Cody Bellinger is modern baseball, and that’s not a bad thing

On Monday night, Cody Bellinger mashed two home runs, and the baseball world went bananas. Every time he hits a dinger, he’s setting a new record, after all. Quickest rookie to 19 homers. Quickest rookie to 20 homers. This will go on for a while, apparently, and everyone is paying attention. Bellinger was trending on Twitter throughout the night. MLB Network broke down his at-bats. MLB.com featured a link to the video prominently on its front page. On Tuesday morning, breathless appreciations of him were published on Deadspin, USA Today, and ESPN.

It’s all Cody, all the time. And while my editors rejected this article idea ...

Here are some words that rhyme with Cody

... that doesn’t mean it won’t draw thousands of clicks one day. Saved to drafts, suckers. People love their Cody Bellinger.

Look at how excited Sports Illustrated is, for example:

However, eight minutes before sending that, Sports Illustrated tweeted out their new cover story from the ridiculously talented Tom Verducci. It’s titled “What Happened To Baseball?”, and Bellinger makes an appearance.

He’s in the last paragraph, where he’s used as an example of how baseball is changing for the worse.

This isn’t to suggest that SI is being hypocritical, or that Verducci is out of touch. It’s to suggest that baseball is caught between competing realities. Baseballs are flying out of the park. Baseballs are flying past the helpless bats of sluggers trying to do too much. Home runs are up, up, up. Strikeouts are up, up, up. The sport is turning into whiffwhiffwhiffwhiffwalkdingerwhiff, and it’s different than what we’re used to.

For all its stodginess, though, baseball has changed plenty over its history. Home Run Baker got his nickname because he lead the league in homers for four straight seasons, but his career high was 12 homers. When he retired, he was teammates with Babe Ruth, who sloughed off dinger spores and reshaped the league in his own image.

The ‘60s saw the mound get lowered because pitchers were too dominant, and the ‘70s saw the rise of fake grass, roofs, and concrete. The ‘80s were filled with stolen bases, and the ‘90s were filled with hideous logos.

Goodness.

There were steroids and new ballparks mixed in. Then the steroids were partially curtailed and the new ballparks became old ballparks. The players keep getting bigger and stronger, and the balls keep getting thrown and hit harder. Baseball is, and will always be, changing.

The question at hand is if the modern game has gone too far. Verducci bemoans the lack of action between the homers and whiffs, and he isn’t alone. My former boss spent many thousands of words on the same complaint and that was before the strikeout rates went truly bonkers around the league. If you like baseball for the deft strategy and the subtle notes and the white noise between the action, these trends are alarming.

If you want to distill everything into a crude sentence, here you go: Baseball is getting dumber. The dumb is being obscured by numbers — spin rates, exit velocities, launch angles — but it’s still obvious. Throw ball HARD. Hit ball HARD. If ball not hit hard, player in TROUBLE, but chance to hit ball HARD always come around again. This is disconcerting, I agree.

And yet, holy heck, did you see Bellinger’s home runs? The dude whips his bat through the zone with an uppercut that makes it look like every third frame was removed from the video. It’s not dumb. It’s art. It’s a delicate ballet, a triumph of the nervous system over physics.

Also, baseball go real far.

You can see the tension between the two extremes in those two SI tweets, eight minutes apart. The message of the first one:

Add them up and virtually half of Bellinger’s turns at bat, 104 of 210, served as a proxy for how the game is played these days: All or nothing.

The message of the second one:

WATCH this home run.

The first one makes me nod. The second one makes me click. This is the push and pull of baseball in 2017. We are ingesting high-fructose corn syrup, and we cannot stop.

Except, hold on. Allow me to posit a wild new theory: Things aren’t nearly as bad or different as they’re made out to be. Not yet. Even if baseball isn’t just in the middle of something temporary and cyclical — probably the likeliest explanation, if history is any guide — we are not drinking a six-pack of soda just yet. There is room for indulgence before we get to gluttony. A soda every other day is tasty, and it doesn’t have to kill you. More dingers are fine. We don’t have a problem yet. We’re fine.

If you want to justify the empty calories, check out this brussel sprout of a paragraph:

Home runs are so easy to come by that teams are more likely to just wait for them rather than be creative. Sacrifice hits are at an all-time low. Intentional walks have been at near-record-low levels the past four years. Nobody has stolen 75 bases in 10 years. The hit-and-run is an endangered play. The veteran pinch hitter has been eliminated so that teams can carry eight relief pitchers.

Sacrifice bunts are boring as hell. Even if they were good strategy, which they often aren’t, there’s no joy to be found in them. If you can get excited about a typical sacrifice bunt, you can get excited about a crafty tax deduction, and good for you. But I’m not there. Intentional walks are one of the least exciting events in baseball. The hit-and-run is fun when it works, and it’s miserable when it fails. And while I carry a soft spot in my heart for Lenny Harris and Matt Stairs, I’m not going to pretend like I’ve spent a lot of time pining for the modern equivalents.

Stolen bases are rad, though. We can agree on that. I will vote for you in a general election if you run on a “More Billy Hamiltons” platform.

Cody Bellinger is a symbol of how baseball has changed, yes. He’s not a symbol of how it’s broken. This is something to watch. It’s also something to WATCH:, in internetese. While I agree that baseball needs something more than the three true outcomes, and while I fear that the Rob Deer Fan Club has moles employed at the highest levels of the game, I’m still OK with the balance. There are more strikeouts. There are more home runs. And there are still an awful lot of baseball plays in between.

Keep an eye on the strikeouts and homers. For now, however, I will enjoy baseball go boom and big man throw rock hard. It’s a little more extreme than it used to be, but this sport isn’t unrecognizable to me.

(Now if we can just get some pitch clocks in here ...)