Just as with every other sport, the marketers have been obsessed with getting more women to watch.
Posted on 09/30/2022 8:09:48 AM PDT by MinorityRepublican
What Baseball Has Done to Baseball, in 25 words or fewer:
The winner is reader John Fleming, who submitted, “It is really sad seeing one entire side of the infield open while a .188 hitter tries to hit a home run.”
Sad, pathetic, self-destructive, mindless, idiotic, senseless, ludicrous. Take your pick, collect them all, trade ’em with your friends.
Every baseball fan who realizes that the fastest way back to home plate is to first reach first base, preferably by running there, by now recognizes that some analytics are, at best, junk science, and at worst, a coast-to-coast con.
Instead of reading the room — or in this case, reading a dugout — managers and front office geeks rely on analytic probabilities that suggest not only that various moments will unfold exactly as others, but that these repeated events happen by the dozens.
And every artificially added “cure” for The Game seems to worsen its afflictions.
The paucity of hitting caused by the analytical willingness to hit into shifts and to strike out in exchange for a few home runs, inspired foresight-bereft commissioner Rob Manfred to “add” offense through using the designated hitter in both leagues.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Not the universal DH or analytics.
Bow to the Rainbow Mafia is
Agree. But the first two certainly don’t help.
Wokeness is dragging down Baseball....
Yankees Move on From Kate Smith’s ‘God Bless America’ After Investigating Racist Lyrics
https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/04/18/yankees-stop-playing-kate-smith-god-bless-america-potential-racism
F the Yankees!
I disagree. Liberalism is dragging down baseball.
Baseball is turning into a comedy show.
The look on the pitchers face when a routine ground ball rolls untouched into the outfield as a single (because of the shift) is hilarious.
My favorite is when the short-stop and second baseman are playing so close together that they have to stop to let the ball go past both of them to avoid collision.
;-)
The automatic man on 2nd base for tie games really sux.
I liken that to the PGA tour championship where the points leader starts the final tournament like 10 under par.
Who thinks up these things?
I’ve played and coached baseball (kids, not high-level) and softball for over 55 years. They want to make baseball a “bang-bang” sport like basketball or football, with action all the time. But baseball is CHESS, not CHECKERS. To me, it’s supposed to be a thinking man’s game, a gentlemen’s game. But when things happen, you better have good athletes on the field.
Pitch-clocks, fine. Shifts, I don’t like. Keep the first, dump the second. Both will speed it up and help the offense without doing damage, IMO.
Let baseball be baseball. Stop with the gimmicks.
There’s alot that has dragged down baseball. I remember attending a HOF game in Cooperstown with the “old” Cin reds, what a team, Bench, Perez et al. Today’s teams seem to change every few years so I find it interesting how people get so attached to the team name, not necessarily the players.
Unless you watch all the games it’s difficult to become a fan due to this, that’s what I think is part of the problem. I like franchise players and players that want to stay with a team.
Other than that, it’s just one big merry go round.
Yep, they ruined the fedex cup with that nonsense.
I believe that next year the shift is kaput. BUT, baseball has only itself to blame for not dealing with it the way it should have been dealt with.
The “kids in the hall” analytics teams who want to be like Pete in Money Ball decided that hitting over the shift was the way to go. Sure, you won’t hit a homer every time or most of the time, but the times you did were, statistically speaking, more valuable.
And so everyone became Dave Kingman.
What was another approach was to start stressing hitting to all fields. Develop players, or put a premium on players who could make contact and take a ball where it is pitched and go with it.
Both viable solutions (hit over the shift and take it to all fields) but the first has more immediate rewards. Building an inning became a dirty thought.
Epic, brutal, and true.
Over the last 20+ years I've noticed several related trends and statistical quirks that I had never seen before. Here's just a few examples:
1. Batters with more home runs than singles.
2. Home run totals rising as RBI totals decline. The New York Yankees reached the point of absurdity when they set an MLB record (since broken) in 2018 with 267 home runs, while only two players on the roster reached the 90-RBI mark. So players are not only hitting more home runs than ever ... they're hitting more home runs with few (if any) runners on base.
3. Multiple "designated hitters" in the lineup. Some teams are notorious now for putting 5 or more players on the field whose best position is DH. If strikeouts, walks and home runs are the most common outcomes for batters these days, there's no reason to keep a productive hitter out of the lineup even if he's incapable of playing a position on the field.
Along with the pitch clock, they need to timer on how long batters can step out of the box between pitches.
Step out, check the signs from the third base coach and get back in the box to take the next pitch.
Just as with every other sport, the marketers have been obsessed with getting more women to watch.
You’re right, not always the pitcher’s fault.
They’ve tried to address that - I believe the rule is that the batter must be back in the box by the time the clock gets down to 8 seconds. Not sure the penalty, but probably a strike added.
My step-dad was a baseball umpire for a small town for a long time. If you didn’t behave, he’d do what hurt you most...
One coach was screaming from the dugout one time about how my step-dad was missing ball/strike calls. He walked over to the coach’s dugout and signaled the opposing pitcher to go ahead and throw. “STRIKE!”, he said. “You know, coach you’re right, I can see it pretty clear from over here. Want me to stay?”
Except analytics did work and teams that adopted them early had great success. The problem is the analytics have decades of data on traditional fielding and hitting patterns but only a decade of data on the “new” style of play.
The managers using the analytics don’t have the background to understand if they are in a GIGO loop and thus you have power only hitters smashing ground balls into the shift instead of skilled hitters taking free bases chipping the ball opposite field.
It is also why the best record teams end up losing in playoffs. The sample size for playoff baseball where strategies change radically is too small for the techniques that work over 162 games to have the same result over 7.
None of this changes the fact that American football is the most boring professional sport in the world - a bunch of faceless idiots on a gridiron running into eachother, with an hour of play broken up by three hours of commercials and “time outs.”
Sports are now just corporate playgrounds.
The Dolphins f’d over Tua last night.
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