The State of Hype in Baseball

Will Paul Skenes "break through"? And would it matter if he did?

The local Crunch Fitness, like many gyms, has a fondness for running a ridiculous slate of programming on the six or seven TVs that face all the cardio machines.

For this member of the cord-cutting generation, it’s one of the few times I get a passive look at live television. Baby animal shows, HGTV, 80s action flicks, the local news, ESPN. It’s all there, and every once in a while, I notice something.

This week, I noticed the Pittsburgh Pirates’ new ace-apparent, Paul Skenes, on The Pat McAfee show. It’s not every MLB rookie who gets that invite.¹ I mean, it’s very rare that a guy even makes the majors this early. He won the College World Series with LSU less than a year ago. He was barely in the minors at all. Guess that’s what a firm ‘stache can do for you.

Skenes is throwing to big-league hitters sooner even than Stephen Strasburg, whose June debut (against the Pirates, might I add) did more to confirm the hype than Skenes just did. Skenes didn’t get shelled or anything, he looked pretty sharp. He just didn’t record 14(!!!) K’s. He got 7, clocking 100+ mph over a dozen times along the way. Solid.

As we’re making that comparison, we have to remember that Strasburg was once considered the most can’t-miss pitching prospect ever. The Washington Nationals getting both him and then Bryce Harper the following year was an all-time coup at the top of the draft.

Strasburg quietly retired last month, calling it quits after four years of trying and failing to get back on the mound. Injuries derailed a promising career, pretty much from the start. He put together one really fantastic year in 2019, when he finished on on the All-MLB First Team and won a World Series MVP, and it was all straight downhill from there.

I’m not sure how famous Strasburg would’ve been had he stayed healthy. You have to imagine his profile would be greater than it ended up, given how infrequently he played, but was he famous in 2019 either? I’d say no. Not really.

Which brings me back to Skenes. MLB, understandably, would like for this young man to be famous. They’re (don’t) pitching him pretty aggressively, trying to make his debut a real event. He’s all over social media, owing in large part to his considerably more famous girlfriend, fellow LSU athlete and social-media starlet Livvy Dunne.

So baseball’s trying. And hey, maybe Dunne contributes some measure of what Taylor Swift did to the NFL, meaning a bunch of dudes getting annoyed whenever the broadcast showed her cheering in the booth. That seems to be the dynamic emerging with the Skunnes pairing as well, albeit with lower stakes. Cool. Good stuff, everybody.

See, MLB, understandably, would like for any of its players to be famous. They have Shohei Ohtani, who’s incredibly famous in his home country of Japan, but may now be best known in America as the guy who got wrapped up in a gambling scandal.

They have Mike Trout, who’s perpetually criticized as too boring, and is now unfortunately hurt again anyways. They have the aforementioned Bryce Harper, who’s still performing at a very high level, but carries a lower public profile than you’d necessarily expect. They even have Ohtani’s teammate, Mookie Betts, who feels like he should probably be more famous than he is, but is, again — if you’re sensing a theme — just not quite there.

According to the latest YouGov survey of the most famous contemporary baseball players, as was the case in the last one I looked at, those surveyed probably don’t mean they’ve heard of Carlos Santana the first baseman for the Twins. But the numbers are the numbers, and he’s #1. Congrats, Carlos.

Coming in well behind him is Aaron Judge, followed by Justin Verlander (famous wife), then Miguel Cabrera, and finally Evan Longoria, who may be benefiting from the famous actress one letter off.

Don’t look at me; I never said YouGov’s methodology was thorough. But that’s the top five, and all of them fall between 57-59% recognition.

However reliable you consider that metric, that is not an encouraging list! You don’t need metrics to tell you what you already know. There’s no one so much as approaching Derek Jeter in stature here. There’s no A-Rod. There’s no David Ortiz. There’s no Ken Griffey Jr., no Roger Clemens, no Barry Bonds.

I have read all the finger-wagging Baseball Is Doing Fine! takes that I need to understand that the financial health of the sport is not under immediate threat.

What I would say in response is that it will be eventually if no one walks through that door one of these days. Continuing room for international growth provides some cause for optimism, but I’m not sure that will matter enough if the sport continues to lose viewership here in America — both literally on television as well as the cultural zeitgeist from which baseball has been slipping for decades.

I like Skenes. He has excellent stuff and should turn out to be an excellent pitcher. I just don’t think the Skenes Effect will be joining the lexicon.²

And let’s be clear: it’s not on him to “save baseball.” It’s not on any one person, and besides, I don’t think the sport is dying. It’s just declining, and while I’ll be curious to see whether anyone can change that, I’m confident it will still be a part of Americans’ lives for the foreseeable future. Just fewer of them, probably.

Commissioner Rob Manfred has a lot to do with his remaining lame-duck years, starting with navigating a thorny broadcast mess. Finding a way to eliminate local TV blackouts could be a start. And then he’s got some expansion cities to marshal through, which are always nice and buzzy.

Ensuring the league can financially accommodate those expansions will be a question for the next commish, or maybe the one after that.

For all my hand-wringing, I’m sure it’ll all be fine. It’ll be diminished somewhat from what I remember, but it’ll be there.

With time, I expect baseball will become a little more like hockey: criminally under-watched by all but a passionate (comparatively) few.

Is that a bad thing? Or just a thing? You tell me.

Also, This

🏀 It’s been a tough run of late for the “this series is over” crowd, as I wrote in a 5x5 roundup yesterday. I am occasionally among them. I wasn’t convinced the Nuggets would roll over, but I did worry that the Knicks might’ve run out of guys. It’s not that the Pacers are good. They haven’t been able to guard anybody all year. But New York had to prove they could score accordingly, even several men down, and they did. So continues the New York moment, as the Rangers break on through too.

⛏️ As for the Nuggets, well… I did say their virtue was patience, didn’t I? That was quite the yikes last night, after a resounding hooray Wednesday. I hope we get the Game 7 That Was Promised after all this up and down.

🌡️ Caitlin Clark made her WNBA debut for the Indiana Fever this week, drawing a number of viewers — 2.1 million — the league hasn’t seen in 20 years. Early glimpse at the Clark Effect.

🔷 I mentioned Shohei Ohtani above. I think it was fair to expect that the enormous scandal leading into this season might affect his play, but not so. As of this writing, he leads MLB in batting average, overall hits, total doubles, slugging and OPS (and he’s second in homers, one off the lead). Incredible. Quite the welcome to LA. I’d want one of those bobbleheads too.

⛳ I have thoughts on the purported architect of the LIV-PGA Tour deal resigning in a huff this week, and you can have them next week. Say it with me, folks: patience.

1. It’s his second appearance, actually. He got another invite while still in the minors, as the Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate is in Indianapolis, where McAfee records. Popular guy.

2. There’s still time though, if

Alex Varghese

cares to write it.