Has the product changed, or are you just buying the hype from a commissioner who wants to put his stamp on the league? You say the game has gotten longer, too long, and the action has gotten less....so less scoring? The great thing about baseball is the statistics...baseball has always loved number and tracks everything. You can look at trends over 120 years, see the ebb and flow of things with the changes in the ball, the players, etc....Let look at the numbers for the past 50 years around game length and scoring.
1970 Avg runs scored by team 4.34 Avg length of game in minutes 154
1980 Avg runs scored by team 4.29 Avg length of game in minutes 158
1990 Avg runs scored by team 4.26 Avg length of game in minutes 171
2000 Avg runs scored by team 5.14 Avg length of game in minutes 181
2010 Avg runs scored by team 4.38 Avg length of game in minutes 174
2019 Avg runs scored by team 4.83 Avg length of game in minutes 190
So, while there is absolutely not less action the games have gotten longer by 36 minutes on average in the past 50 years, most of increase from 1980 onward. You know what the biggest culprit is? An increase in commercial runtime. From 1980 to 2014, the best data I can find, total commercial runtime that delayed the next pitch increased about 12 minutes. An increase that would account for more than half of the gain in overall game length for the same period. This has absolutely nothing to do with style of play and everything to do with how the games are distributed.
For fun let’s assume this number holds true for the entire period of 1970 to 2019. That would attribute 18 minutes of run time to additional commercials and 18 minutes to style of play. So the net net of 50 years is 18 minutes more of baseball players on the screen and an additional .5 runs per game per team.
Yeah, heck let’s start pulling levers and pushing buttons because this game is sooooo not what baseball used to be. We should all be lining up for Bob Manfred’s “New Coke” because we all know that worked so well😂