What We Loved and Hated About the 2022 MLB Season

Exactly 181 days and 2,430 games later, Major League Baseball's 2022 regular season came to a close on Wednesday.

Since we couldn't decide whether to wish the '22 season a fond farewell or to tell it not to hit its rear end on the door on the way out, we figured we'd do both with a list of things that we loved and hated about it.

This is not to be confused for this year's winners and losers. That's where B/R's Brandon Scott has you covered, including on Aaron Judge's and Albert Pujols' historic home run pursuits, Justin Verlander and Sandy Alcántara shoving from the mound and the Los Angeles Angels going the opposite direction from the Seattle Mariners and Philadelphia Phillies.

This list is about the other storylines that stood out, for good or ill. We hand-picked nine to talk about, split between five for the "love" and four for that of "hate."

Why the lopsided number? Because while balance is nice and all, we wanted to go out on a high note with an extra thing that we loved.

Perhaps it wasn't "The Year of the Pitcher," but 2022 was at least A Year of the Pitcher. The league's ERA dipped below 4.00 for the first time since 2015, and hitters recorded fewer than 40,000 hits for only the second time in a full season during the 30-team era.

A group effort? You bet. Yet we simply must shout out those who moved the needle the most.

Because Brandon covered Verlander and Alcántara, we'll start with Carlos Rodón for becoming only the fourth left-hander to top 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings in a season. And how about Aaron Nola, who's only the eighth modern pitcher to finish a season with eight times as many strikeouts as walks?

For their parts, Framber Valdez logged 24 straight quality starts, Dylan Cease went 14-in-a-row allowing one earned run or fewer and Zac Gallen had a 41.1-inning scoreless streak. The most electric hurler on an inning-to-inning basis was Edwin Díaz, who became only the second reliever to average upward of 17 strikeouts per nine innings.

Are further notes necessary? No further notes are necessary. Good job, guys. You were delightful to watch.

We're only kinda-sorta exaggerating here, folks.

Regarding the collective hitting troubles of 2022, we submit that the league's batting average finished at just .243. The last time it was that low was the late 1960s, when pitchers were so good that MLB saw no choice but to lop off the top third of the mound.

The league-wide average had been trending down before 2022, of course, but the re-introduction of the universal designated hitter was supposed to help solve that. Alas, there's apparently only so much hitters can do when every pitcher is a Gas Masterson and every manager thinks he's Lou Boudreau.

Meanwhile, it took an average of three hours and six minutes to play the games. Down from last year's mark of 3:11, perhaps, but still too much of a Lord of the Rings-ian runtime for our taste.

Thus was it good news when MLB announced that it will be introducing a pitch clock, larger bases and regulations on shifts in 2023. There are bound to be unintended consequences, but we're nonetheless hyped for what could theoretically be the sure-shotting of baseball: wherein there's more action than John Woo and mad hits like Rod Carew.

If division races were decided by days spent in first place, let's just say that the New York Mets would have ended 2022 safely ahead of Atlanta in the National League East:

• Mets: 176 days
• Atlanta: 9 days

This is, however, decidedly not how division races are decided. Bummer for the Mets, but bully for Atlanta and anyone who likes a good comeback story.

The defending World Series champs were as far back as 10.5 games on June 1, and the Mets still maintained a seven-game advantage as late as Aug. 10. Atlanta nonetheless ended up on top, officially on Tuesday but effectively after sweeping the Mets out of Truist Park the preceding weekend.

Perhaps that's a sob story on the Mets' part, but, really, the prevailing narrative should be that the NL East simply wasn't big enough for them and Atlanta.

As both clubs finished with exactly a 101-61 record, this is the first time in the three-divisional era that two 100-win clubs tied for the top record within the same division. It's only by way of its 10-9 performance in their head-to-head matchups that Atlanta won the NL East crown.

Anyone who looks back at the 2022 San Diego Padres years from now will see that the team had a solid regular season, winning 89 games and earning a wild-card berth.

Well, here's an urgent dispatch from the past for this hypothetical person: It wasn't pretty.

It seemed headed that way at times, and never more so than in early August. San Diego annihilated the competition at the trade deadline, scoring a haul headlined by hitters Juan Soto, Josh Bell and Brandon Drury and ace reliever Josh Hader. What's more, it was around then that All-Star shortstop Fernando Tatís Jr.'s return from a wrist injury was imminent.

So much for that. Tatís got himself suspended for taking performance-enhancing drugs and the aforementioned trade acquisitions pretty much all went bust in San Diego. It was no thanks to these developments that the Padres ultimately lost nine of their last 12 games against a a 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers squad that also won the National League West by 21 games.

