Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws off subsequent swings.
If the few players who are using this bat tend to hit that spot naturally, it makes a lot of sense to modify the bat to accommodate it, within the rules like they've done here. Hitting is super, super difficult especially today with how far we're pushing pitchers. Love seeing them try to innovate.
Plus, reminder, most of the team isn't using it. Judge clobbered the ball that day with his normal bat. Brewer's pitching is injured, and the starter that day was a Yankee last year and the team is intimately familiar with his game.
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.
This is all just to say that batters are falling behind and there’s an argument that it hurts the on-field product from an entertainment perspective since balls in play are what we ultimately watch for - if torpedo bats make it more likely that players can bat for higher averages by barreling up the ball more consistently, it will be good for the game.
Other alternative proposals include lowering the mound (famously done in the 60s), adjusting the ball (eg lower seams, which makes it harder for pitchers to generate spin and makes the same spin rates less effective), and so on.
One good (bad?) thing is that to some extent pitchers are starting to reach a biomechanical wall, evidenced by the greatly increased rates of Tommy John surgery, though that is partly also an effect of better surgical techniques and recovery times.
Point is - it’s complicated.
>In short, you would rather have a lower BA and a higher home run rate even if it means a higher K rate, since home runs (and 2Bs) are so significantly more valuable than singles, and fly outs are also much more valuable than ground outs (or really, less bad) due to the opportunities for sac flies and the risk of double plays.
Again, I see this as the tail wagging the dog. It's easy to point to home runs as entertaining, but they a ultimately rather boring. For die hard fans, you want more hits that end up in play, with more strategy, and more opportunity for mistakes and drama. You're not going to get that from home run derbies.
Again, I know it's complicated, but ultimately, most sports organizations face an extremely complicated paradigm. It's fun to follow complicated sports where anything can happen, but it's hard to follow the same sports if you're not already into them. The way you solve this is to make the sports incredibly accessible so people visit games easily and cheaply as entertainment. The American sports system doesn't allow this because there is no relegation system, and so the fan bases are too large to allow the game to be accessible to most people. You end up making decisions that make television more watchable, and by making things "important" by "breaking records." This ultimately dilutes the game because it makes breaking records less relevant over time.
We've got to the point in golf where someone setting an all time PGA scoring record is basically a yawn-fest, because everyone knows they're not playing the same game.
A few years ago a friend of mine from the UK made the observation that American Football would benefit greatly from a relegation system... every season I have the same reaction. By about the 4th week of the season, the NFL bifurcates into legitimate contenders and everybody else. You end up with Thursday nights and late season games that nobody gives a shit about because it's gonna be a blowout. For that matter - the last 2-3 weeks of the season the playoffs are already set, so half the league has no reason to even play - and the quality of the product on the field matches this. Some kind of two-tier system would go a long way to fix this, and might also help with the larger problem of the bridge between the college and pro games. At the moment, the NFL is maybe the only league that doesn't really have a "minor league" or development league - its the colleges, and between NIL and the portal system, colleges aren't necessarily producing pro-ready players.
In those few games where they sit starters, the backups absolutely want to do their best to get starting jobs, the games aren’t uncontested.
Guys are always playing for their jobs if nothing else.
There are only a few games where you can put out tape and careers are short in the NFL. So even if you're on a completely losing team there's plenty to play for.
Any given Sunday.
The NFL has also been extremely successful in leveling the playing field via salary cap and draft, such that franchises beset by woe can become title contenders within a single year. The most recent of many, many examples is the Washington Commanders. Detroit came before that.
And no, the playoffs are not "already set" before the last 3 weeks. This is completely inaccurate, as anyone who watches the NFL and reads about the near-infinite playoff scenarios at the close of every season already knows.
And lastly, only a Brit with no understanding of the economics of American football would even propose that relegation could work in this sport. It can't. The sport costs far too much for that and any such "relegated" teams would instantly collapse financially. NFL rosters contain 53 players with a practice squad of 17 and gigantic support staffs which absolutely could not survive without the full levels of NFL TV contract funding, stadium revenues, and other financial flows that full NFL membership provides.
And lastly, anyone who is paying any attention to the NFL draft over time knows that there is no issue with colleges producing pro-ready players.
For ball games it sounds mostly fair.
There is a weird situation in cycling where any attempt at improvement (even in riding postures) getting banned by the UCI has become a meme and each year's announcement generates a fest of joke videos.
That would be the other end of the spectrum we're trying to avoid.
It lacks generational fandom, because there is no place for hope in farm teams.
Depends if you are a fan of the Major league team, imo. I enjoyed the Round Rock Express when they were a part of the Houston Astros. I still remember being really excited to see Hunter Pence in Round Rock on his way to the Majors. Lost interest in RR once it became the Texas Rangers farm team thou
There's a counter-example in Cricket.
The game used to be a 5-day long battle with daily skirmishes and tactical changes required according to the ebbs and flows of the weather, the players, the score each day. Sometimes you could win just by exhausting the other team, sometimes you could gain advantage by changing your play style transiently to force the other team to react. The players all wore white uniforms, national pride was wrapped up the success of the country's team and being a Good Sport was the highest ideal.
Then, the powers that be created a shorter variant, the One-Day Match. The players started wearing brightly coloured uniforms, the crowds grew louder and entire categories of strategy were rendered useless as the game finished in 20% of the time. Viewership increased, cricket became "exciting" and the players sometimes achieved rockstar status usually reserved for sports that more easily captured the Australian sporting imagination like swimming and athletics.
The trend was clear: the entertainment value of short-form cricket games were spectacular. In came a myriad of new sponsorship categories for things like domestic household goods ("It's Australia's Favourite Air"), energy drinks and Sports Utility Vehicles that would appeal to the demographic of viewers who only had a "day's length investment" in the game. They started playing popular music in between game pauses and the Gentlemanliness of the game's spirit gave way to Victory as the highest Ideal.
