Baseball is becoming more fun. Why not just enjoy it?

Shortly after taking over as the commissioner of baseball in 2015, Rob Manfred said one of his goals was "injecting additional offence into the game."

If the verb choice was Freudian, it was at least a good idea. Without hits, three-and-a-half hours of live baseball becomes a televised version of whack-a-mole.

Slow-rolling the game, strategizing each matchup and small ball are great – in the post-season. But the sleepy drift of August baseball requires something a little more energizing than a sixth pitching change to keep people interested.

Almost immediately, Manfred appeared to follow through on his promise. In the second half of 2015, balls began flying off bats at an unprecedented rate. Players who should be hitting home runs hit more of them, and players who should not be hitting home runs – say, the Texas Rangers' irritable garden gnome, Rougned Odor – were hitting them as well.

This week, baseball established a new high-water mark for the total number of homers hit in any season and will end up somewhere north of 6,000 at season's end. The previous high of 5,693 was established in the thick of the steroid era.

This is great news. What sport would not want its single most exciting element happening as often as possible?

As long as the change does not tend to advantage any one team over the others, offence can increase limitlessly without impacting competitive balance. Nobody has suggested anyone is cheating. All that's happened here is that baseball has become a little more fun to watch.

But instead of equipping fans in the outfield stands with Kevlar umbrellas and starting an ad campaign in co-operation with NASA, baseball has turned on itself. Someone must be to blame for all this good fortune, and Manfred is the likeliest culprit.

The widespread suspicion is that major-league baseballs – all of which are manufactured by hand in Costa Rica – have been altered to give them more coefficient of restitution. Essentially, more bounciness.

If you buy this idea, the balls have also become fractionally smaller and denser, while the seams are stitched more tightly, so that there is less drag during flight.

The result is a slight, but significant increase in the distance the ball travels off the bat.

There's more to it than that, but the "live ball" theory has become the magic bullet of baseball. Everyone in the game seems anxious to grab onto it.

I blame the zeitgeist more than the players – paranoia is fashionable at the moment.

"There has got to be some investigation," one pitching coach told USA Today over the summer, as if this was a hack-the-election-level problem.

MLB, in a move straight out of the Politburo playbook, decided to investigate itself and – quelle surprise – found it had done nothing wrong.

When that didn't stop all the loose talk, Manfred set out on history's most pointless propaganda campaign, trying to explain to everyone that, no, baseball is just as boring as it ever was and would never contemplate doing anything to change that.

"Nothing about the baseball is materially different," he said this week. The man cannot help but insert a weasel word into every sentence. I suspect there may be a course on it at Harvard Law School.

Also in keeping with the zeitgeist, the more anyone in charge denies something, the more likely it is they're lying.

Confusingly, Manfred recently added this addendum: "I have never said that it's impossible that there's something out there that we're missing."

It must be wonderful to be able to print your own Get Out of Jail Free cards.

Manfred's argument on changes to the ball boils down to this: "We've done a rigorous probe and found that we are not to blame. But please do not construe that as a denial if, in the end, it's determined that we are to blame."

What he should have done the first time he was asked about this was say, "Who knows? But isn't it great?!"

When some pitchers began muttering, Manfred might have nodded over in the direction of Max Scherzer or Chris Sale. If the bullpen also-rans are drowning, there are still guys surfing this tide of change.

And when the absolutists began to talk about the essence of the game and its eternal immutability, Manfred might point out that they once wrapped the ball in horsehide. Until they ran out of horses.

Every sport – or every smart one – occasionally manipulates its tools in order to make the game more entertaining. Soccer routinely alters the ball in order to give it more swerve, which in turn makes it harder to stop.

Goalkeepers moan about the changes and everyone else in soccer shrugs and says, "Goalkeepers. There's no satisfying them," and then moves on to the next. Because they understand that people watch soccer for goals, not saves.

Baseball has trouble getting its head around the basic truth that offence moves people, and that no other sport provides less of it. Any move in the direction of scoring is an aggregate good, but baseball has to be dragged there screaming.

The inclination to improvement butts against baseball's essential character, which is more conservative than the National Review.

MLB and its players must constantly be passing purity tests and proving how much they respect the game. Any embrace of change is an affront to that ideal.

As an extension of that idea of antediluvian sporting essentialism, no popular pastime is more prone to self-defeating witch hunts. Why else continue announcing how many guys had done performance-enhancing drugs long after everyone had stopped? Would it not have been better at that point to simply stop talking about it?

Clearly, this tendency toward self-flagellation is a disease that has spread throughout MLB headquarters.

The game's changing. Nobody knows exactly why (because I can't buy the idea that Manfred would lie about this just to … I don't know what the reason would be, but whatever it is would get him fired).

Stop trying to justify it. For once, just enjoy it when something goes wrong, and the net result is a better game.