Baseball Is Fun Again: How Pitching, Personality, and Popularity Changed the MLB in 2026

Baseball is fun again.

That phrase has been circulating for a few seasons now, usually spoken with more hope than evidence. This year the sport has finally caught up to the sentence, and every corner of MLB has been trending upward at the same time. The alignment between what the league has been trying to build and what fans have actually been showing up for is something baseball has been chasing for a decade.

Rob Manfred: The Mislabeled Villain

Rob Manfred took his share of grief for the changes he pushed through, and most of that grief came from fans who wanted the game preserved in the exact shape they remembered. The pitch clock felt like a hostile takeover at first, larger bases came off as a gimmick, and every rule change was described in some corner of baseball media as a slow-motion desecration of the sport. Contact and stolen bases have returned to being weapons rather than footnotes, and the pace of play has stopped being the punchline it was five years ago. In practice, every one of those changes has delivered on what Manfred promised, and games now move at a pace that respects a viewer who has other options for their evening. 

The Pitching Piece

Then there is the pitching, which has been so absurd this season that it deserves its own economy. This is the part of the sport that should have been rattled the most by the timing shifts, and instead the arms in this league have decided to spend 2026 making a mockery of every prediction that the clock would break them. What is happening on mounds across MLB right now is the kind of stretch that will get taught in pitching labs for the next decade.

Everyone assumed the timing shifts would rattle pitchers into some kind of collective identity crisis, and instead the whole class has responded by throwing harder than they ever have while somehow also picking up sharper command and making major league hitters look like they walked into the wrong stadium. Rotations are churning out sub-3.00 ERAs the way they used to churn out quality starts, bullpens have gotten so deep that middle relievers routinely look like they should be starting somewhere else, and any given weeknight has a chance to give you a start that would have been the pitching performance of the year in a normal season.

Heading this phenomenon is Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani is the reason the greatest-of-all-time conversation exists again in a real way, and there is no other honest way to describe what he has been doing on the mound this year. Back on a full pitching workload after his return in 2025, Ohtani has posted a 1.58 ERA across 79.2 innings with an 8-2 record, 86 strikeouts, and a 0.90 WHIP, while also hitting seventeen homers and getting on base at a .408 clip through the first half. That is a top-of-the-league starter and an MVP-caliber bat in the same body, which should be impossible, and he is doing it in the middle of a Dodgers rotation that just won back-to-back World Series titles. Baseball had not had a coherent greatest-ever conversation for years because the whole idea of comparing across eras had gotten tired.

Ohtani has personally dragged that debate back onto ESPN because there is no longer a comparable player in league history since Babe Ruth. When someone can headline the All-Star Game as a two-way player and then go throw seven scoreless the following week, the sport suddenly has a marketing engine that fixes itself.

Jacob Misiorowski is the other name that has been carrying the tone of this season, and the Brewers have somehow been trusted with what might be the most exciting arm in baseball. Misiorowski is sitting on a 1.62 ERA, 167 strikeouts, a 0.76 WHIP, and a 10-4 record through his first 17 starts, and every one of those numbers leads MLB or sits in the top few.

Opponents are hitting .151 against him in early July, which is the lowest batting average against any pitcher in the league, and his 37.8 percent whiff rate lives in the 98th percentile of everything Statcast tracks. On June 6 he threw a 103.7 mph pitch against the Rockies, which is the fastest pitch on record by any starting pitcher in the pitch-tracking era, and on May 8 he opened a start against the Yankees with ten consecutive pitches over 102 mph. The Miz has become appointment viewing in a way that starting pitchers almost never get to be anymore, and he is doing it in a small market rotation that also features Kyle Harrison and a Brewers development staff that keeps proving that the analytics gap is the only budget gap that matters.

