6 ms·

The Simple Technology That Accidentally Ruined Baseball

40 points by rfugger 12y ago

thaumasiotes 12y ago
> Both home runs-per-game and runs-per-game are down about 20 percent from their early-2000s highs. Strikeouts are up about a fifth. There's an english style guideline that says if you need to use a concept more than once, you should use a different word every time, lest you seem like the sort of clod who only knows one word. But doing it with numbers feels like a purposeful attempt to mislead the reader.
- msherry 12y ago
  Not sure I understand what you're saying -- is it that runs-per-game and homeruns-per-game are the same thing? Because they're not.
  - CJefferson 12y ago
    No, it's (I think) that 20 percent and a fifth are the same thing.
  - mcot2 12y ago
    No. 20% = one fifth.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  I think the problem might be that strikeouts will be a percentage - I don't know baseball, so I'm making up numbers - say it's 30%. Now if you say "Strikeouts are up about 20%." what are you saying, are you saying that strikeouts are now at 50% of batter-innings [again, not sure on terminology] or are you saying that strikeouts are up 20% of the 30%, ie are now at 36% of batter-innings? If you say it's up "a fifth" then it seems more clear to me that it's up on what it was before, ie 30% + (30/5)% = 36% [using my made up 30% figure]. ?
idlewords 12y ago
This article reinforces my theory that baseball is just a beard for people who love statistics, but don't want the stigma of being called a math nerd. It's the only explanation for how a sport this dull could survive outside the British Empire.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- bitJericho 12y ago
  Agreed. Baseball's always been boring. Not just since '06. Maybe 1906.
- hvs 12y ago
  You seem willing to assume that there are millions of more math nerds in the U.S. than I am.
  - NotAtWork 12y ago
    Given the way that many of my friends who are in to sports talk, I'm inclined to say it's statistics for the math phobic and fantasy sports is DnD for the geek phobic.
- jorgis 12y ago
  Baseball is one of the few sports you can watch with other people and talk over. The pace of the action can be a draw if you're going to pass time with other people rather than obsess over plays. I guess it's like the difference between a lounge and a dance club.
chrisblackwell 12y ago
It's not JUST about the strike zone being enforced so heavily. The number of pitchers a batter sees per game is higher than it has ever been. Many teams are opting for a shorter bench and deeper bullpen. Toronto this year carried an 8-man bullpen for most of the season.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
This sort of thing is a fundamental problem of professional sports, and one of the major reasons why I'm sort of agnostic about the very idea of pro sports in general. Sports are supposed to be a game, they are supposed to be non-serious, but also competitive. Therein lies the fundamental conflict at the heart of all sports, especially at a professional level. It can quickly become difficult to find the right balance between utter seriousness and playfulness when it comes to sports. This gets even worse when millions of fans and billions of dollars play a role. They tip the scale from the playful side to the serious/business side. Sport stops being play and becomes more and more a job. A thing to be executed to the utmost at all cost. That's why you get massive steroid and other drug use, which has been a problem in all sports for perhaps half a century, if not longer, though not widely known. That's where you get fans whose emotional well-being are tied to whether their favorite team has won or lost recently (domestic violence is heavily affected by sports outcomes, for example). Then you have sports riots, and so on. It's quite a mess all around, but it's not exactly an easy problem to fix.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  I went and watched a sports riot once. The majority of the people around were like me, there to watch. It was a small minority that were setting police cars on fire. I don't think the sports allegiance caused the riots, they just happened to be the thing that the riot coalesced around. There was certainly a feeling in the air that there was going to be some riots in that city (friends and I drove in from ~1 hour away), and I think many of the actors went there to take advantage of the (so to speak) opportunity, not because they were upset about the loss.
shpx 12y ago
The whole point of sports is not about perfectly enforcing the rules. I remember an article a while back on here about speed walking, and how a staggering majority of speed walkers actually violate the main rule of speed walking (you can't have both feet off the ground), and while that rule could easily be enforced with cameras it isn't because it would just ruin the sport. It seems to me like the easiest thing to do would be change the rules, bringing the strike zone back to what it was. It'll most likely cause outrage, but ironically you'd be going back to the way things were before. It all comes back to the fact that the reason for sports is not to perfectly follow some set of bizarre rules, its just to be entertaining.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > It all comes back to the fact that the reason for sports is not to perfectly follow some set of bizarre rules, its just to be entertaining. The participants or the audience? I'm trying hard to imagine a world where the rules of chess are changed to turn it into a more spectator friendly sport.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    I imagine time limits on moves are partly because of spectators.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      I think those are mostly to make sure a game will actually progress rather than that one party can force a losing game to a standstill.
  - blowski 12y ago
    In a sense, the rules of chess are frequently changed - speed chess, chess-boxing, Cheshire Cat chess, etc.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      I would consider those 'variations' rather than rule changes.
richardwigley 12y ago
Interesting - in cricket there is a similar problem - the umpire has to judge if the ball was going to hit the wicket (similar problem to going 'over the plate'). They brought in a computer review system in and it also increased how often you were out LBW (similar to 'struck out'). "[ the review system ] has increased the bowler’s potential target area by a remarkable 70 per cent" [1] However, it has improved things because it forced the player to do something rather than block the ball and hope they wouldn't be given out. So, technology helped in this case. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/9166307/Decision-Review-System-made-wicket-70-per-cent-bigger.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/engla...
