| This is the Theme of the Week edition of Bloomberg Opinion Today, a digest of our top commentary published every Sunday. Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, X, Threads and Facebook. I've been a baseball fan my entire life: I grew up playing it, going to games at Three Rivers Stadium with my mom and the Vet with my dad, and while my fandom ebbs and flows as a busy adult, I always come back to it, even though being a Pittsburgh Pirates fan is painful. But my husband, a Yankees diehard who commandeers the television for 162 *&$%@ games, got burned this year, too — his team spent $204 million more in payroll than mine and didn't make the postseason, either. "For a team long committed to the idea that money can buy superstars and success, it's an uncomfortable position," Adam Minter says of the Yankees' expensive failure of a season. Turns out that bad chemistry, injuries and human frailty do make a difference. We're now two games into this year's edition of the World Series — the Arizona Diamondbacks and Texas Rangers are locked at one game apiece — a matchup between wild-card underdogs that pretty much no one saw coming on Opening Day. March feels like a million years ago, and yet … the season sort of flew by, didn't it? Conor Sen writes that Major League Baseball made being a fan a lot more fun again when it made some big changes: "The new rules speed up play and encourage more action within games — and thank goodness for that," he says. It wasn't just fans who benefited: "It also turned out that the Diamondbacks, with some of the fastest athletes in MLB, were perfectly designed for the new baseball rules," Adam Minter writes in another column. "By mid-season, they were leading the National League in several metrics that benefit from speed, making them a dangerous and entertaining team." Baseball traditionalists who don't like seeing the D-backs in the World Series (they only won 84 regular-season games, just over half) need to calm down, he says — both attendance at ballparks and streaming audiences were up this season, a welcome reversal of downward trends. As for the Rangers, they remain one of six MLB teams that have never won a title. Even the Pirates won it all in 1979 (I won't tell you if I was alive or not). Whatever the money tells you, everyone loves an underdog — and a little more excitement on the diamond. More Baseball Reading: | 
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