used to enjoy the contest of pacing between batter and pitcher. baseball is a lot less relaxing now with that fucking clock ticking down in the corner of the screen. if you must have a clock at least stop fucking showing it on the overlay graphics MLB
:baseball-crank:
Don’t care about the pitch clock, but I am devastated about the shift ban.
You are supposed to tell me that the hitter getting paid 10 million dollars to hit a ball can’t adjust to not hitting the ball where the entire team is standing?
It was the last chance we had to get the game back to something more than strikeouts and homeruns. God how I hate the home run
yeah I'm a fan of small ball personally. grinding, steals and good placement hitting
So much more exciting, I’m dying to see either a triple or a triple play live. Something actually rare these days.
Watch the pitch clock just lead to 8pm starts or longer commercial breaks….
Honestly one of the things they could have done to speed the game up was cut ad time. Obviously something that would never happen.
I hate ads as much as the next communist. But, aside from the post-season, broadcasts have never increased the time between innings in the way you're implying. The relatively brief down time of inning breaks has pretty much always existed. The players have to switch from fielding to batting and vice-versa, the pitcher has to throw a few warm-up pitches, and the catcher has to put their pads back on. It' a natural part of the game that has existed since the 19th century. One day the human race will live free from the scourge of capitalist advertising and enjoy baseball the way Fidel intended :fidel-bat:
More than likely in our lifetime, baseball will end up being a pay-per-view service where you buy viewing rights (like boxing), but there will still be ads.
I could see that for the NFL because there are comparatively so few games per (regular) season (17 games per team with 32 teams), but an MLB regular season has 162 games each for 30 teams (and the All-Star game too haha). Unless an individual game costs less than $2 in 2023 money, no way are most consumers even thinking about paying for that imo
they literally did this in 2019, the time is like 2 minutes or something and you can't cut it much lower because guys need to get in position and the pitcher needs to toss some warmups
I do wish we could kill the ads and just see an ambient camera view of the field between innings, but that's what we can fight for in the revolution
I completely forgot about the change in 2019.
Once I went to a game where they turned a triple play, but I was looking down at the food I was eating trying not to make a mess of myself when it happened lmao
That's Japanese-style baseball. Manufacturing runs. Swat at the ball and run like hell.
BORING. Baseball fans like dingers! They want to watch power hitters DESTROY the ball.
the shift ban has encouraged more small ball and less three true outcome play. the problem with the shift is that it was created by computers, and those same computers said that the best way to beat the shift was to try to hit a home run every at bat.
banning using your short stop as a second right fielder means the stat dweebs can start to value slap hitters and small ball guys, and so far this season is working
In general I'm with you. It feels like an (especially) arbitrary tactical restriction.
However, your second point is kind of ironic: you have it backwards. Hitters started swinging for the fences (more than they ever did previously) precisely because of the shift ( :think-about-it: can't use the shift if the ball leaves the park).
The shift came about because Stat Cast data is available for every MLB player since 2015. Stat Cast tracks all balls in play. Team would set up their defensive positioning plan for each batter on their opponent's roster for every individual game based on this data. You can view each player's data for yourself on Baseball Savant. Select a random player and see his spray chart. Pick a previous season since this one just started; there will be more data points available in order to give you the best idea of how this all works.
Regarding strike-outs and homers, the other such outcome, in that it does not involve fielding, is walks. All three went up year in year out (if I recall correctly) between 2015 and 2022. See this video for more on this: Joey Gallo Personifies the Extremes of Modern Baseball.
Finally, while this isn't necessarily relevant with regard to the statistical aspect of this thread, Joey Gallo is actually one of my favorite players. At his best he's exciting to watch in the batter's box and in the field, and I was disappointed to see him struggle during his tenures with the NY Yankees and the LA Dodgers after he got traded from the Texas Rangers before the 2021 trade deadline. In general his performance seems to be on the upswing this year after he signed a one-year contract with the Minnesota Twins.