both ohtani and trout homered today. and they lost to the tigers. that tweet is always right.
1 Like
The radio host is Doug Gottlieb.
No shit. What a fucking tool.
That’s a problem with baseball. Need to lessen the impact of three true outcome players and put more balls in play for more action.
I can’t believe he’s still employed. Giant douchebag and always has been.
Casual fans love Hot Takes from raging asshole sportsball commentators. This is the norm, not the exception.
NYC teams went 4-0 yesterday. I’m gonna call it right now - Mets and Yankees win out the rest of the season.
No argument from me there. However, it’s not clear to me that baseball isn’t just an inherently “flawed” game that tilts toward TTO by design. Banning the shift might claw some of it back, but teams will still change alignment up to the extent it’s permitted. If Bill James’s numbers are correct about the number of hits robbed by the shift in 2021, the difference in league batting average would change from .244 to .249, but again it’s not clear to me what not_shifted means here. One thing they could do is eliminate cheap home runs by playing with outfield geometries, because fat guys tomahawking 15-degree homers shouldn’t be a thing. Make them run.
Yeah, that’s not super easy to quantify. People have been playing “shifts” since at least the 90s, but they usually weren’t so dramatic.
I suspect this is the case.
The immediate problem is that the folks who hate sport of baseball the most, the MLB owners, are in charge. They’ve proven themselves to be a bunch of idiots just throwing stuff at the outfield fence and seeing what sticks. My head hurts at all the stupid ass rules they’ve introduced over the last few seasons, and I shudder at the new ones they’ll inflict upon the sport in the next few seasons.
Another issue is that pretty much anything that tends to lesson TTO will tend to increase game time. The owner fools are obviously working at cross efforts here too.
Now, if I was made Magical Commissioner, I would…
What’s the rationale for this? I would think that more TTO means longer games. Lots of walks and strikeouts increases pitch counts, with longer at bats and more pitching changes.
Move the fences back 30 feet.
Let’s increase the size of the outfield so we get more doubles and triples. I mean the home run is nearly as frequent as the double and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes more frequent than the double at some point in the near future.
Need robo umps but that would draw out games even longer I think. Called strike three error rates are still insanely high, although there may be some kind of feedback mechanism that speeds up games if it would tighten the strike zone and force pitchers to come at the zone instead of fishing off the plate for bad calls. Also the catcher framing effect makes my blood boil.
1 Like
The fact that robot umps aren’t a thing is embarrassing. How is hell is the umpire union that strong?
I mean there’s a goddamn strike zone on the TV screen calling them better.
3 changes for baseball:
-
Move pitcher’s mound back by 1.5-2.5 feet. Every reliever can throw 95+ with consistency, gotta give the batters some chance to catch up.
-
Move the fences back. Batters seeing the ball better means more solid contact and hard hit balls, gotta raise the bar for what leaves the yard.
-
Move the base lines from a 90 degree angle to a 110-120 degree angle. More balls in play, more fair territory to cover to compensate for the fact that every outfielder can run a 4.6 40 nowadays.
Just deaden the ball will do the same thing. Will take players time to change from trying to swing for max power, but I think over-time if no everyone could hit 20 HRs you’d start to see players adjust their stroke.
Also lower the mound would help with Ks.
2 Likes
Lower the mound and deaden the ball were my first two thoughts.
Also some type of pitch clock that starts 1-2 seconds after the batter has one foot in the batter’s box.
1 Like
My considered opinion is that baseball was basically “played wrong” for the first ~150 years, and that things like TTO, shifts, frequent pitching changes are corrections to that wrongness. That TTO, shifts, and a zillion pitchers are largely independent of each other. And that the lessons these corrections address cannot be unlearned.
For example, eve4ryone was taught forever that putting the ball in play is far superior to striking out. This is certainly true when playing “beer ball” with friends, so it does make a certain amount of intuitive sense, That’s how it was valued at the professional level for ~150 years. But, at the professional level, nobody is ever going to believe this going forward.
Would outlawing shifts change the modern batters calculus here. Above ITT it was pointed out that might bring about a .005 increase in BA. That wouldn’t be near enough to change batters calculus to “put it in play” vs “don’t care about striking out”.
All outlawing the shift, again IMO, would do is put marginally more runners on base, which would tend to marginally increase game time. Off the top of my head, everything that has been publicly suggested regarding TTO has the same dynamic.
3 Likes
They have been experimenting with pitch clock in the minors, so think at least that one is likely.
Next season a pitch clock and banning the shift are a lock. Prolly bigger bases too. The pitch clock is used in the minors now, and it’s by far the biggest bang-for-buck regarding decrease of time of game.