Alone among the major sports, baseball has the misfortune of being controlled by people who don’t really like baseball. Over the last few years, they’ve made a large number of changes to the rules that reflect their conviction that the sport they’re trying to sell is slow and boring, and that they need to jazz it up with all sorts of new rules that cut down on the time the game takes. But the rules cut deeply into the game's lyricism, romanticism, and timeless, unhurried pace. And now the chief hatchet man, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, is touting the most radical change of all: elimination of the American and National Leagues.