Most sports are a race against the clock, a race against time. How many baskets can you score before the buzzer ends? Will you hold off against a furious attack until the refs end stoppage time? Can you get up to the line of scrimmage and spike the ball for a last-second field goal attempt?
Baseball, on the other hand, is not that. It is a sport that is agnostic to the whims of time—even with this year’s rule changes aimed at speeding up the pace of play. Rather, baseball is a game of resource management, where each team has a stack of 27 outs and the team that uses theirs most efficiently wins.