13 ms·

I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan) Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you

• ramesh31 2y ago
  I genuinely can't understand the thought process of a Yankees fan. If it's just a tradition thing, then sure whatever. But someone who watches them play and goes "yeah that's my team" is just mindblowing. They'll have a batting lineup that costs more than the opponents entire field, knowing full well they are all just hired guns who will be gone the moment the contract is up, and then you watch them in the playoffs against regular teams and it's just visually hilarious at this point. Like watching a bunch of NFL linebackers playing teeball.
  • techdmn 2y ago
    Some people want to back a winner, and they don't really get too worked up about the details. Another example would be Ferrari in early 2000s in F1. Biggest budget, most skilled driver, all the dirty tricks at all levels (on-track, technical, political), plenty of fans.
  • dionidium 2y ago
    > I genuinely can't understand the thought process of a Yankees fan. There is very little free agency in American sports fandom. People are (for the most part) fans of the team local to where they grew up. (This kind of bums me out as someone raising kids in New England, which is not where I'm from, and so not whose teams I root for.)
    • bluGill 2y ago
      Backing the local team always makes the most sense. In NYC you can choose Mets or Yankees (though where you live in the city affects even that). Choosing a team from some other city means you see your team play much less often and only after much effort. Worse there are less people to talk about the game as nobody has seen your team play and you didn't see their team plan. (except when your team plans the local team)
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • testing22321 2y ago
    That is true of all Poe sport in the USA. No salary cap and teams are a franchise that exist to make money.
• mjrpes 2y ago
  > it really freaking hurts and throws off subsequent swings. Totally ignorant about baseball, but would wearing thick padded gloves help? Do major leaguers build up calluses to help?
  • janalsncm 2y ago
    Gloves help, calluses don’t. It’s also a lot worse in the cold.
  • arrosenberg 2y ago
    The problem isn't friction from the grip (that can occasionally pop up), the issue is when you hit the wrong spot and the energy of the ball gets dumped entirely into your hands instead of evenly distributed through the bat.
    • bluGill 2y ago
      That is what padding gloves help with. Though I suspect thick padding causes less control of the bat and so overall isn't worth it.
      • arrosenberg 2y ago
        It just doesn't help that much to be worth the change in mechanics and the compromise on grip strength - too much energy, too quickly to effectively dissipate. I stopped playing competitively in my teens and I still remember how much that hurts.
  • eszed 2y ago
    Padded gloves do throw off your swing / bat "feel". You do now see a lot of guys wearing a little rubber donut thing on the thumb of their top hand. That helps a lot with absorbing the vibration from a mis-hit. It still shivers your hands, but you don't get the piercing pain focused right at the base of your thumb. [Edit] You do build up some crazy calluses swinging a bat for hours upon hours of practice. They absolutely don't help, like at all, when you strike a ball in on the handle of the bat. It always hurts.
• janalsncm 2y ago
  To be fair, a pitching machine is pretty unnatural compared to a human pitcher (can’t see when it’s about to launch) and they are typically closer than 60 feet. On the other hand, a real MLB pitcher is not just throwing fastballs down the middle.
  • jparishy 2y ago
    Very true. I dream to be able to hit off one of the fancy ones the players have at the facilities
    • to11mtm 2y ago
      NGL that sounds like a fun concept... How cheap could one prototype a 'programmable' pitch machine that can handle the scenarios one would want to practice against?
      • janalsncm 2y ago
        I have practiced on machines which can throw different pitches. There might be some mechanical enhancement required to quickly switch between different pitches though.
• bena 2y ago
  You can just be shitty and get the same experience. My wife and I went to a batting cage once and tried to hit some balls. There is a marked difference between hitting it in the sweet spot and not.
• to11mtm 2y ago
  Baseball being the only 'pro' sport I'll go and watch... I think it's an interesting mixup. From a marketing standpoint; - If certain batters have their 'ridge' in a specific spot/range, it adds marketability. e.x. 'This is the bat ????[0] uses'. - OTOH the first danger with this is that most folks don't have the same stature/etc as the hitter in question, so it doesn't mean much. - Lots of fan dollars to be made here though. From a Game Standpoint: - It vaguely detracts from accessibility; if this goes full, that means that 'pros' get a sort of custom bat that other leagues don't get, and from my view that impacts how folks are viewed. - It's also a challenge of 'doing well with a good standard' vs 'doing well with a custom thing that happens to fit regs'. I suppose examples of other sports having similar (where a 'custom' item per player that fits regs, is legal for the sport and provides clear benefit) would make me feel a little better about this, maybe. The Weird/offball: - Saw a youtube video recently claiming some countries/municipalites have specific laws about not being allowed to carry a bat unless there was a glove and/or ball also involved in the process, would these also fall into it? (I said it was weird/offball, no I don't live in such a region [1], just morbid curiosity.) [0] - It's been a minute since I've looked at Tigers stats who the hell are these folks and no wonder my family doesn't talk about baseball anymore [1] - Per [0] I can at best tell funny stories about DPD and potato launchers I designed and had to explain to the police and non-authorized users and how same precinct gave specific advice as to "if we had to use a firearm in a home invasion, here is how we treat as self defense".
