Let’s talk about the state of baseball, huh?

Before I go further, I want to distinguish between two frequently conflated issues facing Major League Baseball in 2018: Pace of play and style of play. Both are lamented for the way they limit action in the course of a three-plus hour baseball game, but the former seems far, far easier to solve without significantly altering the fundamental tenets of the game.

Incorporate a 20-second pitch clock, dock hitters strikes for spending too much time out of the batter’s box, and cap all regular-season replay reviews at 60 seconds (with the ruling on the field upheld wherever it can’t be overturned in that span) and Major League games would swiftly quicken. The MLB Players Association, tail between its legs after the most recent CBA proved ruinous to free agency, has resisted such changes, and I’d guess — and it’s just a guess — that MLB’s petty, self-defeating efforts to enforce stuffy uniform policies have something to do with the discord between the league and its players union. It’s silly. Both sides should be invested in putting a more accessible product on the field, and while die-hards might happily stick out a four-hour game, there should be little doubt that the sport and its players would benefit in the long haul from moving things along.

It’s the other thing that’s more perplexing. The league-wide strikeout rate has been climbing into unprecedented heights for more than a decade now and has surged ever higher over the past three seasons. Last year, for the first time in league history, Major League catchers recorded more putouts than first basemen did. This year, catchers are recording more than 10% more putouts than first basemen. There are now more strikeouts than groundouts, and first month of the 2018 season was the first in Major League history in which there were more strikeouts than hits.

The prevalence of defensive shifting robs some base hits as well, and league-wide batting average in 2018 is currently at its lowest point in more than 40 years. Combine all that with the uptick in homers in recent seasons, and you have a sport that features far less on-field action than ever before, and a game that increasingly hinges on true outcomes in the batter’s box over the spectacular, thrilling randomness of balls in play.

But you know this already, and maybe you know it to be bad for the game. Only it hardly seems like Major League Baseball is reeling after exceeding $10 billion in revenue for the first time last year. And I would argue — and have argued — that while the decrease in defensive opportunities makes for a more boring event in person, the television broadcasts that butter so much of the league’s bread primarily emphasize the pitcher-batter matchup, and all the strikeouts and homers only make that aspect of the telecast more compelling.

Regardless, consider what it is we’re saying when we complain about that quirk of the contemporary game: If you want pitchers that strike out fewer opponents and batters that hit fewer homers and teams that do not optimize defensive positioning, you’re essentially saying you want baseball to be crappier.

Any problems you perceive in the 2018 version of Major League Baseball ultimately stem from baseball players and baseball teams being way better right now than they ever have been in the past. Enhancements in training, technology and understanding of the game over the past couple of decades mean today’s ballplayer is, on average, stronger, faster, better prepared, and likely more mechanically and philosophically sound than any of his predecessors.

Right? No player ever steals 100 bases in a season anymore, but it’s not that the stolen base is a lost art. It’s just an increasingly abandoned one, because teams recognized and communicated the fact that having a baserunner erased on a caught stealing is more costly than the value added by moving one base forward. Players learned and adjusted, and teams shifted development priorities away from volume base-stealing. Now, teams, players and coaches are learning about things like spin rate and launch angle and batted-ball tendencies, and adjusting to improve themselves based on the new knowledge.

Take a look at this pitch Rays reliever Chaz Roe threw in the seventh inning of a lopsided loss over the weekend:

One pitch, no matter how awesome, should not be held up as proof of anything in baseball. But look at it! What’s a hitter supposed to do about a pitch like that? That pitch still looks like a strike after Caleb Joseph needs to decide whether to swing, and then, peace out, it’s low and away.

And maybe you’re saying, “hey, wait a minute, that’s nothing! I saw Sandy Koufax throw pitches that moved like that!” But then remember that this pitch was thrown by a journeyman reliever you’ve never heard of in a game his team was losing by 17 runs.

