. My most memorable experience in sports writing, which I’m no expert in, was helping cover Pete Rose when he surpassed Ty Cobb’s career base hits mark in 1985. I was a young reporter working for the now-defunct Cincinnati Post, and it was quite the jaw-dropping moment to walk into a real Major League Baseball locker room and ask questions of a legend like Rose. But I quickly learned something about baseball that everyone involved with the game no doubt takes for granted: The players were a bunch of kids. They acted like kids. They were excited by kid things. They had little awareness of the world around them, just about their game.

Oh, they’d straighten up like they were in Sunday school for their on-camera moments with TV reporters or when the ballclub’s public relations staff dragged them to the podium to deal with the rest of the media. And their juvenilia wasn’t about chronological age. Rose was 44 years old on Sept. 11, 1985, when he officially recorded hit 4,192.

But trust me, if you read a quote from a ballplayer in your local sports pages, Rose included, and they came across as erudite and philosophical, credit the writer’s skills, not the player’s deep knowledge of the literary canon. Mind you, this is in no way a criticism. Athletes of this caliber have spent their lives in singular focus of their pursuit. They have spent more times in practice, in weight rooms, in learning their craft and with greater dedication and self-discipline from the time they were in middle school than most people can imagine. But, inevitably, many have also become isolated and narcissistic, immature and accustomed to hanging out people with the exact same qualities. Hand them millions of dollars by way of a fat contract and they just become rich kids.

Where am I going with this? I’m glad you asked.

Major League Baseball changed some of the most fundamental rules of their sport this season. The big ones:

It’s already made the games faster, boosted the offense, increased base stealing and, to put it bluntly, made the games more fun to watch. Here in Baltimore, the Orioles are clearly having a heck of a time. It helps that they’ve been winning. And that the recent years of “rebuilding” have actually produced some breakout stars in catcher Adley Rutschman and infielder Gunnar Henderson, who are a combined 46 years old. Manager Brandon Hyde has given his thumb’s up to the changes. And attendance at Camden Yards is also substantially higher — although still behind the post-COVID MLB average — with 20,403 per home game, ranking 21st overall.

So here’s my pitch: Let’s go that extra step in rule revisions and make baseball a truly immersive experience. Turn the national pastime into a reality TV show. It’s one thing to interview players between innings; it would be quite another to keep a cordless microphone attached to — and camera operator trained full-time on — each player, including in the dugout (and maybe in their personal lives but we’re going to have to check with legal on that).

Don’t think “MLB Game of The Week”; think “Survivor” or “Big Brother” or even “The Great British Bake Off.” Let’s get some of that off-the-field childish behavior on camera, show people that these are overgrown adolescents having fun, that this is a game, for heaven’s sake. We can hear their deepest thoughts — not just how to hit the curve but how to accumulate the most in-game currency in “Call of Duty: Warzone” or what they really think about Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the satirical drag group the Dodgers recently honored on Pride Night.

Now, I know that traditionalists will object to treating baseball as something less than a serious undertaking. But I was reminded, as a recent Orioles spectator, that players goofy enough to want to drink water from a “Homer Hose” after a four-bagger and fans excited to get doused in the “Bird Bath Splash Zone” after an extra-base hit aren’t above this. So if we’re just here for the fun, why not a little “Real Ballplayers of Major League Baseball” action?

You know you want it.

Peter Jensen is an editorial writer at The Sun; he can be reached at pejensen@baltsun.com.

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