The epiphany came to me one recent evening on the exercise bike, my laptop propped on the handlebars, its screen split between a half-finished copy assignment and the streamed broadcast of my beloved Baltimore Orioles: copywriting could learn a lot from baseball’s magical summer of 2023.
Beyond the trove of well-worn metaphors and turns of phrase (“Boy, you really knocked that piece out of the park!”), copywriting shares many parallels and connections to our national pastime here in the early middle innings of the digital era. I’m specifically thinking about the ways this pair of intensely competitive entertainment industries has been influenced—and changed over the past decade—by analytics. The transformations have followed a similar trajectory: The early fascination. The Red Queen’s race among organizations to adopt the new formulas and technologies to keep up with the competition. The degree to which universal adoption ultimately threatens to suck the very life out of the product on the field/screen.
Of the two, though, only baseball (at least so far) has found an elegant way off this particular treadmill. Which brought me, as a baseball-re-obsessed copywriting professional, to my recent sweaty aha.
Baseball had gotten boring.
That most of you probably haven’t given the slightest thought to what is now so plain to me is partly a function of how far baseball has fallen out of the national consciousness during its decade-long sabermetrics binge. The irony is, this “Moneyball” movement was originally conceived as a leveler that, for a time, made the game more interesting by helping low-budget teams compete with richer, bigger-market ones.
The approach, in essence, boiled down to this: Statistically speaking, the highest-percentage way to win a baseball game is to get as many players on base as possible (including via the highest-percentage route: a walk) and then have someone come up and whack a home run. But here’s also the problem with that: While walks followed by home runs may be an effective and logical enough in-game strategy, from a fan’s perspective it limits the action on the field.
As the rich clubs got wise to the same statistics and computer programs, much of what made the game most fun to watch (multi-hit rallies, base stealing, taking extra bases) became de-emphasized in favor of players capable of jacking balls over the fence when not not swinging at balls outside the strike zone. On the other side of the ball, pitchers got advanced input on optimal spin rates and hitters’ weaknesses, and defenders on how to bunch themselves in the exact part of the field where the hitters (occasionally) put the ball in play. Over time, strikeouts and players hitting into the “shift” joined walks as the other most likely outcome of any given at bat. (Giant yawn.)
Worse, once baseball finally recognized it had an analytics problem, its paradoxical fealty to tradition prevented it from doing anything about it. Even as football and basketball continually tweaked their rules to free up the action and encourage more scoring, any change proposed to do the same for baseball was dismissed as a threat to the “integrity of the game.”
And, so, baseball stumbled out of the pandemic in the unenviable position of finding itself simultaneously squeezed by analytics-driven disruption and stuck in its ways.
Sound familiar?
All that changed with the 2023 season.
Before the first pitch of April was thrown, baseball introduced a raft of changes as sweeping as they were overdue, all designed to speed up and reinvigorate the game.
For example, no longer could fielders take up position in the shift. Infielders were forced back in their natural positions, two to each side of second base. This increased the probability of more balls making it through for hits—and of fielders making spectacular diving stops to turn hits into outs—just like in the good old days.
Even now, baseball remains the only major sport without a game clock. Play concludes when both teams have finished their last at bat, not when time expires. But the new rules at least aimed to ensure the game’s duration doesn’t stretch on until everyone watching is asleep. Pitchers and batters, for instance, were put on a pitch clock that gave them 15 seconds per pitch (20 with runners on base) to get on with their business.
Other changes sought to eliminate other dead spots such as when a pitcher throws repeatedly over to first base to keep a runner close and prevent him from getting a head start on stealing second. The bases were even made bigger. In part, this was done to increase player safety by giving fielder and baserunner a few more inches to maneuver around the bag. But it also shortened the distance between bases, which, together with the new limits to the number of pickoff throws allowed, heightened the aggressiveness of the runners.
The impact was immediate, and dramatic.
The average length of games this season shrank by 32 minutes. Balls in play, steals, runners hustling to grab extra bases, diving defensive stops all increased demonstrably, while strikeouts and walks fell. Attendance has shot up 8%, the largest jump in 20 years. Most importantly, the game has a pace and tempo to it more akin to the game millions of adult fans remember watching and falling in love with as kids.