Then, Cricket had it's "YouTube Shorts" moment -- an even more abridged version of the game that only lasted 20 overs per side was born. This hyper-speed version of cricket favoured fast results, flying balls and fan participation like never before. There was now fireworks and rock music and after-parties and more. It was All Killer, No Filler. The goal was to Smash It Outta The Park as much as possible, and every time they did it, a quick ad-break got to play on TV while the fans in the crowd got to sing Seven Nation Army while cheering on whoever caught the ball this time. The domestic competition is even called the "Big Bash League".
Australian Cricket's archetype went from Twelve Magnificent Fellows in Baggy Green Hats to what feels like a monster truck rally with branded personalised beers, bucket hats, and brand-safe team rivalries. Sometimes they even drive a Ute truck around the stadium at half-time.
What I'm trying to say is that popular demand or the voices of those who claim to interpret it say that Spectacle Isn't Boring. They love the exciting moments, and maybe are only willing to tolerate the slow and strategic sides of the game to get to the next Home Run. This trend towards shallow spectacle seems to be happening to all forms of entertainment and I suspect that baseball is not immune.
I watch a spectacle, dreadful, terrible. Every time out is a good reason to blast loud, annoying music and show a group of dancing children on the jumbotron, for a cheerleading exhibition of people who are over 60 or under 13, for a competition in which the girl, or the middle-aged man in attendance, tries to score a bucket with bio-mechanically unsound movements that herald an expensive visit to the orthopedist, for a toss from the in-house entertainers either of T-shirts or socks that gets retirees, who are struggling to get out of their chairs, all excited.
Cops on the court checking that the retirees themselves are not throwing a fit, tickets to be scanned, metal detectors ringing for a key in the pocket, a $15 draft beer. When I leave, I'm exhausted, mortified, wondering who made me do it.
Give me back the sport of 50 years ago, or never invite me again.
Also I don't think your assertion that batters have "fallen behind" pitchers holds up. Shohei Ohtani just became the first player to have 50 homers and 50 stolen bases.
If pitching evolves faster than hitting, does that mean the response time of the hitter becomes shkrter? Can't you move the pitcher further away to give the hitter more time to respond?
https://static.odealo.com/uploads/auction_images//6441500406...
But in comparison these new bats look exactly like the old ones...
The other crisis baseball faces is pitcher arm health. The mere act of throwing a ball 90-105 mph is damaging to the arm, and it only gets worse the harder you throw. Every pitcher is chasing velocity and spin rate since the resulting success and money is undeniable. Pitchers frequently need major surgery and extended year+ time recovering as a result.
If the mound is moved back or lowered pitchers will respond by doubling down on chasing velocity just to stay level, leading to more injuries and UCL replacement surgeries.
The same incentives apply to other options to give batters an edge, like juicing the ball or shrinking the strike zone. Pitchers will respond with velocity and blow up their arms.
They seem, from the outside, like they'll do this no matter what. Move the mound back, allow torpedo bats or don't, do you think pitchers will intentionally pass up the money and success?
They’re similar to things we know, but different enough that they haven’t been optimized out of reach by normals, or at least perceived as such, and both have a relatively cheap barrier of entry to get started.
I think we may find 20 years from now the dominate sports have changed up a bit. I have heard that the NFL and MLB for instance are worried about the incoming decline of their sports because they aren’t nearly as popular with people under 35 compared to basketball and other up snd coming sports
For me, Roger Federer's style represents tennis at its most beautiful. His all-court game feels effortless and graceful, almost like a dance. But from a court-level view, it's more of a high-speed chess match built on calculated aggression, constantly pressuring opponents and waiting for the slightest opening to strike a point-winning shot. That level of sophistication and precision wouldn’t be possible without modern racket technology.
I still feel emotionally tied to classic matches from my childhood, especially Federer versus Nadal. But there's no objective reason, because tennis keeps getting better. People worried finesse was disappearing, but players like Alcaraz have brought back drop shots and clever cat-and-mouse tactics against deep-baseline defenders like Zverev and Medvedev. It’s a technique that was once considered too risky to rely on consistently.
In golf, tennis, baseball, basketball, running, & any other sport will keep evolving as technology & athleticism improves. Clinging to older styles feels more like holding onto the past than genuinely appreciating progress. If you can’t enjoy Curry hitting daggers in the Olympic finals or Kiplimo breaking 57 minutes in a half marathon, maybe the problem isn't with the sport itself. Maybe it’s the comfort of past memories holding you back from appreciating what’s happening now.
People who are passionate about either sport will find them less and less interesting, but 1) most of you will keep watching anyway, and 2) the sports can afford to lose you for the parts you won't watch if it increases the total amount of "seconds people will watch" enough by drawing in enough new eyeballs.
I think the toughest part will be equipment - golf bats cost a fair bit to make but perhaps a price limit might help fix that. You could define club classes akin to how sailing has standard class boats. You could even require that participants make their own for an added twist. I'd keep the current standard balls for now.
Why stop at the bats and balls? What about the format? You could do three holes with a very short shot clock and go straight to the 19th for a bladder wrecking session involving a golf themed drinking game. Instead of running in a Triathlon, do nine holes after the swim and before cycling to the finish. You could replace the cycle phase with knocking a polo ball from a pony along the course to the finish. The swim could be ... yes ... underwater croquet!
Could be a lot of fun even if it never takes off - and that is what any past time ought to be.
I still play with my grandfather's persimmon clubs about 25% of the time.
It's just a coordination problem... but once the dominant professional association the game changes forever, because the vast majority of people just want to emulate the pros, because they grew up dreaming of becoming pro.
Golf is finally trying to do something about this with rolling back the golf ball so that it will have diminishing returns with more power, but the real damage was done in the early 80s by allowing hollow clubs to make the sweet spot bigger, which lead to it becoming absolutely huge in the 90s.
Again, once you go down this road, you'll wake up in 20 years wondering what happened.
So why do I feel the need to dislike golf? I'm a white skinned, middle aged male and my job title is Managing Director. Obviously I should be a passionate small white ball smacker. No I'm not.
I love the idea of golf but hate the ... environment. That is still on me. Our wedding ding dong was held in a hotel that majored in golf (Woodbury/Devon/UK - Nigel Mansell's place), 19 years ago.
