Bases. Ugh.

Watching my beloved Yankees this season has been an embarrassment due to them being thrown out in the bases like Little Leaguers, so it's kind of a relief to find out it's a league-wide phenomenon right now:

It is not necessarily the fault of the players. The industry, infatuated with home runs being the primary way to score runs in today's game, has de-emphasized baserunning. It hasn't taught it very well. It doesn't pay for great baserunning. It doesn't penalize bad baserunning. The industry has decided that the risk of getting thrown out trying to advance 90 feet is far greater than the reward for hitting a three-run home run.

But the industry has gone too far. It has taken one of the most exciting and most critical parts of the game and devalued it. In doing so, it has turned baseball into a slower game, one base at a time. It has become a game that, at times, can be spectacularly boring.

My bold: just the other day, I noted to myself that the Yankees seem to have a curiously low rate of advancing a runnier from first to third on a single. Runners are constantly stopping at second base. Along with the shift and "let's stand around striking out until someone hits a 3-run dinger", shitty base-running is making baseball unwatchable.