4 ms·

We see this in all kinds of sports. Professional baseball for example use bats that make it harder to hit home runs. Professional swimming limit how long you ca

by dagw 4y ago

We see this in all kinds of sports. Professional baseball for example use bats that make it harder to hit home runs. Professional swimming limit how long you can swim under water, even though it leads to slower times. Professional sports are first and foremost supposed to be fun to watch, and people find it less fun to watch golf if everybody can hit the ball 'too far', since it removes the need to navigate the trickier parts of the course.

geoduck14 4y ago
>Professional sports are first and foremost supposed to be fun to watch Are you sure?
- liveoneggs 4y ago
  they are entertainment
- bombcar 4y ago
  The “professional” gives it away - someone is paying for it and that is mostly people looking for entertainment these days. There may be a very small amount of “record beating” but even that should be entertaining. Imagine if MLB used aluminum bats or allowed the pitchers to grease the ball. A game if endless home runs or endless strikeouts would be boring.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Yes. Olympics and other competitive events seek the best. Professional sports seek the most entertaining and therefore most profitable (which usually but not always correlates with skill).
  - dagw 4y ago
    Olympics and other competitive events seek the best. That's not really true at all. Look at swimming again for example, they have lots of rules related to what you are allowed to wear and how you're allowed to swim that all lead to slower times, but (hopefully) a more fun event to watch. The Olympics keep changing and tweaking the rules of all kinds of sports simply to try to make them more interesting and/or increase their popularity and viewership.
TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
It's been fascinating to watch that in a new emerging sport which is still developing rapidly: World Chase Tag. While it is a professional sport, they can't afford to pay high player salaries, so it has to be fun to play, too, to attract talent. But they definitely do care about how it looks, and have said in interviews that this was their main focus during initial play testing. They've actually changed the rules very little over time (they reduced the rest period between chases from 30 seconds to 25, but that's about it); instead, they've focused their attention on tweaking the quad, the structure on which the game is played. Small tweaks to the positioning of bars can subtly alter the balance of power between chaser and evader. They've deliberately nerfed some developing strategies they decided they didn't like (by adding obstructions behind the Mountain, for example).
illiarian 4y ago
> Professional sports are first and foremost supposed to be fun to watch, and people find it less fun to watch There are some sports where they have a similar problem (tennis and table tennis) where the speeds have become ridiculous, but no one wants to limit that (via limits on equipment sizes etc.) because people don't want to see long tedious technical exchanges. They want to see "wack" and "boom 200 kmh"
- barrkel 4y ago
  I don't think people want to see continuous exchanges of aces in tennis.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    It's a fine line indeed :)
- jaclaz 4y ago
  Well, many, many years ago in the late 1970's there was the spaghetti racket in tennis that was swiftly outlawed: https://www.lovetennisblog.com/the-spaghetti-racket-a-documentary-about-the-infamous-racket/ https://www.lovetennisblog.com/the-spaghetti-racket-a-docume...
- yowzadave 4y ago
  In tennis, despite serves being generally faster than they were 30 years ago, the game seems to be less serve-dominated. True, there are still players who are one-dimensional in their ability to hit aces...but the very top players all have well-rounded games. Novak Djokovic has less than half the number of aces as John Isner, despite having played in many more matches. And for ground strokes, the net and court size restrict how much power you can give a shot--spin and control are more critical. Pro-level racquets are generally less powerful than those used by amateurs. If a company were to come out with a racket that could hit twice as fast, approximately zero pro players would use it.
  - illiarian 4y ago

by dagw 4y ago

geoduck14 4y ago

>Professional sports are first and foremost supposed to be fun to watch Are you sure?

liveoneggs 4y ago
they are entertainment
bombcar 4y ago
The “professional” gives it away - someone is paying for it and that is mostly people looking for entertainment these days. There may be a very small amount of “record beating” but even that should be entertaining. Imagine if MLB used aluminum bats or allowed the pitchers to grease the ball. A game if endless home runs or endless strikeouts would be boring.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Yes. Olympics and other competitive events seek the best. Professional sports seek the most entertaining and therefore most profitable (which usually but not always correlates with skill).
- dagw 4y ago
  Olympics and other competitive events seek the best. That's not really true at all. Look at swimming again for example, they have lots of rules related to what you are allowed to wear and how you're allowed to swim that all lead to slower times, but (hopefully) a more fun event to watch. The Olympics keep changing and tweaking the rules of all kinds of sports simply to try to make them more interesting and/or increase their popularity and viewership.

TRiG_Ireland 4y ago

It's been fascinating to watch that in a new emerging sport which is still developing rapidly: World Chase Tag. While it is a professional sport, they can't afford to pay high player salaries, so it has to be fun to play, too, to attract talent. But they definitely do care about how it looks, and have said in interviews that this was their main focus during initial play testing. They've actually changed the rules very little over time (they reduced the rest period between chases from 30 seconds to 25, but that's about it); instead, they've focused their attention on tweaking the quad, the structure on which the game is played. Small tweaks to the positioning of bars can subtly alter the balance of power between chaser and evader. They've deliberately nerfed some developing strategies they decided they didn't like (by adding obstructions behind the Mountain, for example).

illiarian 4y ago

> Professional sports are first and foremost supposed to be fun to watch, and people find it less fun to watch There are some sports where they have a similar problem (tennis and table tennis) where the speeds have become ridiculous, but no one wants to limit that (via limits on equipment sizes etc.) because people don't want to see long tedious technical exchanges. They want to see "wack" and "boom 200 kmh"

barrkel 4y ago
I don't think people want to see continuous exchanges of aces in tennis.
- illiarian 4y ago
  It's a fine line indeed :)
jaclaz 4y ago
Well, many, many years ago in the late 1970's there was the spaghetti racket in tennis that was swiftly outlawed: https://www.lovetennisblog.com/the-spaghetti-racket-a-documentary-about-the-infamous-racket/ https://www.lovetennisblog.com/the-spaghetti-racket-a-docume...
yowzadave 4y ago
In tennis, despite serves being generally faster than they were 30 years ago, the game seems to be less serve-dominated. True, there are still players who are one-dimensional in their ability to hit aces...but the very top players all have well-rounded games. Novak Djokovic has less than half the number of aces as John Isner, despite having played in many more matches. And for ground strokes, the net and court size restrict how much power you can give a shot--spin and control are more critical. Pro-level racquets are generally less powerful than those used by amateurs. If a company were to come out with a racket that could hit twice as fast, approximately zero pro players would use it.
- illiarian 4y ago