What Baseball Traditionalists Don't Get About the Arizona Diamondbacks

A World Series contender without the best winning record could be good for business.

October 27, 2023 at 9:02 AM MST

By Adam Minter

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports.

He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."

Americans love an underdog, so long as the underdog stays out of the baseball World Series. That’s the unwelcome reality faced by the Arizona Diamondbacks since qualifying for the Fall Classic. They advanced even though they barely won half of their regular season games — 84 in total — beating out the five best regular season teams, including the 104-win Atlanta Braves.

Baseball’s traditionalists, frustrated that the most dominant regular season teams didn’t steamroll into the playoffs, are lashing out at Major League Baseball’s 2022 expansion of its playoff field. Instead of 10 teams, there are 12.

Without the change, the analysts note, the Diamondbacks would already be on winter vacation.

The critics should lighten up.

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✓ Attendance and viewership are up thanks to this rule change and others designed to make the games more entertaining.

MLB has had its best audience in years.
The Diamondbacks turned out to be perfectly built to win under the modifications.
As the game enjoys a 2023 comeback, the team is the model others will emulate to win over a new generation of fans.

It’s a surprising role for Arizona to be in. Established as an expansion franchise in 1998, the Diamondbacks enjoyed early success (including a 2001 World Series championship). But over the years, the winning tapered off. In 2021, the team lost 110 games. The outlook for 2023 wasn’t much better.

Some Las Vegas oddsmakers charitably pegged them at 125-1 to win the World Series.

It wasn’t just the Diamondbacks who were in the dumps.

The game itself had gone stagnant.
With the advance of data analytics (so-called moneyball), teams started choosing players who could produce three high-probability outcomes: walks, strikeouts and home runs. T
he approach engineered wins — the Boston Red Sox won championships using it — but it increased playing time and boredom.
The things that make baseball engaging, such as stolen bases, cratered. In the 1980s, the average baseball game lasted around two-and-a-half hours; by the 2010s, it dragged out for over three.

Meanwhile, bad teams embraced tanking (purposely running up a losing record) to boost their opportunity to pick the best amateur players in the draft. The practical effect was to render large numbers of teams irrelevant before the season was half over.

Fans noticed.

Before spring training in 2023,
MLB hadn’t seen an increase in attendance since 2012.
In 2022, league-wide attendance was down 5.7% compared to 2019; those 68.5 million spectators were the lowest since 1997.

This led to the league’s playoffs field expansion, which incentivized middling teams to remain competitive.

For an up-and-coming team like Arizona, which would’ve been eliminated from contention by September, the future suddenly brightened.
They could not only make the playoffs, but they could dream of going far in them.

Then, as I discussed in a previous column, the MLB announced rule changes such as a pitch clock to shorten the games, which brought the fun back.

The box office has benefited, too.

In 2023, league-wide attendance surged 9.6% to 70.7 million, its highest level since 2017.
Television and streaming also perked up, with the regional sports networks that broadcast the games locally seeing a 7% increase overall (Arizona enjoyed a 25% increase).

It also turned out that the Diamondbacks, with some of the fastest athletes in MLB (including breakout star Corbin Carroll), were perfectly designed for the new baseball rules.

By mid-season, they were leading the National League in several metrics that benefit from speed, including scoring from first on a double.
At season’s end, they’d stolen the second most bases in 2023 (166) and are tied for the most during the postseason.
That speed has also boosted Arizona’s defense, making them a dangerous and entertaining team to play in a short, anything-can-happen playoff series.