Baseball's Golden Age

For some reason, and unlike any other sport, baseball's fans love to denigrate the game and pine for days of yore when everything was better.

We hear constantly about how baseball is too slow, how its popularity is declining, how the umps are all inept, how the playoffs are all wrong and so on.

Although I agree that some changes could be made to goose the pace of games, in every other respect these complaints are unwarranted. More people attend a month of MLB games than the entire NFL schedule. Instant replay has demonstrated how incredibly close many calls are in all sports. Baseball's playoff format might be the best of any major American sport's given the utter ineptitude of the NBA and NHL to fashion a coherent tournament.

(At the risk of beating a long since buried and mourned horse, and of drifting off on a tangent, the NBA, after three desultory rounds of their tournament, is a month later careening to a finals match-up that any casual follower could have predicted last June. In the NHL, one of the conference finalists, the one going home today with a chance to claim a spot in the championship series, lost as many games as it won this season and qualified 16th for the playoffs.)

The Cubs and Red Sox Have Won the World Series, For Godsakes
All of which flooded into my head recently when a petitioner in a Fangraphs chat asked the writer to identify the best era in baseball history. My immediate reaction was, right now! (To his credit, the writer agreed.)

Consider the last 16 years in the Majors. Eleven different teams have won the World Series, and of the three teams that have repeated, one of them hadn't won a Series in 87 years, another in 56. Eight of the winners claimed their first ever title (Diamondbacks, White Sox, Angles) or won for the first time in 28+ years (Giants, Red Sox, Phillies, Royals and Cubs.) Compare that to the often-named Golden Age, when the hardware never moved from The Bronx. Yawn.

It's far beyond that, of course. We've never seen an era of young talent, particularly at the keystone and shortstop positions. Rougned Odor might not even qualify among the game's top 10 second baseman, except when rating right crosses. Yet he slugged 33 home runs last year. A list of the 10 best shortstops includes one player over 29 (30-year-old Brandon Crawford). And we haven't even mentioned the historic starts of Kris Bryant, Manny Machado, Bryce Harper and the greatest 25-year-old in baseball history. 

Exit Velocity and Launch Angles
You like the guys who bring the heat instead? Basically every 100 mph pitch ever thrown in MLB games has been recorded this decade. We know how fast pitches go because we know more about the game than we could ever have thought to ask two decades ago, thanks to Statcast and advanced baseball analytics.

The second Wild Card, the trade deadline and the concept of the total teardown have created interest in the game across America, even among fan bases rooting for teams bumbling their way to triple-digit losses. You want to get closer to the game? You can tweet to your favorite player and he might answer you. Who needs an autograph?

And don't forget the stadiums. There has never been a ballpark like PNC Park, Camden Yards or AT&T, and we still have Fenway and Wrigley. The game is 150 years old and we're seeing things we've never seen before. It's an amazing time.

You're Living In It
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but baseball has not only never been better, it's never been close. The best era for baseball -- it's today.

And the best news is, it's fixing to be tomorrow too.