- lennel 12y ago
  Interesting article. DRS has revamped the motto "When in doubt not out" considerably. I also think it has helped reverse swing bowlers (Steyn, Harris) more than pure swing bowlers (Anderson) through the length of the innings. Test cricket I do think has resulted more because of drs, but also because teams have become more aggressive (a change made by the great aussie team under steve waugh).
  - wycx 12y ago
    It started under Mark Taylor
jimhefferon 12y ago
Equating runs scored with game interest is mistaken.
- fredleblanc 12y ago
  Agreed. This article does a lot of comparing to 2006, in which a lot of technology has happened — not just on the field but off. From what I've seen, many people "watching" games these days aren't doing just that, they're multitasking with three or four other things: checking feeds, timelines, stats, other game scores, fantasy updates, etc. To me, in-game changes seem to be only a minor contributor. More so, I'd like to hear more about how people are so easily distracted these days. Notifications for this and that, work emails checked all night, game on in the background while surfing reddit or ESPN or whatever. It's becoming extremely easy to forget you're watching baseball at all.
Pxtl 12y ago
Sounds like they need to change the rules, not the cameras. If the strike zone is too big for entertaining play, shrink it.
codva 12y ago
A well played 1-0 baseball game that takes 2 hours to complete is an absolute joy to watch. A 1-0 game that lasts 3:30, not so much. It's not the score or HRs or or the hits, it is the length of the game that is ruining baseball. Get the games back to 2 - 2.5 hours and it will be fine.
- rip747 12y ago
  you hit the nail on the head. watching a baseball game is like poking your eye with an icepick. there are too many breaks, too many commercials; thus too slow of a pace. they need to pick it up so that a game is shorter and the action is constant. viewers don't have that long of an attention.
  - johnchristopher 12y ago
    We are framing it as a show but what about people who actually play baseball for the sake of playing a game ?
    - schnable 12y ago
      Major League Baseball is a business, nobody is playing it purely for the sake of playing a game.
    - jerf 12y ago
      What about them? What exactly are you trying to say?
      - johnchristopher 12y ago
        Changing baseball rules because there are too many breaks and the viewer is likely to find it boring is an acceptable position to hold when you are in the "business". But people actually playing the game and enjoying it (those that aren't on a TV screen) don't need this problem to be solved because they simply don't have it. So "their" game rules are being changed for the sake of baseball seen as an entertainment show, not for the sake of people actually playing it because they like playing the game more than watching it.
prof_hobart 12y ago
Assuming that this is all true, and that MLB wants to do something about it, isn't there a simple solution? Simply raise the actual strike zone to put it in line with where umpires used to judge it.
cbr 12y ago
Why not just shrink the strike zone a little?
- peeters 12y ago
  It's possible, but it's also difficult. The strike zone is not a static box; it's relative to the batter. Thus, the umpire needs to be able to compare the location of the pitch to the batter himself, and so the zone should be defined relative to points on the batter. Currently, the points of reference on the batter are the knees for the bottom and the team letters on the jersey for the top (though technically it's the midpoint between belt and shoulders). These are convenient reference points. Shrinking the strikezone a bit would yield something like "two inches above the knees to 1/3rd the distance from the belt to the shoulder", which would require more explicit rather than subconscious analysis from the ump.
  - NotAtWork 12y ago
    Why not just fully use computers, then? If the problem is that an incomplete switch to technology left us in a chimeric state where we have the worst of both worlds, why not remove one of the two? If we remove the cameras, old umpire error will move the box up; if we remove the umpires from pitch calling, the new computers will have no trouble doing a bunch of math and moving the box up. This seems more like an incomplete implementation of an idea, rather than a fundamental flaw.
    - jerf 12y ago
      Our collective inability to conceive of the idea that perfect enforcement of previous sloppy rules may require the rules to be adjusted is scary in light of the increasing ability of computers to enforce laws, too. MLB is a sideshow by comparison. If even HN-type readers have a hard time with the idea, we're in some deep trouble over the next couple of decades.
    - peeters 12y ago
      > Why not just fully use computers, then? Because that will kill interest in watching the game much more thoroughly than a more accurate strike zone. Viewers like the subtle things, like that moment's pause that leaves viewers on the edge of their seat before the ump rings the batter up on a called third strike. Plus, imperfection causes water cooler buzz much more than perfection (people LOVE complaining about missed calls).
jonifico 12y ago
I'd rather watch golf. OK, that was a bit over the top, but seriously, I don't have all that passion in the sport in order to wait for 30 minutes or so for someone to bat the ball... and see it's an out.
jazzyb 12y ago
If you enjoyed this article and find the unintended side-effects of new technology fascinating, I would encourage you to read anything by the author Neil Postman -- particularly his works _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ and _Technopoly_.
bronbron 12y ago
I think they should follow through on reducing to 7 innings per game (with all the rules about extra innings still applicable). Sure, it would more-or-less destroy relief pitching as a profession, but relief pitchers are basically the placekickers of MLB anyway (people know the really good ones, the rest no one cares unless they mess up royally). It would shorten the game enough to be enjoyable, and people would get to watch their favorite pitchers play entire games, similar to football and basketball (with obvious exceptions for one-sided games).
- peeters 12y ago
  I expect relief pitching would quickly re-enter the picture. Starting pitchers pace themselves to go 7-8 innings (100 pitches is the unwritten rule, as much as I hate it). They might be able to deliver a higher quality start if they are targeting 80 pitches (or 5-6 innings) instead.
timdellinger 12y ago
The solution is to lower the pitcher's mound... this is a variable that has been tweaked a number of times in baseball already! It has been shown that a higher pitcher's mound favors the pitcher. A lower mound would shift the balance a bit to the batter, leading to more hits, and thus a more exciting game.