• reactordev 2y ago
  Let’s also not forget that a pitch machine will deliver consistent throws where a player won’t. It’s 10x harder to hit a real moving 90mph fastball than a straight dinner plate, if you can even manage the plate. The bat will add probably 0.2-0.5% longer bombs statistically but it’s still a skill of the player at bat that makes the difference.
• scoofy 2y ago
  I play golf. I write about golf. I genuinely love golf. Over the last 50 years, we have slowly broken the game of golf by allowing incremental technological advancements -- just like this -- that make it easier to do something that is hard, that is making it easier to hit the sweet spot. I am sending a grave warning to baseball fans here from the future that you will arrive at by following this road. Golf used to be a finesse game with moments of power. Now everyone is swinging out of their shoes on every shot, and the strategy of the game has reached Nash equilibrium where you basically want to hit the ball as hard as you can at every opportunity, despite any strategic element on the course. Professional baseball is always what I point to when I talk about what we've lost. You don't need the most optimized equipment to enjoy the game, in fact, ultimately, you don't even want it. Just use simply, standardized equipment, accept the limitations of that equipment, and enjoy a simple game, where strategy can be used to overcome the limitations of equipment. The best thing that the MLB ever did was reject aluminum bats.
  • 13_9_7_7_5_18 2y ago
    [dead]
  • DabbyDabberson 2y ago
    baseball is an arms race though. In golf the ball is on a tee. In baseball, the pitchers get better every year, and throw faster every year. There's innovation happening on both ends.
    • scoofy 2y ago
      If the pitchers are getting too good, just make it harder to pitch. Don't make it easier to hit better pitches. Golf is also an arms race too. Look at the lengths of golf courses over the last 50 years. It's comical. It used to be 6000 yards was a championship course... now it's over 8000. They used to put bunkers in front of greens to make them more challenging, but the equipment evolve to maximize height, and stop the ball on a dime. It's completely convoluted, because we just keep letting technology overcome every obstacle, but players don't like the obstacles, but you're not supposed to like the obstacles. So we let the tech overcome those obstacles, and then we build new, more difficult obstacles, and it's a never ending process of legalizing more tech, and then building more obstacles. And it continues until the game is unrecognizable from what it was a half century earlier.
• dwighttk 2y ago
  "typical MLB fastball"s aren't 105
• londons_explore 2y ago
  I'd like to see a slow-mo shot of a bad hitting a ball in the 'sweet spot' and not in the sweet spot, to see how they differ. I assume that when not hit in the sweet spot a lot of the energy gets transformed into vibrations in the bat. Those vibrations then hurt your wrist/arm because flesh absorbs ~100 Hz vibrations far more than wood does.
• saghm 2y ago
  Even as a dirty Red Sox fan, I was quite amused at Judge's response when he was asked about it (quoting from a similar article on this from The Guardian): > “The past couple of seasons kind of speak for itself,” Judge said a day after his third career three-homer game. “Why try to change something?” He's certainly not wrong!
• dfxm12 2y ago
  Hitting is hard (and that's why the best hitters make the big bucks), but as an aside, it seems like batters get more and more help each year: DH in the NL, outlawing defensive shifts, pitch clock, etc. It's not a surprise that the league will be on board with any change that favors the offense (we've also seen pick off attempt limits and bigger bases which help the base runners).
• fishpen0 2y ago
  If every player ends up with a bat custom tailored to their swing this will get very interesting.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • papercrane 2y ago
    It could get even more wild. I could imagine batters having custom profiles for different pitchers. E.g. one bat for when hitting against someone who throws 100MPH four seam fastballs, and another when facing someone who throws 90 MPH cutters.
    • abirch 2y ago
      I'm fine with it as long as they don't change bats in between pitches.
      • BobaFloutist 2y ago
        I mean that's part of baseball as chess (or poker), right? The batter swaps to the fastball bat, communicating that they expect a fastball. The pitcher knows, from the coach's extensive scouting, and swaps to the curve. But actually, the batter knows he struggles with that kind of fastball and was hoping to bait the curveball, which he's more confident swinging against, and is happy to use a slightly suboptimized bat.
      • Pet_Ant 2y ago
        I'm picturing a caddy standing off to the side of the batter with a bag full of bats, sizing up the last pitch and say "May I suggest the pine with the conical twist sir?"
        • maccard 2y ago
          That’s air golf at that point
        • 2y ago
• dontTREATonme 2y ago
  > Brewer's pitching is injured, and the starter that day was a Yankee last year and the team is intimately familiar with his game. Is this one of those situations where the Yankees are even still paying part of his salary?
  • xhkkffbf 2y ago
    I don't know, but those situations exist and they might be more problematic than baseball is willing to admit. The pitcher may get more from the Yankees than the Brewers. So the pitcher may have more incentive to make sure the Yankees don't go bankrupt. Hmmm.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]