I think that golf needs to go back say 300 years. A bloke sporting a kilt would slyly whip out a hidden club on a Sunday (shock, horror) and whack a ball/stone away. Just for the absolute hell of it.
Golf needs to find its joy again. If it does, then I'll join in.
My blogs name is “Wigs on the Green” because that’s and archaic term for a fistfight, and I wasn’t to write like I was willing to burn every bridge if I thought it was good for golf, environmentalism, and the culture.
I learned on muni’s and went to graduate school in Scotland where I learned the snooty aspects of golf are almost exclusively a North American phenomena.
"Wigs on the Green" - love the name ... OK it looks like Georgian/Regency so roughly 16-17C when wigs were popular and they would fly off during a proper scrap.
Maybe there could be a coordination method to only play with blades and persimmons. Then you could mark it in when reporting your score for handicap calculation. That's the make-it-or-break-it decision. If there's a way to get recognition or compensation for playing with worse equipment, then people might do it.
Shorter courses could also be more interesting this way. Then you would have more places to play closer by, eliminating travel etc.
There's some precedent already. Drivers have limitations and most manufacturers are under them (ie just at the limit for things like moment of inertia) but drivers that are outside regulations are available to buy online. Also horizontal distance metering is allowed in competition, but not vertical distance. Most rangefinders have a visible external switch to disable vertical distance. One could expand from those two places where we by regulation already use sub-optimal equipment.
I don't want to squash anyone's dreams but I feel like "emulating the pros" undermines the "spirit of the game" a lot. Most sports are literally "bet I can" style games that have then been refined and refined. They don't intrinsically matter to life continuing.
When you've experienced "sledging" in a low skill amateur series and the defence is "the pro's do it" then the fun of the game is gone...
even better- i get to suck on so many shots. but sometimes - glory and feels.
another thing i like to celebrate when doing new sports ks starting with the crappiest gear available. it works and i learn. eventually when i upgrade, i can appreciate the new features and tech. or it’s bogus and doesn’t matter.
probably inappropriate but i find this phrase encouraging - it’s not the arrow, it’s the indian.
When you play, you can play with whatever equipment you want, with a like minded group of players. Keep the game as “pure” as you want or use “The Sure Thing” clubs from top golf. The changes only matter on TV and then specifically if you compare that product to years or decades back. MLB is an incredibly poor example of maintaining purity. the most sacred records in the game were totally shattered, repeatedly, with modern technology and pharmaceuticals all in order to increase TV viewership and no penalties at all. To pretend there is some preservation of purity they are keeping these guys out of the Hall of Fame for a while, but the teams didn’t have fines or lose wins or draft picks or even have any of these guys suspended when everyone knew they were cheating.
It’s this intersection between taking part and entertainment where this odd gatekeeping happens. I hated hydraulic disc brakes and EPS on race bikes, until I tried it, the stuff is great but for myself I still ride bikes without electronics and rim brakes sometimes. I pinch the barbs on my hooks when I fly fish, I know others don’t and probably catch fish that I don’t, but for me I pinch the barbs. Oddly, I find it acceptable to use completely modern lines and rods and can throw a fly way better than any angler could in years ago. I’ve been able to find more satisfaction competing against myself with my own criteria than worrying about the purity on tv.
I guess if you want to compete with them then there is that.
I agree completely with your synopsis, but I'm still a bit torn on whether it is a bad thing... I first golfed using my parent's 1970s era wood headed, aluminum shaft clubs that were extremely limited - it really was entirely about the golfer, not the equipment. Years later when I picked the game back up a bit - it's clear the equipment is doing a lot of work to make the user better. That said, at least at the amateur level - most of us still aren't great golfers, and given that many golfers are older and have physical limitations, it is a bad thing if better equipment improves their game and potentially gives them a few more years of enjoyment over the old stuff?
I have a parallel view on skis - man those old straight long skis were hard on knees and so many skiers were lucky to still be charging after 40. Lotta knee surgeons made good money in the 80s! Then along came parabolic skis and made us all better and safer skiers - almost anyone can shred in today's skis because they are frankly easy to ride. In that case - the technology was a positive innovation.
Your last paragraph nails it - the magic of baseball is its simplicity. Baseball games should take a long time and be an act of leisure. The idea of putting a baserunner on third to speed up a game is an abomination in the same way the addition of something other than a wood bat would detract from the skill of the player swinging it. So I'm with you - this could be some kind of equipment arms race that won't end well.
And I guess that's where I wonder if golf might be a sport where equipment should be restricted at the professional level, the same way that metal bats are not allowed in MLB. Here's another weird way to look at it - you can ingest whatever you want and go play on the company softball team, but an Olympic athlete takes an aspirin and they might get a lifetime ban. It doesn't seem unreasonable to deliberately restrict professional athletics in ways that might constrain it and yet allow us to gauge the athletes in their purest form. Some in the world have advocated for the idea that we should remove all constraints - take all the drugs, use all the physics and science to enhance performance, and let's really see what we can do. It's a fun idea, but like one of the parent posters alluded - we might not like where that all ends up.
Babe Ruth’s wood bat was 44 oz.
Today’s wood bat in MLB are ~33 oz.
The bat Babe Ruth used was so heavy he literally had to swing the bat different than how players can swing the bat today.
There’s a short video on this here: https://youtu.be/P_uiHUJg7zs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_bat
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Fishing has even undergone this technical change.
FFS (Front Facing Sonar) has completely changed the sport of fishing tournaments, since now you can literally identify where to cast (direction and depth) to catch a fish … and you can even target the fish by their size.
So the difference between Babe's bat and today's is about the weight of 55 quarters (a roll and a half). Years of doing laundry at laundromats have given me a keen sense of how much handfuls of quarters weigh, so I find this actually pretty handy.
Just in case:
* A nickel is exactly 5 grams.
* A penny (1982+) is 2.5 grams.
* A dime is 0.08 ounces.
* A quarter is 0.2 ounces.
* 5 rolls of nickels = 1 kilogram
* 2 rolls of quarters = 1 pound.