Mason Miller is doing the closer version of the same story down in San Diego, and calling him The Reaper feels underselling at this point. Miller is 17 for 17 in save chances with a 0.72 ERA, a 0.84 WHIP, and 49 strikeouts across 25 innings, and he broke the Padres franchise record for consecutive scoreless innings at 34 and two thirds this April. He has also now thrown a pitch at 104 mph in a Padres uniform, which is closer velocity that used to be the entire personality of a whole bullpen. Watching Miller walk in from the pen is one of the few moments where a save situation actually feels appointment-worthy again.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto is the World Series MVP from last October and somehow still might be the third or fourth most talked-about pitcher on his own team, which speaks to where this rotation of superhumans currently sits. Yamamoto has gone 9-5 with a 2.49 ERA, a 0.88 WHIP, and 100 strikeouts across 104.2 innings this season, and he is the reason the Dodgers keep functioning even when Ohtani is being managed carefully. His command is the kind of command that used to belong to Greg Maddux comparisons, and he is doing it in a market that would embarrass him in any language if he ever slipped.

Tarik Skubal is the returning two-time Cy Young winner, and even a mid-season elbow procedure has not been enough to slow the conversation about whether he might win a third in a row. Skubal missed six weeks after having loose bodies removed from his elbow, came back on a nanoneedle-assisted recovery timeline that was previously considered fantasy, and is already back to averaging nine strikeouts a start. Before the procedure he had posted a 2.70 ERA and a 0.95 WHIP across 43.1 innings with 45 strikeouts, and he came back looking like the procedure never happened. Skubal has become the first pitcher in a long time who can walk into any ballpark and reasonably expect to strike out fourteen, and the fact that this is his baseline is why Detroit fans have been living through the best individual pitching run their city has seen since Verlander.

What makes all of this so much fun is that these superhumans are drowning out a group of pitchers who, in any normal season, would be front page news. Cristopher Sanchez has been putting up co-ace numbers in the Phillies rotation. He maintains a 2.50 ERA over 202 innings and still gets treated as a second option because Zack Wheeler came back from thoracic outlet surgery pitching to a 1.98 ERA and a league-best 0.64 WHIP through his first nine starts. And Chase Burns has been having the sneakiest breakout season in the National League for the Reds, sitting on a 2.58 ERA with a 1.81 FIP that ranks second-lowest among qualified starters in the sport. Dylan Cease has been outperforming almost every version of himself in San Diego alongside Miller with peripheral numbers that suggest even more should be coming. Logan Webb keeps grinding out quality starts for the Giants at a workload nobody else in the sport is matching. His ERA sits comfortably in the low threes while nobody outside of the Bay Area seems to notice. Then there is Tatsuya Imai, who posted a 1.92 ERA over 163 innings for Seibu last year while walking just 45 batters and striking out 178. 

This is the part of the season that feels the most like something has fundamentally shifted. Baseball has spent decades protecting the identities of its most dominant pitchers because there were only ever two or three of them at a time, and now the whole ecosystem is producing this level of pitching at once. When a Cristopher Sanchez run gets buried under a Misiorowski velocity graph, you get a sport that has more elite pitching than it has media capacity to cover. That is what a golden era of pitching actually looks like.

ABS? More Like AB-Yes

The Automated Ball-Strike system (ABS) and the pitch clock have garnered most of the flack from the traditionalist crowd, and the loudest voices in that crowd have decided that these tools are “killing baseball”. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The ABS and pitch clock have improved the pace and integrity of the game whilst, controversially, managing not to eliminate the human element of the game. Most people argue that “robots are replacing humans” when talking about the ABS. In reality, each pitch is still entirely determined to be a ball or a strike by the physical umpires. Each team is allowed two ABS challenges per game to validate the call that was made. Around 300 pitches are thrown per game, most of them being judged by a human umpire. The combined four optional challenges per game is barely a drop in the bucket when it comes to the determination of pitches. Shohei Ohtani and Dalton Rushing have both landed at the center of that conversation on the Dodgers, which tells you exactly how much these tools are making a meaningful impact.

