“We’re in 1968 right now.”

Those blunt words came out of the mouth of a candid, insightful, realistic member of one deep-thinking baseball front office last September. He was speaking on background, but he was speaking the truth. Those were related developments.

It’s eight months later now. A lot has changed, by which we obviously mean: the rules! We still hear daily from people who think those changes are ruining baseball. With all due respect to their opinion and the good place it comes from, they couldn’t be more wrong.

You know what was really ruining baseball? Baseball was ruining baseball.

So before we look at 2023 and how much life these rule changes have breathed back into this sport, it’s important to gaze back one last time at 2022. A warning, before we move on: It’s a frightening view.

“It’s all about the fans and what they want to watch — and we’ve given them the opposite,” the same executive went on last September. “We’re basically having 10-7 football games every single game. And why would people be excited to watch a bunch of three-and-outs?”

So what was the baseball equivalent of “a bunch of three-and-outs” back then, in the pre-rule-change era? We can sum it up this way:

You were watching games that routinely took three and a half hours to play — and there was pretty much nobody on base.

You think we’re exaggerating? Guess again. We’ve been looking at the facts for months. You know what they tell us? That the rate of base runners per game in 2022 was the second-lowest in the last 115 years.

Check out those facts for yourself. Here’s the average team’s rate of non-home-run hits plus walks per game. (Why did we subtract homers? Because they produce zero base runners.)