Why did the U.S. Mint switch between even metric and even imperial units? Probably has to do with the changing metals in those coins. That said, the new small dollar coin is 8.1g / 0.286oz which makes no sense at all. It is, however, exactly 2mm thick.
Surely any strategy around loading up bases to stack the deck for your strongest hitter remains, it seems like this levels between hitters more than from hitter to pitcher?
Not at all! Always swinging for home runs is a recipe for a lot of strike outs. Singles and doubles win games.
Though, maybe not for long.
If you don't like a particular thing in golf, then don't use that particular thing. And if it destroys the entertainment value, then don't watch that.
This is very similar to how speedruns for video games have multiple categories with different rulesets, and you pick whichever one you like best.
That is not at all how tournament/competitive golf works. And that's what sets the tone for the whole sport.
With modern golf, yes. This is only because of the advent of television. Match-play used to dominate the game, and is still advocated my many (myself included), which allows direct competition, and introduces risk-reward strategy depending on how the other player plays.
Very different from the direct interaction you have in a game like Baseball.
It's the clubs and everyone knows it but nobody wants to admit it because the club manufacturers are the money behind the game.
You give a pro a persimmon driver and 70's blades and it doesn't matter if they're hitting a modern ball or the pre-pro v's from the 90s... you can't hit it out of your shoes because you won't be able to hit the sweet spot.
Yes, the ball is a problem, but it's not the problem. The problem is exactly that we've allowed the sweet spot to become too big, which has led to the end of the finesse aspect of the game.
pros are going to be better with any type of equipment, and they're going to be better at finesse, but doesn't a bigger sweet spot allow amateurs to play with more finesse than they could otherwise? it means more reliably being able to fade, draw, etc. rather than slice and hook, and it means more people can enjoy the game.
Here is Sam Snead in his prime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjEJgC5nYXw
Here is Bryson warming up today: https://www.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/1joeiap/vijay_just_lo...
It's like absolute night and day. It used to be a combination of balance and power. Now it's just brute force. The way Bryson is playing just isn't possible with a persimmon.
Indy car is every team essentially driving the same car. (The standardization you’re talking about)
F1 however, establishes guardrails for what teams can & cannot do. And then lets the teams innovate within those definitions.
So all the tech improvements are doing is letting the average duffer keep it closer to the fairway and maybe have some fun, instead of getting so frustrated they quit.
So much time and frustration wasted with inferior equipment that sucks the life out, or requires a path of practice and mastery most people don't want for hobbies or things they enjoy doing.
If YOU want to use the least helpful tools and make up the difference with knowledge, skill and practice that's OK. To each their own and if you enjoy that then 100%. Just remember some people enjoy things in a lot of different ways.
There's innovation happening on both ends.
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.
I know its unpopular opinion basically anywhere, but I detest most professional sports that have enough money in them for enough time. It literally and visibly corrupts game. Football (and hockey, basketball etc.) became monopoly game long time ago. Cycling became much worse re doping than bodybuilding ffs, literally everybody is dosing and the game is only about better evasion of newer compounds from ever-evolving tests. And so on.
There is very little former spirit of why games like olympics started. Just read about first few olympics how they were done. Very respectable achievements even if not the best times. But times should be largely irrelevant, it should be way more about team efforts, camaraderie, and internal motivation. Now its just chasing sponsors, promotions, routing to instagram accounts in bikinis for female athletes. I get it, it generates tons of cash, but I do sports and like them for sports, nothing else.
In contrary I still love sports cca on fringe, where sportsmen do it more for the love of it than anything more pragmatical. Thats real passion, not manufactured ones with big redbull or adidas logos all over the place and contracts running in millions or more.
When I extend it to personal level - I like running just by myself, no watch to track me. I know how much effort I do, every sporty person does very well. I don't care about my times, laps, energy spent, progression, getting better every week and so on. That's not a good reason to do it and sustain long term (apart from unhealthily competitive persons but thats another story).
On the other hand, a real MLB pitcher is not just throwing fastballs down the middle.
How cheap could one prototype a 'programmable' pitch machine that can handle the scenarios one would want to practice against?
My intuition tells me this whole thing is stupid and a fad, sure you might get slightly more mass behind the ball on perfectly barreled swings, but you get so few of those on the year already, were they already home runs of XBH on the old bat? And what are we losing on mishits with the skinny end of barrel, since after all hitting is more than just perfect swings caught in the right spot. Seems like more of a push towards feast or famine, 3 outcome baseball, which I personally just ain't a fan of.
Maybe that's where advanced baseball bats will end up eventually.
https://www.therunningweek.com/post/carbon-plate-running-sho...
Always wondered why the NFL doesn't ban sticky gloves.
You could probably accomplish something similar by strictly capping spending per team to force people to do real engineering and optimize their play accordingly, but the result would be a very different sport that would appeal to a very different (and probably much smaller) audience. Formula One and Robot Wars come to mind.
This is simply not reflected very well in how professional sports are structured. If this were really a priority teams wouldn't be privately owned. It has extremely negative effects on each sport, easily dwarfing the influence of performance enhancing drugs.
Anyway, I would absolutely love to see what the human body is capable of. To me, hearing a ban of performance enhancing drugs is a guarantee of a more boring and less competitive game. I understand the impetus of protecting children, but we're already buying and selling humans. How good of an influence was this to begin with?
But ultimately you run into issues like the colorado rockies where the owner just views it like an entertainment venue and basically refuses to invest in the team in any rational way. The entire model of competiton-through-investment doesn't make as much sense once you realize you can place butts in seats without a competent team to root for.
(And personally, i think it makes a lot of sense for the team to own itself, or a state to own a team, or something like that. I think the Green Bay Packers have a setup like this.)
It's also not possibly to divvy players rarely—sometimes you run into people who are truly extraordinary, and exorbitant salaries can help balance this, to debatable efficacy.
Edit: yup, https://www.packers.com/community/shareholders. Kind of an orthogonal issue to disproportionate spending of teams, though.
