5 ms·

I'd personally like for baseball to change even slower than it does. The continuity is a huge part of its appeal to me.

gbacon 8y ago
Watching a high school baseball game this weekend, I was thinking of how little the rules of the game seem to change and also how slow performance gains are relative to other sports. Occasionally innovations like the infield fly rule come into play. Small tweaks of inches to the height of the mound seem to be the great majority of changes. Gridiron football grows faster and the style of play changes every year. Baseball is just baseball. These are the subjective impressions of a fan who mostly dropped the game after the ‘95 strike. Perhaps the slow pace of the game shapes my perception.
- isostatic 8y ago
  As a normal geek, my entire knowledge of baseball comes from DS9 - hence the "infield fly rule" immediately ringing a bell. If the player touches the umpire does that player get kicked out of the field?
  - jkaplowitz 8y ago
    The umpire has lots of discretion. An ejection could well occur if the contact was intentional, but it wouldn't happen if it's an accident while, say, an fielder is chasing a fly ball faster than the umpire can get out of the way.
  - gbacon 8y ago
    Not if that player is Robin Ventura.
- baddox 8y ago
  Isn’t the infield fly rule essentially patching a bug once it was discovered that it could be exploited? I don’t know much about baseball, but it doesn’t strike me as a rule change that would effect the game negatively in any significant way.
  - gbacon 8y ago
    That’s a reasonable way to look at it and not negative at all. Umpires do have some discretion as to what’s an infield fly, but it’s part of the game — and better than without the rule.
    - DrScump 8y ago
      The only subjective element is ruling "ordinary effort" by an infielder. As for fair or foul, the rule is automatically void on a foul ball, although the umpire should explicitly call "infield fly if fair" on a fly that may land foul. I literally saved my team's season one year when I wrote an upheld protest of a misapplication of the IFR. We won the replay, that got us into the playoffs, and we won the championship.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  how slow performance gains are relative to other sports Stephen Jay Gould's analysis of why nobody hits .400 anymore is relevant here, I think. His argument, basically, is that there have been massive performance gains over the past 75-ish years, just in a way that deceptively depresses many of the statistics we compare to from earlier days. The overall ceiling of physical performance for a human hasn't changed much in that time frame, and generally doesn't seem to change much in modern developed countries. The occasional people who win the genetic and upbringing lotteries today have much the same physical capacity as their predecessors of decades ago. But thanks to improved training, conditioning, coaching and selection, the average major-league player today is vastly better than in, say, the 1940s or 50s. Which means the gap between the very best professional players and the average professional player is much smaller than it used to be. So take Mike Trout as an example. He's consistently the pick for the best player active in the major leagues today. He put up a .326 batting average in his rookie year, and that's the highest he's gotten as a major-league player. Which seems bad compared to Ted Williams' .406 in 1941 (the last time any major-league player had a batting average of .400 or better in a full season). But, of course, Ted Williams faced the average player of 1941, and Trout faces the average player of today. The gap between Trout and the average major-league player today is far smaller than the gap between Williams and the average player in 1941. And if Trout got to face 1941-level competition, he'd be absolutely slaughtering them, as we can see from his earlier statistics: in his final minor-league stint before being promoted to a full-time major league player, he put up a .403 average. To really appreciate Mike Trout, we have to turn to more modern statistics rooted in a better understanding of what leads to winning baseball games. Only three players have had a season at 10 or more fWAR in this millennium, and two of them -- Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez -- had careers tainted by steroid use. The other player to do it is Mike Trout. In 2012 he was good for 10.0, with the next best player being the Giants' Buster Posey at 7.6 and only 26 players in the major leagues breaking even 5.0 fWAR. In 2013 he reached 10.1, and only 25 players were at 5.0 or higher. But, of course, modern baseball statistics are unfamiliar and often impenetrable to people used to batting average, home runs, RBIs, and (for pitchers) ERA and win-loss records. Which means it's hard to explain how we know that Trout -- who, by virtue of being on the Angels, has only been in the playoffs once, where his team got swept in the first round -- is so amazingly good at baseball, and how good the average player now is, which in turn means the perception, based on the older stats, is that players must not have gotten much better since the old days, or may even have gotten worse.
technics256 8y ago
Continuity of players and teams you mean, or the pace of the game? As a lifelong baseball fan, I'm curious what is too fast.
- GavinMcG 8y ago
  Not the commenter you're responding to, but given that they said they'd like slower change, "continuity" probably refers to continuity in the rules/the way the game is played.

