"Give us back our offseason."

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” - Rogers Hornsby, Hall of Famer

For many among us, the words “pitchers and catchers” inspire a childlike thrill that simply can’t be found elsewhere in the adult world. Officially, it signals the start of spring training (pitchers and catchers report earlier than position players), but it also evokes grander notions like the end of winter, the first glimpses of summer, and the annual renewal of hope that the start of the baseball season represents. It’s cold and bitter out now, and I haven’t seen the sun for two weeks, but before I know it, there will be green grass, brown dirt, young upstarts trying to take jobs from aging stars, and reports of players being in “the best shape of their lives.” This freeze will end. The world will spring to life again.

I have definitely had a winter, but I never felt like I had an offseason. Things have changed in that regard. The offseason doesn’t really exist anymore. The playing stops, but the sport never does.  Baseball—that is to say, baseball coverage—is a year-round affair. When I was a younger man, the end of the World Series signaled not just the season’s conclusion but a cooling of our fandom. Over the following few months, there would be the occasional report of a free agent signing, but that would be it. We didn’t know about trades until they happened. No one reported on a team’s “interest” in a player, which more often than not leads to nothing except dashed hopes. In short, we rested.

These days, there is no rest, but instead daily coverage of each team’s offseason, even when literally nothing is happening. Weekly team podcasts can’t just shut down for two and half months, so they fill the airwaves by debating the merits of every free agent out there, creating imaginary trade scenarios, and evaluating minor-league players who are years away from helping the big-league club. Websites like MLB Trade Rumors and The Athletic rank the free agents (then, after a couple months, re-rank the remaining free agents) and speculate on the best fits for every team, while general baseball podcasts do a deep dive into every single signing. Then there are the rankings. Numerous sites release their Top 100 Prospects, giving fans something to celebrate or shake their fists about (“How could Baseball America not have included Christian Scott? Baseball Prospectus had him at #88!”). MLB even releases their own exclusive rankings of the best MLB player at every position. It means nothing, it has no impact on the season, and we don’t even know who came up with the rankings. And yet fans get riled up about it all the same.

Despite this preponderance of content, there were complaints this year that the offseason wasn’t compelling enough. After the Winter Meetings (where team executives gather to discuss trades and meet with free agents) didn’t produce any major news, commentators suggested MLB needed to do something to encourage teams to be more active earlier in the offseason. “Why baseball must act to liven up the Winter Meetings” read the headline from one of the most respected baseball writers. Later, as prominent free agents like Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery remained unsigned (and still do), every podcast host fretted about the slowness of the pace of signings. 

I get it. Content creators need actual news to talk about. Frankly, it has been embarrassing listening to them rehash the same discussions over and over just to have something to say. But this rush towards engagement from the MLB media feels similarly motivated as the unanimous support for recent rule changes made to speed up the game action. Once again, MLB and its supporters are seeking to emulate the pace of the NBA, which often has a flurry of signings at the start of the offseason, a consequence of a salary cap that requires teams to decide earlier how next year’s roster is going to look. It also is measuring itself by the standards of the NFL, which became a year-long league when it turned the annual offseason NFL draft into several months of content.

This might be good for fans and journalists, but it’s bad for us as humans. While we may appreciate having fun podcasts to listen to while we do laundry, work out, or, you know, walk to the bathroom from the kitchen, the abundance of content only leads to a fierce desire for…more content. It’s like George Carlin said when asked what doing cocaine felt like: “It makes you feel like doing more cocaine.” It doesn’t satisfy us. It just makes us content devourers, and that’s anathema to the spirit of the sport, and maybe of life itself.

Baseball is not supposed to be a year-round sport. It’s meant to reflect the natural rhythms of the year. Bart Giamatti, former baseball commissioner, said it best. “The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone.” Our bodies respond to this cycle. They need the game to stop for a while. We’re supposed to hibernate some in the winter. Get a little fat. Change our rhythms. Maybe change our interests. You know, all the best movies come out in the winter. Maybe we watch them instead of gorging on empty baseball news. Or maybe we catch up on sleep, enjoy family time, go to the gym. Maybe we give ourselves a break from thinking about baseball all day every day, and maybe we’ll approach the next season with genuine hope instead of an addict’s craving for another hit of baseball dopamine.

That doesn’t seem to be in the cards, for it’s not just sports but everything that has become year-round. Look at the Academy Awards, which once were barely discussed until the very end of the calendar year. Now there are countless online outlets devoted to year-round Oscars coverage, predicting next year’s nominees before this year’s awards have occurred. Pundits have already locked in Saoirse Ronan for Best Actress in 2025 based on the reception of her performance in a film that just screened at Sundance; a film, by the way, that doesn’t even have distribution yet. Like baseball coverage, year-round awards writing leads to several bad outcomes, including the diminishment of proper film criticism in the public discourse and a sense of inevitability around the actual awards season, which used to be filled with surprises and now is simply an exercise in conventional wisdom. 

Even if you’re not into film or baseball—in which case, thank you for reading this far—I’d bet this same dynamic plays out in whatever culture or subculture you inhabit. It’s a symptom of the gig economy, our online lives, and a society that seems to force us out of alignment with nature. I’d be lying if I said I was above it all. Every morning over breakfast, I check all the baseball sites. I listen to all the podcasts at home, in the car, and at the gym. Sometimes I even leave them on at night to help me get to sleep. Since I’m not strong enough to transcend the culture that shapes me, I’ll just whisper this plea into the world. Give us back our offseason. Our minds, souls, and bodies need it, even if they don’t remember they do.