It almost sounds like corporate ownership could help with this, something like shareholders owning the team, and then the management is obligated to do what’s best for the shareholders (and somehow that should be to win). It seems like part of the problem might also be:
- sports teams make money by selling tickets and merchandise
- teams sell tickets and merchandise by being entertaining, which may or may not involve winning
Suddenly a line was draw between have- and have-nots based on whose parents could and would buy this stuff. (My club, like many, practiced in a small municipal pool and it was very budget friendly. The fancy suits would be a large fraction of the annual cost to a family.)
In my opinion banning the suits was great for the sport at the age-group level, and thus the sport in general.
Sports should be for those doing them, and then if people end up caring and commercial competitions end up viable, then that's a bonus but we shouldn't design them for entertainment of the audience.
Customization of equipment should always be fine unless it increases injury risk or completely destroys the game.
Amateur sports like colleges or olympics could continue to have the traditional rules to keep things "competitive", but might as well let the pro-sports just go full tilt.
Do you not see the contradiction here? Professional wrestling is huge. It has very loyal fans. The fans pay for pay-per-view and live event sales. They buy merch. Nobody attends a WWE event expecting Greco-Roman style wrestling. They all know exactly what they are getting.
This is because winning in this game is seen as an achievement, and a natural and reasonable achievement-- after all, there are many world records that nobody cares about.
There's a reason someone might prefer a sport over seeing a circus performance.
You’re arguing that others should not be allowed because you don’t like it.
All the major sports alter their rules every year to increase their entertainment value. Here is a short, non-exhaustive list off the top of my head: NBA flopping penalties, NBA player resting policy, MLB base stealing rule changes, MLB free base runners, MLB pitch clocks, NFL changing overtime rules almost every year, NFL challenges and reviews, etc.
There is nothing wrong with not having much knowledge of sports, but it might be worth reconsidering your strident opinions if that's the case.
But I agree that sports at the elite level aren't about health. It's not unusual to be doing things that at least risk injury.
I think these kinds of rule changes are destructive though. They certainly are in tennis.
The problem here is of course that you probably won't get the best athletes in the world to sign up for that. So you'd be watching desperate and quite mediocre athletes who feel they have literally no other option in life.
The spirit of fair competition (and thus ordering teams according to some predefined metric) is very important to most sports.
Are you suggesting the rules of sports are a natural property of the universe? It’s all completely arbitrary. That’s kind of the point: we watch people perform these arbitrary tasks and then we celebrate.
Custom drugs seem like a step too far IMO. As far as the suits go that's to level out body shapes as an issue.
It's called worker safety.
F1 introduced a cost cap to stop the top manufactures from being able to test and develop everything they want to.
F1's regulations are very strict and completely artificial, just not quite so strict as to allow only 1 car. This is both for safety and cost control. In Schumacher's days, why did ferrari dominate so much? Because they have a private circuit, a much larger budget than anyone, and the racers flew back to the factory to spend long day after long day of testing right next to where the parts where being manufactured. We'd not have a full grid if anyone had to compete with budgets like that
Would you be willing to be the guinea pig?
It's no different than asking if workers should be allowed to work without PPE.
The problem was not offered as your sibling comment as a forced decision. Some people choose to juice, others do not. That same logic applied to if you want to do it, here's the waiver to acknowledge it was your decision. I can feel sorry for someone's family for being related to a dunce, but no empathy is required on my part for the dunce.
Why in the world would this have any bearing on the conversation? What point are you trying to make?
If the former, I regret to inform you: you are a psycopath.
If the latter, then please go read some Nassim Taleb and refrain from opining on what is acceptable risks for others unless you yourself are willing to pay for the consequences.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu /submission grappling is like this right now
The biggest events don't test. That's adcc and ibjjf tournaments only test the winners of black and belt and they can skip the testing somehow
Personally I think it's bad for the sport and hobby. Downstream effects where it normalizes ped use for hobbyist tournaments and delusional parents have their kids on steroids and try. The best don't win neccesarily, just who handles the drugs the best
Sanding and finishing are subsequent steps.
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".
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.
Totally ignorant about baseball, but would wearing thick padded gloves help? Do major leaguers build up calluses to help?
[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.
> “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!
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.
Is this one of those situations where the Yankees are even still paying part of his salary?
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.)
There is a marked difference between hitting it in the sweet spot and not.
I imagine it will go the way of the brilliant strategic innovation a few years back of shifting defenders heavily depending on the batter's statistical hitting patterns. It'll get banned because it makes the game more boring. If home runs happen all the time, they lose their excitement. I imagine it's quite expensive or impossible to shift the outfield walls back farther in most MLB stadiums.
I actually would love more of a no holds barred evolutionary battle in the MLB [1] but I know it's not gonna happen.
You see something similar going on in football, right now, with a play known as the "tush push". It's not a particularly complex play, but for some reason the Philadelphia Eagles can pull it off astoundingly better than anyone else in the league. In response, several teams are petitioning rules to outlaw it. All it takes is enough teams to vote for banning this play and it's gone.
I think people generally take the perspective of "it used to be illegal, so it's reasonable to make it illegal again" in a way they don't when a team is just doing something new.
And then pitchers started taking 1 minute+ to throw a dang pitch and it was ruining the flow of the game. So they started enforcing it.
As a European that just woke up from a nap, I was having a very hard time imagning a soccer move called "tush push" that was so successful it had to be outlawed...
Often lost in the debate is the fact that the Philly QB is uncommonly athletic for his position and that Philly typically has a top-5 O-line on any given year.
If no other team sees an advantage from using torpedo bats, it would be a lot like the brotherly shove.
But first we'll have to see if this is a passing fad. In baseball, pitchers evolve pretty quickly and usually lead the batter-pitcher arms race.
I'm guessing it spread pretty quickly through the league and be used by a minority of hitters, and the advantage will flatten out. So a .210 hitter may hit .230. That is a big difference no doubt, but compare the game to when leading batters were hitting .330.
I looked this up and am still unclear why only the Eagles seem to be able to perform this maneuver effectively, other than having an exceptionally strong person at the front?
You'd think it'd be easy to watch game footage and just replicate what the Eagles do, but other teams haven't been able to get the formula right.
This is the reason that banning it is controversial. Why make it illegal when most teams can't make work well?
