way to look at it is that baseball is not trying to kick the home run.

Right.

They’re trying to kick the problems and things that come with it — that there’s other things going on —

Right.

— and there’s not things weighing it down.

Got it. I’m very curious, Mike, how baseball players, who Manfred feared might not like these changes, and fans have been reacting to these new rules.

Surprisingly, it’s been positive. Baseball is not something that lends itself to new, cutting-edge changes. It’s a sport where the players are set in their ways. And fans seem to have opinions about everything and want to debate each other on who the best players are and when the best times in baseball history were.

Right.

But I think, surprising, certainly, to me, and surprising to the baseball executives that are putting these new rules in place, it’s been embraced. These new moves to make it faster have actually made it faster. Spring training games are more than 20 minutes shorter than they were last year.

More balls are being hit in play. More players are trying to steal bases. But as Manfred and I talked about, the real test starts in the regular season —

Right.

— when the games actually matter.

And in theory, you could imagine moments where teams blame a loss on one of these new rules, and it’ll all come down on Manfred.

Of course, there’s a very strong possibility that these rule changes won’t make Manfred a lightning rod, that they’re going to be embraced. Maybe they’re even going to be celebrated. Right? They’re going to make the sport better, and maybe even usher in a golden era in the sport.

Golden era? I don’t know about that. But a more appealing, faster, efficient product that is not going to take four hours to watch a nine-inning game? Good chance. And in that sense, we’re watching an American institution embrace new and different things, in a potentially positive way, which is, you know, progress.

Progress.

A bit remarkable.

Well, Mike, as always Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

On Wednesday, Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a sweeping law that restricts how health care workers and schools can treat transgender youth, overriding a veto of the bill by the state’s Democratic governor. The bill bans access to gender-affirming care for trans children, restricts which bathrooms they can use, and bars the discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation in the classroom.

Its passage was angrily opposed by Democratic lawmakers, including State Senator Karen Berg, whose transgender son died by suicide last year.

And federal regulators have approved the sale of Narcan, a nasal spray that reverses opioid overdoses without a prescription, making it widely available as a life-saving treatment. The decision to sell Narcan over the counter could vastly reduce fatal overdoses, which have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans over the past two years.

Today’s episode was produced by Rob Szypko and Carlos Prieto, with help from Will Reid and Mooj Zadie. It was edited by Lexie Diao, with help from Michael Benoist. It was fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.