Once a generation, the game of baseball suffers through a fun crisis, and the story of this MLB season so far is how alarmingly not fun baseball has become. These crises always seem to coincide with pitchers nosing ahead of hitters, followed by a nosedive in offense. Despite what the purists and baseball lifers and respect-for-the-gamers would have you believe, though, MLB has responded with drastic changes every time. And now it’s time to do it again. Modern baseball has lots of problems—too many strikeouts, too few runs, too little action on the basepaths—but all these problems are symptoms of the same root cause: Major League Baseball is afraid of fun. When you’re a humorless corporation with no capacity to distinguish between fun and controversy, between a charisma machine and a giant prick, they all look like time bombs. Stir in the game’s historical insistence on modesty, on keeping your head down and doing your job, even though this isn’t an oil rig, and before long, your sport turns into a snooze... In the social-media age, baseball is once again in the throes of a fun crisis, and given all the competition out there for our attention, especially relative to 1968, this might be the big one. MLB must find a way to restore the equilibrium on the field, and that will require a fundamental shift in the game’s talent pool, away from power and back toward speed, back toward action on the basepaths, stolen bases, plays at the plate, extra-base hits that don’t leave the park. Home runs may count for more, but anyone who loves baseball knows that triples are way more fun. Minor-league baseball is currently experimenting with slightly larger bases—18x18 inches, versus the traditional 15x15—a minor safety measure with a major consequence for game action: It brings the bases a few inches closer together. Just enough to tilt the risk-reward balance toward stealing bases, or stretching a double into a triple, or tagging up on a shallow fly ball, versus playing it safe. Just enough to make speed super valuable again. One or two more tweaks like that, and baseball will fix its latest fun crisis for another decade or two … until home runs vanish entirely and the game evolves into a mouse maze of bunt singles, and we have another fun crisis, and then the cycle repeats.