Lost In Japan

The recent “Japanese invasion” has also been a catalyst that the sport has needed for a very long time. Ohtani is the obvious anchor, and the movement runs much deeper than one player. Yamamoto's arrival forced a conversation about how NPB pitchers scale to major league rotations, and Roki Sasaki's transition has pushed that conversation even further.

Front offices are now treating Japanese scouting departments the way they used to treat their Dominican pipelines. The pace at which imported talent has been arriving has changed how teams draft, how they allocate international bonus money, how they build rotations, and how they position themselves for the next posting window. For the first time in a while, the sport has a wave of imported stars whose stories are pulling in fans who used to think baseball was dull and boring. Those fans are interested because there is a version of the game happening right now that feels like it belongs to this decade, and no amount of marketing dollars could have produced that effect on its own.

Bless The Bananas

The Savannah Bananas have introduced more than 100,000 new fans to baseball, and they have done it while wearing yellow uniforms and doing choreographed dances at second base. The Bananas have won over an audience that would never have shown up at a Wednesday night AL Central game, and they did so by making baseball feel like an entertainment act rather than a “boring cable program”. Kids and families, who might have written the sport off as slow, have watched a stadium lose its mind over a home run trot ending in a flip. The MLB was smart enough to lean into that overlap rather than treat the Bananas as a rival product, and the result has been a fan feeder system for the traditional game that no marketing department could have designed.

Small Markets, Big Conversations

The small market conversation has quietly become one of the most productive things happening in baseball right now. The absence of a hard salary cap has forced smaller market front offices into a level of resourcefulness that has produced some of the most compelling operations in professional sports. Tampa Bay keeps converting spare parts into playoff runs on a budget that would make any other executive laugh, and this year that resourcefulness has a face in Junior Caminero, a twenty-two-year-old third baseman producing raw power that most teams have to pay premium free agent money to find. The bullpen behind him tells the same story. Names like Bryan Baker and Forrest Whitley have stepped into high-leverage innings not because Tampa Bay went out and bought experience, but because the organization keeps developing pitching depth from within instead of shopping for it on the open market. Baltimore rebuilt itself into relevance the same way, refusing to spend the way the market expected them to and building instead around a homegrown core that grew up together in the same farm system. Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, and Jackson Holliday were all top prospects before they were teammates, and watching that group mature into everyday major leaguers side by side is a long-term bet that a big market team rarely has the patience to make. The tension between big and small markets has become one of the most valuable things that the sport has going for it, because it keeps producing exactly the stakes that make regular season baseball worth caring about.

The Social Success

Social media has been another other quiet catalyst, and MLB's teams have expertly weaponized it to reach new fans across the globe. The player interviews being pushed on TikTok and Instagram have humanized a group of athletes who used to feel like they existed on a different planet from their fans. The numbers back that up. MLB generated close to eighteen billion video views across social platforms in 2025, and posts tagged with #MLB grew nearly sixty percent on TikTok that same year, pushing the league’s combined TikTok following past ten million. Baseball is a notoriously classic, “older generation” sport, and a jump of that size in a single year says plenty about how far the shift has gone. Marketing teams have successfully broadcasted fan favorites on Tik Tok, fun stories on Twitter, and engaging graphics on Instagram. The MLB spent years worrying that its stars were not marketable enough, and the solution turned out to be embarrassingly straightforward. Let the stars be themselves, point a camera at them, hand the footage to a Gen Z audience, and get out of the way.

Don’t Let The Party End

Baseball is fun again because the sport finally stopped fighting itself. Rule changes have delivered on what Manfred promised. Japanese talent has arrived and conquered. Pitching has adjusted with a competence that nobody could have predicted. Every generation of baseball fans ends up with one stretch of the sport that becomes theirs, the years they replay for people who were not around to see it happen. This current run of pitching, imported stars, and reinvented pace belongs in that category. Someone who walked away from the game a decade ago because it felt slow and predictable would not recognize the sport being played right now, and that difference alone is worth going back to see for yourself. For the first time in a long time, baseball feels like something worth being excited about again, and that alone makes this era one to enjoy while it lasts.