Watching a high school baseball game this weekend, I was thinking of how little the rules of the game seem to change and also how slow performance gains are relative to other sports. Occasionally innovations like the infield fly rule come into play. Small tweaks of inches to the height of the mound seem to be the great majority of changes. Gridiron football grows faster and the style of play changes every year. Baseball is just baseball. These are the subjective impressions of a fan who mostly dropped the game after the ‘95 strike. Perhaps the slow pace of the game shapes my perception.

isostatic 8y ago
As a normal geek, my entire knowledge of baseball comes from DS9 - hence the "infield fly rule" immediately ringing a bell. If the player touches the umpire does that player get kicked out of the field?
- jkaplowitz 8y ago
  The umpire has lots of discretion. An ejection could well occur if the contact was intentional, but it wouldn't happen if it's an accident while, say, an fielder is chasing a fly ball faster than the umpire can get out of the way.
- gbacon 8y ago
  Not if that player is Robin Ventura.
baddox 8y ago
Isn’t the infield fly rule essentially patching a bug once it was discovered that it could be exploited? I don’t know much about baseball, but it doesn’t strike me as a rule change that would effect the game negatively in any significant way.
- gbacon 8y ago
  That’s a reasonable way to look at it and not negative at all. Umpires do have some discretion as to what’s an infield fly, but it’s part of the game — and better than without the rule.
  - DrScump 8y ago
    The only subjective element is ruling "ordinary effort" by an infielder. As for fair or foul, the rule is automatically void on a foul ball, although the umpire should explicitly call "infield fly if fair" on a fly that may land foul. I literally saved my team's season one year when I wrote an upheld protest of a misapplication of the IFR. We won the replay, that got us into the playoffs, and we won the championship.
ubernostrum 8y ago
how slow performance gains are relative to other sports Stephen Jay Gould's analysis of why nobody hits .400 anymore is relevant here, I think. His argument, basically, is that there have been massive performance gains over the past 75-ish years, just in a way that deceptively depresses many of the statistics we compare to from earlier days. The overall ceiling of physical performance for a human hasn't changed much in that time frame, and generally doesn't seem to change much in modern developed countries. The occasional people who win the genetic and upbringing lotteries today have much the same physical capacity as their predecessors of decades ago. But thanks to improved training, conditioning, coaching and selection, the average major-league player today is vastly better than in, say, the 1940s or 50s. Which means the gap between the very best professional players and the average professional player is much smaller than it used to be. So take Mike Trout as an example. He's consistently the pick for the best player active in the major leagues today. He put up a .326 batting average in his rookie year, and that's the highest he's gotten as a major-league player. Which seems bad compared to Ted Williams' .406 in 1941 (the last time any major-league player had a batting average of .400 or better in a full season). But, of course, Ted Williams faced the average player of 1941, and Trout faces the average player of today. The gap between Trout and the average major-league player today is far smaller than the gap between Williams and the average player in 1941. And if Trout got to face 1941-level competition, he'd be absolutely slaughtering them, as we can see from his earlier statistics: in his final minor-league stint before being promoted to a full-time major league player, he put up a .403 average. To really appreciate Mike Trout, we have to turn to more modern statistics rooted in a better understanding of what leads to winning baseball games. Only three players have had a season at 10 or more fWAR in this millennium, and two of them -- Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez -- had careers tainted by steroid use. The other player to do it is Mike Trout. In 2012 he was good for 10.0, with the next best player being the Giants' Buster Posey at 7.6 and only 26 players in the major leagues breaking even 5.0 fWAR. In 2013 he reached 10.1, and only 25 players were at 5.0 or higher. But, of course, modern baseball statistics are unfamiliar and often impenetrable to people used to batting average, home runs, RBIs, and (for pitchers) ERA and win-loss records. Which means it's hard to explain how we know that Trout -- who, by virtue of being on the Angels, has only been in the playoffs once, where his team got swept in the first round -- is so amazingly good at baseball, and how good the average player now is, which in turn means the perception, based on the older stats, is that players must not have gotten much better since the old days, or may even have gotten worse.

technics256 8y ago

Continuity of players and teams you mean, or the pace of the game? As a lifelong baseball fan, I'm curious what is too fast.

GavinMcG 8y ago
Not the commenter you're responding to, but given that they said they'd like slower change, "continuity" probably refers to continuity in the rules/the way the game is played.