All sports, to some extent, are games of change. Basketball has spent the past few seasons reckoning with the discovery that three points are worth more than two points. Analytics are slowly becoming more prevalent in football, and some teams are getting significantly more aggressive when it comes to going for it on fourth down and in deploying things like play-action fakes. And in baseball, the three true outcomes are all the rage, with home runs in particular exploding at an eye-popping pace.
When a game changes as fast as baseball has in recent years, though, it can threaten our understanding of the sport in some ways.