I can’t say that this particular pitcher was able to throw this particular pitch because he was able to maintain his arm-strength with cutting-edge training techniques or optimize his release point with high-speed cameras, but I can assert with some confidence that those developments, and their pervasiveness within the game, conspired to have that pitch thrown in mopup duty. Velocities have increased steadily for as long as velocities have been tracked. If the exact version of Chaz Roe that threw that pitch hit the Majors twenty years ago, you would know Chaz Roe as a very, very big deal and not just one more guy with mid-90s heat and a nasty slider. Every bullpen now has a bunch of guys with mid-90s heat and a nasty slider.

Take a look at this shift the Astros used against Joey Gallo last week:

Joey Gallo grounded out to the Houston Astros Right Side Monster. pic.twitter.com/x8u3heRUtj — Andrew Simon (@AndrewSimonMLB) May 12, 2018

Gallo’s hardly the first hitter of his type, but in that he is a pull-heavy, strikeout-prone, fly-ball hitter, he is the apotheosis of the 2018 MLB hitter. Gallo, 24, was born and bred into a baseball landscape recognizing fully the value of monster homers, and he’s blessed with a massive frame and a ton of strength. His huge uppercut swing is simply not geared in any way to smack hard grounders the opposite way, but when he gets into one, whoa, nelly…

But Gallo has not been terribly good this year. He’s hit 12 homers, all triumphant, but he has struck out in 58 of his 151 at-bats and is maintaining a measly .199 batting average. His 94 OPS+ makes him a below-average hitter for a corner bat. It’s a small sample, he’s still young and he’s coming off an excellent rookie season, but Gallo has played as a replacement-level player this year while seeing a steady diet of pitches low and outside that either miss his bat entirely or force him to roll over grounders into the shifted infield. Gallo, right now, is simply too prone to whiffs and predictable weak contact to be a productive big-league hitter, even if he’s still clubbing homers.

Again, it’s one guy, and it’s a month and a half, and it’d be dumb to extrapolate anything substantive from Gallo’s early struggles this season. But they are, maybe, instructive, or at the least a symbol of hope for those invested in a baseball future with more on-field action. Gallo demonstrates the limitations of the all-or-nothing approach, and Major League pitchers will figure out how to exploit them. If Gallo cannot adjust and succeed, then the next time a player like Joey Gallo hits Class A ball — bet on it — his organization will train him to cover more of the plate and make more contact and promote him to the Majors only when he shows he can do so, as Gallo’s limitations become another data point in the constant, tireless advancements and adjustments within the sport.

And when you step back and ignore for one moment the ways Major League Baseball in 2018 no longer resembles the sport you fell in love with as a kid, it’s all kind of awesome in a bigger picture sense. The power surge of the late 1990s begets more groundball pitchers which begets more shifting which begets fly-ball heavy hitting approaches which begets spin-rate driven pitch design to defy those approaches, and on and on, except with a thousand other factors in play throughout and red herrings all over the place.

There has always been a cat-and-mouse aspect to baseball strategy, but with new technologies digging ever deeper into the quest for competitive advantages, recent seasons have seen the sport’s adjustments occur at more of a cheetah-and-antelope pace. Teams aren’t scoring appreciably more or less runs than ever before, but baseball is basically maxing out right before our eyes, and people seem certain it’s a bad thing.

This is all an extremely long-winded way of presenting the mildest of takes: Maybe let this just play out. Some are eager for the league to jump in and correct the sport’s course with rule changes — though it’s unclear which rule change, exactly, might unfilthify Chaz Roe’s slider or convince Joey Gallo not to want to jack dingers to the moon. But to do so would be to bring about an artificial end to a dizzying and fascinating era of change inside baseball with little evidence beyond the anecdotal that what’s happening on the field is turning people away.

Home runs are dope. Strikeouts are dope. And baseball’s perpetual ebbs and flows are pretty darn dope, too. I’m here for our current NBA Jam version of Major League Baseball because I’m not convinced it’ll last, and because I want to see what happens next.