A rugby scrum is highly regimented, it's not the optimal way for 3 (or 5 or 8) guys to push the other team back, it's the optimal way to do it given that they must be bound in a particular way.
A rugby ruck or maul is more freeform and maybe some of the techniques from those can be applied to NFL, but small differences in rules make a big difference there too.
On a different question, though, sure, the Eagles have a massive and strong QB who is perfect for this play, but other teams have huge guys playing other positions. Why not have a different quarterback for your QB sneak / tush push plays? Specialist players for niche situations is a trademark of the NFL compared to other professional sports, and this play doesn't rely on the element of surprise. You don't need to have your best player at passing the ball also be the strongest at breaking the line.
Good point about using different players, and I even think I've seen that a time or two. As for why not always do it, I'm only guessing, but there may be an inherent advantage in preserving the possibility that it won't be a "tush push" play (I mean, maybe not for the Eagles, because they're so good at it, but for other teams who aren't). Like, maybe it keeps the linebackers a step or two deeper and increases the likelihood of success; or, if they provoke a "tush push" defense that opens up a more-promising play then the QB is best placed to run the counter. I don't really know, though.
Josh Allen on the bills also tries this and is very strong but it's harder for him to get as low.
The tush push shouldn’t be allowed because is almost impossible to defend, sort of an automatic 1 yarder once you get there. The snapping team always have advantage because they know the start timing and the defense always has to react a split second later.
Tom Brady also had similar success with the standard old QB sneak during his career and I don't recall attempts to ban that.
1. Make the kicker kick from farther out in that case. Pretty simple change.
2. 1 yard is kind of nothing in this league now when the referees have so much leeway to change yardage. They get the spot wrong ALL the damn time now. So what if it's automatic for some teams. And so what if the offense has the advantage there. That's sport. Same thing in soccer on penalty kicks, the kicker has the advantage there knowing where he's going to kick.
([1,2] For those that don't get the snide reference to cheating.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/astros-cheating.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Astros_sign_stealing_s...
But seriously, they stole a World Series and faced zero real consequences. It’s like watching a gang of bank robbers walk free because the judge thought, “Well, gosh, they seemed like nice young men.”
Imagine if John Wilkes Booth had been caught, and the government just said, “Eh, let’s move on. No hard feelings.” That’s the Astros. MLB gave them a juice box and a pat on the head.
Total joke. Crooks.
I don't know why anyone would be upset about this, but baseball fans tend to be curmudgeons.
TV ratings show otherwise - in every instance so far, HRs put butts in seats, and defense makes people change the channel. TV and ballpark analytics show this to be true. The common thought is that's why the league ignored abuse during the steroid era so much.
edit - This is also the driving force behind multiple 'juiced ball' conspiracy theories.
While this can be exciting for individual at bats, it becomes pretty boring if it's too common. This is because it invalidates every role except the pitcher and batter, and removes a lot of strategy from the game. While this may be fine if you only watch the occasional game, it can get really dull if you watch a lot of games every season.
Home runs are a lot of fun! One of the things that makes baseball exciting is that every pitch has the potential to result in a home run. This adds a lot of tension to the game, and helps keep things engaging. But when home runs become too prevalent, it eliminates other fun aspects of baseball, and makes the game one dimensional and dull.
> During the dead-ball era, baseball was much more of a strategy-driven game, using a style of play now known as small ball or inside baseball. It relied much more on plays such as stolen bases and hit-and-run than on home runs.
This was likely caused by reusing baseballs more, so it should be easy to recreate,
> Before 1921, it was common for a baseball to be in play for over 100 pitches. Players used the same ball until it started to unravel. Early baseball leagues were very cost-conscious, so fans had to throw back balls that had been hit into the stands. The longer the ball was in play, the softer it became—and hitting a heavily used, softer ball for distance is much more difficult than hitting a new, harder one. The ball was also softer to begin with, making home runs less likely.
> I mean I find the whole infield outside of maybe a triple play more boring than all or nothing home run, intentional walk, and strikeout.
The problem is that the strikeout or walk is much more common than the home run.
Descriptions of close plays are fun. Homers are flashy to watch and easy to understand. The latter may catch more casual-viewer eyeballs.
However, one could argue the same thing about Curry and 3 pointers. My original argument suggests that seeing someone makes loads more 3 pointers would be boring. Yet it was very exciting to see him smash through previously unthinkable records. On the other hand, that was not driven by technological change…
I disagree. Go watch some of the old games before 3 pointers. Teams would pack the defense into the key and the game would get really boring. It was also brutal--driving to the bucket on a packed defense like that would get you mugged.
3 pointers force defenses to move outward. Illegal defense penalties also helped.
But if they become a lot more commonplace, then the allure will depreciate over time.
It's not about watching home runs; it's mostly about watching a competitive game.
I have no strong feelings on these bats, but there are concerns other than just fairness from one team to the next.
The new rule says there has to be two infielders on either side of of second base when the pitcher delivers They still shift just not as much
So you're saying baseball gets more boring when people get better hitting the ball?
Sounds like there's something fundamentally wrong with the sport.
Imagine if, somehow, soccer players got really good at scoring goals from midfield, such that a very high proportion of goals were scored after just two touches. That's exciting or interesting for, like... one game, then it's worse than before.
Are you there to watch people score goals, or to watch people play the game?
If there's a home-run more at-bats than not, they get boring. You do want plenty of solid hits (but you also want strike-outs! And walks! And bunts! You want diversity!) but you don't want a lot of them to be homers.
A home run is only exciting if it's uncommon, otherwise it's less interesting than most other things that can happen when the ball's hit into fair territory.
If this jabroni was in charge of sports, there'd be no forward pass, no three-point line, no fosbury flop. Sports should be frozen in a specific moment of this guy's choosing. MLB batting averages have been on a steady, multi-decade decline as pitching quality and strategy has improved[1], so God forbid we do something to add some offense.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/mlb-vanishing-offense-allstar-b48...
He briefly alluded to a valid point but went no where with it about how it may affect little league and college with less money, but that is completely separate from MLB teams using millions of dollars for custom bats.