All these changes coincided with the turnarounds of a half dozen teams, including my Orioles, that had roundly stunk during the final capitulation to and capitalization of the Moneyball tactics—and had stocked up on compensatory draft picks in the process. Now flush with young talent, these same teams have been favored by the new rules’ emphasis on speed and athleticism. So, in addition to being quicker and more exciting, the game has become more competitive and infused by a gaggle of rising stars.
For someone like this long-suffering fan, who long ago relocated from my team’s home city, spending evenings tuning in to baseball’s first-rate out-of-market streaming app while putting in an hour on the bike, has become one of the simple-pleasure highlights of my summer.
Copywriting from baseball’s new playbook.
As the endorphins helped flesh out my thinking, I decided the copy takeaways from baseball’s remarkable renaissance fall into four general categories, “bases” if you will:
No sacred cows. At a time when analytics—and their ultimate killer app, ChatGPT—have rocked the very firmament of copy, it’s interesting how much some copy vendors and clients cling to certain rules or set ideas about how the copy should read. Part of this may be a function of the AI copywriting programs themselves, which, after all, are inherently rule-based … Write a 500-word post incorporating the following facts in an x tone with a brand-voice z… Inevitably, though, as I said, it’s hard for all the attention to rules and making the process more turnkey and automatic not to sap the spontaneity from what appears on screen. Scroll through some firms’ sites today, and it can feel like one of those old-school elevator rides, mind-numbing Muzak all the way down.
To be clear: Things like brand voice and consistency of messaging are important. But it’s also important to remember that, in the end, successful copywriting is as much about surprise. It took real courage for baseball to take a bolt gun to some of its most hallowed bovines in the interest of livening up its product. Major league copy operations might do well to do the same.
Speed it up. Let’s be honest: copy, like a baseball game, rarely benefits from being longer. That’s not to say your organization needs to embark on an Ozempic-like purge to turn all your whitepapers into haikus. But nor should you abide the bloat that can so easily and insidiously run in the other direction—especially when the time it takes to edit a piece is way longer than it takes the new generative AI guy to pump out another few dozen pages.
As we all know, and as Henry Thoreau and the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wryly observed, the length of a piece often runs in inverse proportion to the amount of time we’ve had with it. For every hour your team saves by not pruning extraneous verbiage or tangents, the more you risk testing the patience of your audience. Length may be one area, in fact, where more rules might be in order. The New York Times, arguably the world’s leading media organization, has hard-fast word limits for many of its article formats. Having had to comply with them as a contributor, I can attest they’re no fun. But as a daily reader, I’m sure they’re also a big reason why, well, I’m a daily reader.
Rub out dead spots. Closely related to both the above, the dawn of the ChatGPT era is a time to be extra-vigilant about eradicating those dead zones in your copy experience. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those boilerplate paragraphs you’ve copied and pasted from previous pieces for the nth time. The pages stuffed with key words and phrases highlighted in the latest engagement reports. The outputs of those CYA prompts fed lazily into the program … Write something like this competitor’s piece, but, you know, uh, not plagiarized … If your eyes glaze over when reviewing a passage, just imagine how the folks watching at home will respond. Instead, try taking the same stance that the newly disciplined higher-ups at Major League Baseball took with all the fussing between pitches and the semi-pointless tosses to hold on runners: Enough already!
Stay human. Analytics will always have a place in copywriting, just as they always will in baseball. Every Major League team today has a robust analytics department feeding the coaches and players on the field a steady drip of constructive critique and intel: video programs able to detect the slightest hitch in a pitcher’s wind-up; data on opposing hitters’ tendencies to be able to handle one type or location of pitch vs. another; the speed of a given outfielder’s throws that may figure into whether a runner rounding third decides to risk continuing for home.
However, the very best teams have come to learn, some painfully, that the goal of this constant data stream is not to turn players into robots. It’s to free their minds, allow them to play looser and take more chances in phases of the game where their confidence should be boosted by the increased odds of success. More than anything, the new rules recalibrate the risks/rewards in these directions, penalizing clubs that in now-outdated fashion play it strictly by the numbers without a healthy governing by abandon and feel.
We can think of no more hopeful benediction for copywriting as it seeks to harness the powers of the ChatGPT era without becoming overly bridled by it: may all who still love the profession throw ourselves into the challenge of producing crystalline, catalyzing prose, with our feet firmly planted in the analytics, and our heads still very much in the game.
At MarketSmiths, we have long taken a nuanced approach to rule making and breaking in our pursuit of winning copy. Please give us a call and allow us to make our pitch.
