shutime

Hello everyone and happy Opening Day! It’s been over a year since I last posted anything to this blog or updated the website. The past year has been a whirlwind for me and has brought a lot of life changes and new challenges that have taken up a large percentage of my time. With that said, I’m eager to write more blog pages for Shutime this year as I believe this will be an amazing year for baseball. 

Back in December 2023, I wrote a small post about Shohei Ohtani signing with the Dodgers and all the drama that came with it. In that post, I wrote about how Ohtani signing with the Dodgers was the destruction of baseball. I likened it to the Golden State Warriors signing Kevin Durant after having already broken the NBA’s regular season wins record. I also said that the 2024 baseball season was effectively ruined because the Dodgers would win the World Series handedly.

While the Dodgers did win the World Series handedly, and while it was very similar to the Warriors situation, I was very wrong about one thing; it was not the destruction of baseball. 

I’ve been vocal about my disdain for the Dodgers in the past. As a fan of a small market team it is hard to look at teams like the Dodgers or Yankees and not feel frustrated by the relationship baseball and money have. Seeing those teams throw generational wealth at the shiniest, trendiest players each year because their billionaire owners want to win makes it hard to feel like baseball is a level playing field.

But one thing I failed to see was the impact one player can have when they enter the largest media market possible. Shohei’s 2024 season may have been one of the best statistical performances in an MLB season ever. Pairing that with playing on the most popular team in the largest television market gives you a chance to create a spectacle that has truly never been seen before. 

The bottom line? 2024 was an amazing year for baseball. It gave us one of the most memorable World Series in recent years, maybe the greatest season-long performance by a player ever, a ton of new young talent that already feel like true superstars, the final season of baseball in Oakland, the worst baseball team of all time, the pitch-clock that changed the pace and excitement of the game, and no team won 100 games for the first time in ten years.

I’m confident 2025 will be an amazing year! I hope you all will follow along with this upcoming season and with this blog as I post more regularly. Stay tuned for my 2025 predictions and revisit my 2024 predictions with me in my next post. I’ll also be sharing some “Ballpark Reviews” of the many new baseball cities I visited last year, complete with quite a few photos of my time in each! 

See you later!