Bad players should continue to suck unless they put in the effort to be better. If you're a batter and can't hit the ball with the right part of the bat (especially experienced guys like Chilsolm) you're simply bad at your job. This is like getting a crappy NBA player and putting some Flubber on his shoes[1]. In all sport the tools are going to push performance a certain amount of but this feels beyond the limit for me.
But that is what they are doing? The bat is within size and volume limits. Many bats come in slightly odd shapes or weight distributions. Is it because this is "optimized" that it's bad?
Also, golf club technology basically does the same thing. Everything is about making a bigger sweet spot. Oversize drivers and irons didn't seem to ruin the game.
I'm not convinced how much of the offensive onslaught was due to the bats either, but all of the sources I've heard/read have indicated that 5 players in the Yankees starting lineup have been using the bats:
https://apnews.com/article/torpedo-bats-yankees-6ac6c797ea93...
https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/article/which-mlb-players-are-u...
Drivers have COR and volume limits, etc. Professionals are dropping blades and playing game improvement irons. Dropping 2i and playing 7w
In fact you could argue golf should be more like baseball in that lower skilled players and amateurs use large metal clubs whereas pros use small wooden clubs.
I briefly looked into it after playing Golf Story on the Switch, which features an area where you have to use a set of historical clubs (sometimes with different names from the modern versions!) and found such leagues.
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be a ton of courses really designed for shorter-distance games, which makes sense when most players are rocking space-age tech clubs, but does make getting involved in it challenging.
- Par 3/Pitch & Putt. Should be able to reach the green from the tee on most or all holes.
- Executive. Smaller course with more par 3 holes and shorter par 4s. Less than 5,000 yards and makes for fast play.
- Championship. Full sized course that most people are familiar with. These have gotten longer as equipment has evolved.
There has been a resurgence in par 3 and executive course openings. Especially par 3 courses. I agree that a faster round that’s more about shot making than power is fun.
TPC Sawgrass is the closest to a perfect pro course (PGA National second I guess) since it was designed specifically for it. I think a course perfectly optimized for pro play would be very different from what most people would expect.
A bat needs to be round, a solid piece of wood, less than a certain length and less than a certain diameter. The actual shape is not defined.
The physicists and swing coaches and trainers and teammates have probably been telling Volpe and Chisholm for almost 2 decades to make contact at the tip of the bat instead of closer to their hands. But the solution turned out to be adjusting the bat and not the swing. Fascinating.
I can sit in my office and deliberate on the location of buttons and indicators on the screen and come up with the objectively best arrangement per ISA 101 high-performance HMI standards, but if operators keep making messes because their intuition about that system is wrong, maybe I should just change the way the machine operates to match.
It’s the single hardest skill in competitive team sports in my opinion.
> Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It's 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week - just one - a gorp... you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week... and you're in Yankee Stadium.
(Crash Davis)
They have a lot riding on that existing swing. Pro baseball is an unforgiving endeavor in which small edges add up over the course of a six month season, and the rewards for skill follow a power law distribution such that being just a bit better has millions of dollars attached to it, but becoming just a bit worse can also mean losing millions of dollars.
Changing swing path to get contact on a slightly different portion of the bat on a particular kind of pitch, possibly when looking for another pitch, perhaps just in particular counts, requires a lot of offseason work and carries no guarantees. The risk is similar to a from-scratch rewrite where the old code is thrown away; a very large portion of the time the resulting hitter ends up unplayable in the majors.
Tweaking the bat shape, on the other hand, is a micro-optimization akin to a bug fix whose rollout is behind a feature flag: undoing it is as easy at pulling a different bat from the rack.
Its not that they just need to get closer to the ball, their estimation if where a ball will strike their bat is slightly off.
That resonated with me as I turned back around and gazed at the elegant, efficient, and inscrutable-and-difficult-to-debug Reactive-Extensions-based backend I was working on. Maybe Task<List<T>> would have been "better" after all
Could we end up with custom bats for each player designed around where they tend to hit the ball?
In fact they have undergone a similar evolution. You can see that in the variations history on the Wikipedia page [0], as well as the photo of the old bats versus modern ones [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_bat#Variations
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_bat#/media/File%3AHi...
“ That was dumb… They should have saved them for the playoffs…”
… and I can’t help but agree.
Physics nerds, would a “larger contact area” give the baseball more velocity?
I’ve been speculating that moving the mass lower effectively increases bat speed because its a “shorter bat”, but all of the commentary is acting like the larger barrel is “more power”.
I’d expect larger barrel increases odds of contact, not increased power transfer?
(But I also think of a car with bike diameter wheels and that could obviously change the power transfer)
I’m not an expert but I think it has more to too with reducing vibrations along the bat and increasing the efficiency of energy transfer
Again not an expert
From what I can tell this is more about making it easier to make solid contact. Even if it lowers the moment of inertia, it’s more important that the ball goes on a decent trajectory rather than e.g. directly into the ground. A bigger radius means the ball will be exit closer to the plane of the swing.
Without question, one of the high points of childhood was going out and trying to make that bat pop.
A lot of long-term baseball fans “get it” when it comes to creative tech in the game and it’s fun to see something new with bats.
The only thing I want to point out is that baseball (and all big sports) have always been a technological arms race and always will be. It’s just part of it.
It was nice of them to reveal this early in the season—I would have loved to see the drama if they revealed it during the postseason so other teams didn't have time to catch up.
However, there were serious issues with cost and accessibility. These suits cost a lot of money to develop and manufacture, which was passed on to the swim teams. The LZR Racer could cost $550 per suit, with each suit only lasting a handful of races before requiring replacement. This gave a huge advantage to wealthy teams and swimmers with good sponsorship deals, and talented swimmers without a lot of financial resources were left in the dust.
Then there's the basic question of "what skills do we want to measure and reward in this sport?" With swimming, it got to the point where races were won not in the pool, but in the R&D department of swimwear companies. The swimming organizing bodies felt that swimming competitions should be focused on the athletic ability of individual swimmers instead, so advanced swimsuits were banned.