40 points by rfugger 12y ago

> Both home runs-per-game and runs-per-game are down about 20 percent from their early-2000s highs. Strikeouts are up about a fifth. There's an english style guideline that says if you need to use a concept more than once, you should use a different word every time, lest you seem like the sort of clod who only knows one word. But doing it with numbers feels like a purposeful attempt to mislead the reader.

msherry 12y ago
Not sure I understand what you're saying -- is it that runs-per-game and homeruns-per-game are the same thing? Because they're not.
- CJefferson 12y ago
  No, it's (I think) that 20 percent and a fifth are the same thing.
- mcot2 12y ago
  No. 20% = one fifth.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
I think the problem might be that strikeouts will be a percentage - I don't know baseball, so I'm making up numbers - say it's 30%. Now if you say "Strikeouts are up about 20%." what are you saying, are you saying that strikeouts are now at 50% of batter-innings [again, not sure on terminology] or are you saying that strikeouts are up 20% of the 30%, ie are now at 36% of batter-innings? If you say it's up "a fifth" then it seems more clear to me that it's up on what it was before, ie 30% + (30/5)% = 36% [using my made up 30% figure]. ?

idlewords 12y ago

This article reinforces my theory that baseball is just a beard for people who love statistics, but don't want the stigma of being called a math nerd. It's the only explanation for how a sport this dull could survive outside the British Empire.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bitJericho 12y ago
Agreed. Baseball's always been boring. Not just since '06. Maybe 1906.
hvs 12y ago
You seem willing to assume that there are millions of more math nerds in the U.S. than I am.
- NotAtWork 12y ago
  Given the way that many of my friends who are in to sports talk, I'm inclined to say it's statistics for the math phobic and fantasy sports is DnD for the geek phobic.
jorgis 12y ago
Baseball is one of the few sports you can watch with other people and talk over. The pace of the action can be a draw if you're going to pass time with other people rather than obsess over plays. I guess it's like the difference between a lounge and a dance club.

chrisblackwell 12y ago

It's not JUST about the strike zone being enforced so heavily. The number of pitchers a batter sees per game is higher than it has ever been. Many teams are opting for a shorter bench and deeper bullpen. Toronto this year carried an 8-man bullpen for most of the season.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

