If you negotiate it, they will come. That is the reality for America’s pastime in 2022 after a deal was struck between baseball owners and players, averting the possibility of a lost season. 

While the protracted negotiations and acrimonious 99-day lockout means that first pitches will start flying only as of April 7, all 32 Major League clubs will play all 162 games after threats of a shortened season. Mercifully for seamheads and casual fans alike, the traumatic memories of the work stoppages that marred the 1981 and 1994 campaigns will not be repeated.

However, the game will look different when the players take the field. This starts with the uniforms they will wear, which for the first time will be adorned with advertising logos in a move that appears to put profit over the game’s vaunted purity. 

More substantively, the older of baseball’s two leagues — the National — will ditch its long-held practice of having pitchers bat as well as hurl and join the junior circuit, the American League, in featuring a designated hitter. 

The DH has long been despised by baseball purists, who cling to the ideal of a complete ballplayer the way paleontologists hunt for fossils. The idea that a player can just swing the bat and never take the field, which first became law in the American League in 1973, strikes old-timers as a perversion, even as the sight of pitchers incompetently flailing at meatballs over the plate is nobody’s notion of athletic excellence.

To this trend away from the generalist there is one glorious exception, Shohei Ohtani, the superstar Los Angeles Angels pitcher and slugger. The unanimous Most Valuable Player last year, this Japanese import has done the seemingly impossible — and he has done it with an loping grace that belies the insane difficulty of mastering both hitting and pitching at the highest of levels. One of the most intriguing plots of this season will be what Mr. Ohtani can do as a follow up. 

New York’s teams — the Yankees and the Mets — have seemingly switched roles. Under the swashbuckling owner George Steinbrenner, the Yankees long ago spared no expense in ruthless pursuit of championships, reinforcing the notion that any year that did not end in a championship parade through the Canyon of Heroes was a failure. 

The Mets, under the tight fists of owner Fred Wilpon, were long miserly and mediocre, the Yankees’ impoverished relation with garish uniforms and a silly mascot, Mr. Met. The widely spread idea that Bernard Madoff made off with much of Mr. Wilpon’s money did not help the team’s reputation for a kind of well-meaning incompetence.    

The 2022 season finds the two clubs in very different circumstances. The Mets are now controlled by billionaire Steven Cohen, the richest owner in the sport. Mr. Cohen has begun to import premium talent, with a three-time Cy Young award winner and future Hall of Famer, Max Scherzer, joining the Amazin’s for $130 million over three years. Their payroll has jumped over $60 million since last year.

The pinstripers find themselves in distinctly different circumstances. George’s son Hank has proved himself to be more money manager than maverick, and while the Yankees still feature one of the sport’s highest payrolls, there is a sense in the Bronx that the will to win does not burn quite as brightly these days. 

The Yankees whiffed on bringing in superstar shortstop Carlos Correia, who went to the famously frugal Minnesota Twins, and brought back the manager, Aaron Boone, despite a track record of muddling through. The glory days of Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera feel as distant as the era when Babe Ruth launched balls in the Bronx.

Elsewhere, the league’s glamor team — the Dodgers — added superstar Freddie Freeman from the defending champion Atlanta Braves. Two of the game’s greatest players, Mike Trout of the Angels and Justin Verlander of the Houston Astros, will try to return to their sublime standards after injury-blighted 2021 campaigns. 

As stadiums around America begin to stock up on hot dogs and lukewarm beer, a lingering sour taste lingers in some mouths over the months when billionaire owners and millionaire players battled over untold riches garnered from a children’s game. 

It is worth remembering that iniquity is no stranger to baseball, from the 1919 World Series tainted by gambling to the sport’s long history of racism and segregation to its more recent struggles with steroids and cheating scandals. Indeed, the only place where it has ever been perfect is the only place that really matters — on the field. 

Let’s play ball.