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June 6, 2023––“Baseball had a great run, a nice century. Boxing used to be huge too. Times change, tastes veer, attention spans shrink. Cultural gems become cultural relics. It’s no one’s fault; we move on to new things.” When staff writer Mark Leibovich started reporting his new cover story for The Atlantic, such was his thinking toward the sport; Leibovich thought he would be writing its obituary. Instead, he discovered that some of the same Moneyball whiz kids who had made baseball games endless and unwatchable had been brought back in to save the sport––and, against all expectations, have implemented the transformations necessary to save it.

In his first cover story for The Atlantic, Leibovich continues his sharp reporting on professional sports in America with “How Baseball Saved Itself,” the fullest inside story yet of how the rule changes came to be, reported using his extensive access to the individuals most responsible for them. The feature follows his best-selling book from 2018, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times, which probed the NFL at the peak of its power.

Leibovich reports that each morning in recent years, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred would review daily reports charting the advancing lengths of the previous night’s games. “It was not a good story,” Manfred told Leibovich. “Last year was so depressing, I just stopped doing it.” In addition to spending time with Manfred, Liebovich spent extensive time with key executives, including Theo Epstein—the wunderkind who, as a general manager for the Red Sox and the Cubs, broke century-old World Series curses and is now a consultant for MLB—and Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations (and the “quarterback” of the project to reinvent baseball). Notably, Epstein and Sword are both figures from the Moneyball generation of baseball who, in using analytics to help teams win more games, helped usher in the unwatchable entertainment product the game had become: more strikeouts, more walks, less contact with the ball, less offense, less action, and (much) longer games. They could see that the sport Moneyball had wrought was dooming the game to eventual irrelevance. “What’s it going to look like 10 years from now, when the league is hitting .215?” Epstein said. “Who’s going to watch that?”

During this past off-season, Leibovich attended a boot camp that MLB had organized for the game’s 76 full-time umpires in Scottsdale, as well the first spring-training game of the year in Peoria, where he sat directly between Epstein and Sword as they rooted anxiously for the game to clock in at under two-and-a-half hours. The game finished in 2:29, an early sign that this experiment would be a success.

Leibovich interviewed a number of managers and players in his reporting, including Terry Francona of the Guardians, Bob Melvin on the Padres, and Scott Servais of the Mariners, the latter of whom offered Leibovich a candid thought on baseball before its rule changes: “I’m trying to decide if I want to say this or not … There are games when I’m sitting there in the dugout, and I will think, This is boring. And I’ve been part of this game my whole life. This is boring. It’s three up, three down. No action.”

But to Leibovich’s surprise, and to the delight of the MLB executives, the changes have worked: Game times are down, ratings are up, and the new rules—especially the pitch clocks—are drawing raves. Leibovich writes, “The idea is that baseball needs to attract new fans. But there’s a parallel notion here, with life lessons embedded. Change can invigorate at any age. It’s important to keep traditions, and base runners, moving. Obsolescence is a choice.”

“How Baseball Saved Itself” is published today at The Atlantic. Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview Leibovich about his reporting.

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