This sort of thing is a fundamental problem of professional sports, and one of the major reasons why I'm sort of agnostic about the very idea of pro sports in general. Sports are supposed to be a game, they are supposed to be non-serious, but also competitive. Therein lies the fundamental conflict at the heart of all sports, especially at a professional level. It can quickly become difficult to find the right balance between utter seriousness and playfulness when it comes to sports. This gets even worse when millions of fans and billions of dollars play a role. They tip the scale from the playful side to the serious/business side. Sport stops being play and becomes more and more a job. A thing to be executed to the utmost at all cost. That's why you get massive steroid and other drug use, which has been a problem in all sports for perhaps half a century, if not longer, though not widely known. That's where you get fans whose emotional well-being are tied to whether their favorite team has won or lost recently (domestic violence is heavily affected by sports outcomes, for example). Then you have sports riots, and so on. It's quite a mess all around, but it's not exactly an easy problem to fix.

maxerickson 12y ago
I went and watched a sports riot once. The majority of the people around were like me, there to watch. It was a small minority that were setting police cars on fire. I don't think the sports allegiance caused the riots, they just happened to be the thing that the riot coalesced around. There was certainly a feeling in the air that there was going to be some riots in that city (friends and I drove in from ~1 hour away), and I think many of the actors went there to take advantage of the (so to speak) opportunity, not because they were upset about the loss.

shpx 12y ago

The whole point of sports is not about perfectly enforcing the rules. I remember an article a while back on here about speed walking, and how a staggering majority of speed walkers actually violate the main rule of speed walking (you can't have both feet off the ground), and while that rule could easily be enforced with cameras it isn't because it would just ruin the sport. It seems to me like the easiest thing to do would be change the rules, bringing the strike zone back to what it was. It'll most likely cause outrage, but ironically you'd be going back to the way things were before. It all comes back to the fact that the reason for sports is not to perfectly follow some set of bizarre rules, its just to be entertaining.

jacquesm 12y ago
> It all comes back to the fact that the reason for sports is not to perfectly follow some set of bizarre rules, its just to be entertaining. The participants or the audience? I'm trying hard to imagine a world where the rules of chess are changed to turn it into a more spectator friendly sport.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  I imagine time limits on moves are partly because of spectators.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I think those are mostly to make sure a game will actually progress rather than that one party can force a losing game to a standstill.
- blowski 12y ago
  In a sense, the rules of chess are frequently changed - speed chess, chess-boxing, Cheshire Cat chess, etc.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I would consider those 'variations' rather than rule changes.

richardwigley 12y ago

Interesting - in cricket there is a similar problem - the umpire has to judge if the ball was going to hit the wicket (similar problem to going 'over the plate'). They brought in a computer review system in and it also increased how often you were out LBW (similar to 'struck out'). "[ the review system ] has increased the bowler’s potential target area by a remarkable 70 per cent" [1] However, it has improved things because it forced the player to do something rather than block the ball and hope they wouldn't be given out. So, technology helped in this case. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/9166307/Decision-Review-System-made-wicket-70-per-cent-bigger.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/engla...

lennel 12y ago
Interesting article. DRS has revamped the motto "When in doubt not out" considerably. I also think it has helped reverse swing bowlers (Steyn, Harris) more than pure swing bowlers (Anderson) through the length of the innings. Test cricket I do think has resulted more because of drs, but also because teams have become more aggressive (a change made by the great aussie team under steve waugh).
- wycx 12y ago
  It started under Mark Taylor

jimhefferon 12y ago

Equating runs scored with game interest is mistaken.

fredleblanc 12y ago
Agreed. This article does a lot of comparing to 2006, in which a lot of technology has happened — not just on the field but off. From what I've seen, many people "watching" games these days aren't doing just that, they're multitasking with three or four other things: checking feeds, timelines, stats, other game scores, fantasy updates, etc. To me, in-game changes seem to be only a minor contributor. More so, I'd like to hear more about how people are so easily distracted these days. Notifications for this and that, work emails checked all night, game on in the background while surfing reddit or ESPN or whatever. It's becoming extremely easy to forget you're watching baseball at all.

