[GERBO] No better place to start than with Major League Baseball. The Dodgers, repeat World Series champions last year — first time since the turn of the century, since the Yankees did it. And that is the big overarching story. Shohei Ohtani, three-time MVP. Now Aaron Judge won the MVP in the American League. And you’ve got a lot of these stars that are coming into their own. We went through a period in baseball with, trying to make Mike Trout a star, and Bryce Harper. But now you’ve got Tarik Skubal and those type of guys in this world that are coming up — the Jose Ramirez’s in Cleveland, and Paul Skenes in Pittsburgh, and other places — that the sport really is taking on kind of a new wave and a new generation.

[GRIFFIN] Yeah, absolutely. And for so long, like, Mike Trout was an incredible player, but he was so — not media averse — but it definitely didn’t come naturally to him. And so many of these guys, even when you get down to like Freddie Freeman on the Dodgers, like these guys are so comfortable in front of a camera. They are finding their own personalities, even when you see like Aaron Judge at the World Baseball Classic, where they’re finding their footing into how they’re going to be leaders in their clubhouses and how they’re going to be kind of the faces of Major League Baseball — which is going to be something really big when we get through this season, when we’re looking at potential labor negotiations for the MLB.

[GERBO] And ahead of the labor negotiations, the biggest change that fans are going to probably notice this season — ABS, it’s an automated ball-strike calling system that’s now kind of talked about, and it’s been tested in the minor leagues, was tested at the All-Star Game last year as well, and now fully implemented in the regular season for the first time. Where not the typical manager where he goes like this in the dugout — hey, the guy’s safe at second base, no he’s not, out — challenge that. This challenge system, only among the people in the battery there — the batter, the pitcher, and the catcher — can challenge for an overrule of a ball or a strike if they deem the call to be inaccurate.

[GRIFFIN] Yeah, and something that’s really big for Major League Baseball is they want to make this as seamless of a transition as possible. We’ve seen them make those kind of changes to bring the game up to the modern era, with like the pitch clock. And that went swimmingly. I don’t think I’ve heard any complaints about the pitch clock over the last year or so. And so by kind of trickling it out — by having it in the minors, so a lot of the players who are in the majors now have already had experience with this, by having it in spring training and in the All-Star Game — these players are starting to understand when they want a challenge, when it’s worth it, when it is not, and they’re having fun with it.

And from the quick trials we’ve seen — we saw the first of it at Nationals Park during their final spring training game — it is rapid. It is lightning fast. And as soon as the batter touches their head, you see it on the Jumbotron. The batters are able to see it. They watch it with the fans. It is almost instantaneous, these challenges. And it’s a really simple system. You start with two. You get it right, you get to keep challenging. You get it wrong, you’re out. That’s it. But it is something that is going to be a weird adjustment for the first couple of games. And then I think really quickly, I don’t think fans are going to start to notice it very much at all.

[GERBO] Yeah, it should blend in seamlessly. As you mentioned, the pitch clock and the pace of play has dropped games to well under three hours now. And how quickly those games are going. Another adjustment is here in town with the Washington Nationals, who have completely overhauled the top of their organization. Mike Rizzo, general manager, decade-plus, built those division-winning teams, the World Series team in 2019 that won the championship. He’s replaced by Paul Toboni. And Blake Butera, 33 years old, the youngest manager in the Major Leagues since 1972 — he takes over for Dave Martinez, who also led the Nats to that World Series title.

But Liam, as you’ve kind of written about extensively this spring, this was a franchise that had gotten bogged down in some ways. They won that World Series — it’s great, you can hang your hat on it forever — six straight losing seasons since. And so here you are at this… the organization tried to rebuild, and I don’t know if you can continue to call it a rebuild when it’s, you know, six years in and you’re still about below .500, at the bottom of your division. But is there a place for Nats fans to hang their hope on how Toboni and Butera are approaching their jobs, and this very young, modern movement that the Lerner family — who owns the Nationals — are trying to usher in?

[GRIFFIN] Yeah, absolutely. Because you mentioned that it’s not really a rebuild — well, now it’s the first rebuild didn’t work, we’re trying all over again. So the rebuild with Rizzo and Martinez didn’t go the way they wanted it to. You saw more and more star players, promising players, start to trickle out of the organization. And now Toboni and Butera are coming in with a really blank slate. And they are trying to catch this franchise back up to where the rest of the league has ended up over the last few years, with a really widespread implementation of technology.