To be sure, how the Padres fare in the playoffs is the only story about their 2022 season that will ultimately matter. For now, though, it's hard to escape the sense that things should have gone better.

If there's a flipside of the bummer-ific expectation vs. reality story of the Padres for 2022, it's surely the one that concerns the Baltimore Orioles.

Perhaps their final 83-79 record isn't much to look at in a vacuum, but it's a solid gold recreation of the Mona Lisa relative to the 110 losses that the club incurred just last season. As turnarounds from 2021 to 2022 go, theirs was the biggest:

There's also the all-time historical context of the Orioles' turnaround. Of the 20 teams that have ever lost as many as 110 games in a season, they're the first to pull off a .500 or better record in the ensuing campaign.

Could this be lightning in a bottle? That is a possibility, sure.

Just not a likely one, if you're asking us. With Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson and Félix Bautista already in tow and Grayson Rodriguez and more still waiting for their shot, the 2022 season should prove to have been merely the start of the Orioles' rise.

Missed it by that much. Had the New York Yankees dispatched the Texas Rangers on Wednesday, the 2022 season would have become the first in MLB history with as many as five 100-game winners.

All the same, this season is yet another that has us asking, "What the heck ever happened to teams actually trying to win?"

There's indeed been a theme of deliberate losing in recent years, and so it went in 2022. The Washington Nationals, Oakland Athletics, Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds made this the third year out of the last three full seasons since 2019 with four 100-loss teams. There had previously been just one such season in the first 119 years of MLB history.

We're putting especially fiendish poxes on the houses of the A's and Reds. Both finished above .500 in 2021 and carried strong rosters out of the offseason lockout, only to blow it up enough to make Charlton Heston weep into the surf.

Don't think you're getting off easy, Cleveland Guardians and Milwaukee Brewers. And even you, Orioles. Because when teams have a chance to augment winning rosters at the trade deadline, nothing or selling off key veterans are the last things they should be doing.

Of course, there is an unvoidably awkward aspect of scolding teams for being bad on purpose. The general idea in doing so is to more so focus on developing young talent, which is an undeniably valuable commodity in today's MLB.

See, for example, this year's class of rookies.

It was a darn good one, especially on the offensive side. The '22 season marked only the second in history that rookie hitters accumulated more than 50 fWAR, for which the lion's share of the credit is owed to guys like Rutschman, Michael Harris II, Steven Kwan and not one, but two 20-20 guys: Julio Rodríguez and Bobby Witt Jr.

This year's rookie pitchers? They merely did OK if we're using fWAR as a barometer, but not if we use what we'll call the "Super-Duper-Funzo Factor." Spencer Strider is the first in history to record over 200 strikeouts and fewer than 100 hits. George Kirby and Reid Detmers also had successful seasons as starters, and nobody threw gas like Jhoan Duran and Hunter Greene.

Bottom line: 2022 is a year to remember for those of use who prefer our baseball with ascendant youngsters. And that's all of us, right?

There's no such thing as a baseball season that doesn't contain controversies that are no fault of the guys in uniform, but that doesn't make it any easier to anticipate or put up with them.

Which is to say: Yeah, we're still steaming over what went on with the ball, the umpires and the so-called "Buster Posey rule" in 2022.

The weird behavior of the baseball in April would have been easy to shrug off if it wasn't so easily traced back to new manufacturing and storage protocols. And while such things are impossible to quantify, this did seem like a strangely prolific year for "the ump show."

Then there was all the sudden (and essentially league-sponsored) confusion on the rules governing plays at the plate in August, about which nobody got hotter than Minnesota Twins manager Rocco Baldelli for this one:

There's lots of blame to go around here, yet the buck stops with MLB itself. The league is, after all, responsible for overseeing the balls and for too often setting up umpires to fail by asking them to do too much with too little.

Remember what baseball was like in 2020 and 2021? If not, allow us to help you recollect with a brief walk down memory lane.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a shortened season in which there were constant disruptions to teams' schedules. The St. Louis Cardinals even made the playoffs despite playing two fewer games and about 20 fewer innings than everyone else.

The games themselves, meanwhile, had a vague fever dream quality. The players wore masks. There was crowd noise, but it came not from the cardboard-bodied fans. If Harlan Ellison wrote the story, he would have called it "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Cheer."

Things went back to normal in 2021...eventually. It wasn't until about halfway through the season that stadiums were at full capacity again, and even then the specter of the pandemic lingered. So, too, did that of a seemingly inevitable work stoppage.

Mercifully, all this pretty much—as in, not entirely but just about—ceased to be baseball's reality and became regrettable parts of its past in 2022. For all the good, for all the bad, it was basically just a normal baseball season.

And for that, we say thank goodness.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.