Pxtl 12y ago

Sounds like they need to change the rules, not the cameras. If the strike zone is too big for entertaining play, shrink it.

codva 12y ago

A well played 1-0 baseball game that takes 2 hours to complete is an absolute joy to watch. A 1-0 game that lasts 3:30, not so much. It's not the score or HRs or or the hits, it is the length of the game that is ruining baseball. Get the games back to 2 - 2.5 hours and it will be fine.

rip747 12y ago
you hit the nail on the head. watching a baseball game is like poking your eye with an icepick. there are too many breaks, too many commercials; thus too slow of a pace. they need to pick it up so that a game is shorter and the action is constant. viewers don't have that long of an attention.
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  We are framing it as a show but what about people who actually play baseball for the sake of playing a game ?
  - schnable 12y ago
    Major League Baseball is a business, nobody is playing it purely for the sake of playing a game.
  - jerf 12y ago
    What about them? What exactly are you trying to say?
    - johnchristopher 12y ago
      Changing baseball rules because there are too many breaks and the viewer is likely to find it boring is an acceptable position to hold when you are in the "business". But people actually playing the game and enjoying it (those that aren't on a TV screen) don't need this problem to be solved because they simply don't have it. So "their" game rules are being changed for the sake of baseball seen as an entertainment show, not for the sake of people actually playing it because they like playing the game more than watching it.

prof_hobart 12y ago

Assuming that this is all true, and that MLB wants to do something about it, isn't there a simple solution? Simply raise the actual strike zone to put it in line with where umpires used to judge it.

cbr 12y ago

Why not just shrink the strike zone a little?

peeters 12y ago
It's possible, but it's also difficult. The strike zone is not a static box; it's relative to the batter. Thus, the umpire needs to be able to compare the location of the pitch to the batter himself, and so the zone should be defined relative to points on the batter. Currently, the points of reference on the batter are the knees for the bottom and the team letters on the jersey for the top (though technically it's the midpoint between belt and shoulders). These are convenient reference points. Shrinking the strikezone a bit would yield something like "two inches above the knees to 1/3rd the distance from the belt to the shoulder", which would require more explicit rather than subconscious analysis from the ump.
- NotAtWork 12y ago
  Why not just fully use computers, then? If the problem is that an incomplete switch to technology left us in a chimeric state where we have the worst of both worlds, why not remove one of the two? If we remove the cameras, old umpire error will move the box up; if we remove the umpires from pitch calling, the new computers will have no trouble doing a bunch of math and moving the box up. This seems more like an incomplete implementation of an idea, rather than a fundamental flaw.
  - jerf 12y ago
    Our collective inability to conceive of the idea that perfect enforcement of previous sloppy rules may require the rules to be adjusted is scary in light of the increasing ability of computers to enforce laws, too. MLB is a sideshow by comparison. If even HN-type readers have a hard time with the idea, we're in some deep trouble over the next couple of decades.
  - peeters 12y ago
    > Why not just fully use computers, then? Because that will kill interest in watching the game much more thoroughly than a more accurate strike zone. Viewers like the subtle things, like that moment's pause that leaves viewers on the edge of their seat before the ump rings the batter up on a called third strike. Plus, imperfection causes water cooler buzz much more than perfection (people LOVE complaining about missed calls).

jonifico 12y ago

I'd rather watch golf. OK, that was a bit over the top, but seriously, I don't have all that passion in the sport in order to wait for 30 minutes or so for someone to bat the ball... and see it's an out.

jazzyb 12y ago

If you enjoyed this article and find the unintended side-effects of new technology fascinating, I would encourage you to read anything by the author Neil Postman -- particularly his works _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ and _Technopoly_.

bronbron 12y ago

I think they should follow through on reducing to 7 innings per game (with all the rules about extra innings still applicable). Sure, it would more-or-less destroy relief pitching as a profession, but relief pitchers are basically the placekickers of MLB anyway (people know the really good ones, the rest no one cares unless they mess up royally). It would shorten the game enough to be enjoyable, and people would get to watch their favorite pitchers play entire games, similar to football and basketball (with obvious exceptions for one-sided games).

peeters 12y ago
I expect relief pitching would quickly re-enter the picture. Starting pitchers pace themselves to go 7-8 innings (100 pitches is the unwritten rule, as much as I hate it). They might be able to deliver a higher quality start if they are targeting 80 pitches (or 5-6 innings) instead.

timdellinger 12y ago

The solution is to lower the pitcher's mound... this is a variable that has been tweaked a number of times in baseball already! It has been shown that a higher pitcher's mound favors the pitcher. A lower mound would shift the balance a bit to the batter, leading to more hits, and thus a more exciting game.