Don't get me wrong, I like F1 a lot, and part of that is the cool cutting-edge technology the teams develop. But for most sports, heavy technological development doesn't lead to more exciting competition, it just adds barriers to entry.
> This gave a huge advantage to ... teams and swimmers with ... sponsorship deals
Is the former caused by the latter or caused by performance enhancement?
Speedo sponsoring all likely medal winners into their new product seems like a reasonable explanation. Given that I've never heard of another brand, I assume speedo has a fairly large budget for sponsorships. I don't know anything at all about swimming though, just wanted to throw that out there.
You're paying coaches, nutritionists, doctors, managers, etc. What's an extra $550 every now and then?
Sure, maybe a less-well off swimmer can't afford to train with the suit in every practice swim like a wealthy team/swimmer can - but that wealthy team/swimmer already has advantages in everything else.
> Rule 79 – Hand Pass > 79.1 Hand Pass - A player shall be permitted to stop or “bat” a puck in the air with his open hand, or push it along the ice with his hand, and the play shall not be stopped unless, in the opinion of the on-ice officials, he has directed the puck to a teammate, or has allowed his team to gain an advantage, and subsequently possession and control of the puck is obtained by a player of the offending team, either directly or deflected off any player or official. For violations related to “closing his hand on the puck”, refer to Rule 67 – Handling Puck.
> 79.2 Defending Zone - Play will not be stopped for any hand pass by players in their own defending zone. The location of the puck when contacted by either the player making the hand pass or the player receiving the hand pass shall determine the zone it is in.
From the 2023-2024 rulebook [1], because it came up first in search. I don't think hand pass rules have changed. Basically, if your stick breaks when defending, you can go ahead and use your body to play and fling the puck to your teammates as appropriate (but not out of the defensive zone). OTOH, if your stick breaks when you're in the offensive zone, you better skate to the bench and either grab another stick or change out. Sometimes you'll see another player give their stick to the player with the broken stick and then go change.
[1] https://media.nhl.com/site/asset/public/ext/2023-24/2023-24R...
Isn't that specifically banned?
>> and the play shall not be stopped unless, in the opinion of the on-ice officials, he has directed the puck to a teammate [...] and subsequently possession and control of the puck is obtained by a player of the offending team
Other easy tech that was banned is seats with a lip on the back, so you could push your butt up against it to drive more power. And the “puppy paws” handlebar position - more aero but banned outside of time trials.
[1] https://www.bikeradar.com/news/uci-bans-supersapiens [2] https://www.uci.org/pressrelease/the-uci-bans-repeated-inhal... [3] https://www.bicycling.com/news/a61677020/carbon-monoxide-reb... [4] https://archive.ph/XMrVg
I guess other (banned) examples would be the LZR swim suits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer) and the Nike Vaporfly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Vaporfly_and_Tokyo_2020_O...)
I think I am also right in saying that you can buy a road bike that is better than the ones permitted in the Tour de France.
Recumbent bikes have been banned since 1934[0]! Remarkable machines. I'd love to ride one in a civilized location one day.
I'm sure cycling and golf have been doing things like this since forever.
(In a normal racing rowing boat, the athlete sits on a sliding seat, while their shoes and the rigger with the oarlock are fixed to the boat. In the 1980s, boats were developed that had the shoes and rigger as a unit that slid, while the seat was fixed, which was more efficient as it meant that the boat hull and the athlete's mass moved together.)
On the other hand, first carbon-fibre oar shafts and later asymmetrical "hatchet" oar blades were adopted near-universally within a few years of their invention.
They are exploring the idea of rolling back the ball but the implications of that are endless.
Players like to endorse gear because people want to play what the best players play. They think it will make them better. So it’s hard to endorse gear you aren’t playing with.
Theres also data that suggests longer hitting guys will be more dominant with a rollback. I don’t know but I guess the nerds figured out how to optimize golf and it’s all about distance. The days of precession and artistry may be gone. I’m not sure how to defend against bomb and gouge and not sure if we should.
"Unfortunately, the MLB reviewed the torpedo bats after the game and somehow had zero issues with them", isn't a question; adding a question mark just makes me read you with an obnoxious up-tone.
Players diets, sleep schedules, low altitude flights…
Maybe so, but the demand is just not there with so many play ending up as home runs or strikeouts.
I think the key innovation that enabled this new profile is the accuracy and quality of data being collected.
Edit: Here's an article talking about some of the bat tracking technology that MLB has deployed in recent years: https://technology.mlblogs.com/introducing-statcast-2023-hig...
I.e. it's a move that may well have a counter move.
And if the season proves that these bats are indeed juicier than others? Probably MLB will let it lie. Offense is down enough already and all of the recent rules changes are intended to support offense.
Also, we haven’t given pitchers a chance to adapt. Perhaps pitching outside (now a thinner part of the bat) will take the force out of the hit leading to softer contact.
Kinda suggests the Yankees aren't all great at playing baseball, except for hitting home runs, but that's all that really matters.
A new tech will be allowed to stand if everyone can take advantage of it equally AND it does not make the sport too boring.
Gotta get that ad and sponsor money.
By concentrating weight in the center of the bat hitters will be less able to protect the outside and inside of the zone.
I don't expect to see the torpedos past June.
If you look at an exhibit of bats over time, you will see that size, weight, width and shape have all varied quite a bit between players even if on the same team and era, and this makes me skeptical that some new shape is really going to invalidate every baseball stadium’s length and field overnight. If it does, MLB will outlaw it. See aluminum bats for example.
I’m not saying MIT physicists can’t help hitters with going deep, I bet they can. But given the tools at their disposal - bat shape in this case - I’m skeptical that they are going to create a new era of hitting for all. I guess we’ll see soon.
Indeed, and lets also test against other ''new'' bat designs and materials i.e. graphene, carbon fibre, etc. so that we can hopefully ban them pre-emptively if they show improvements that are statistically above the latest trends in human effort and talent.
I wonder if they couldn't have non-round profiles. Might be able to steer the ball, like a golf driver or add spin like some sort of racket.
> The bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length. The bat shall be one piece of solid wood.
[0] https://mktg.mlbstatic.com/mlb/official-information/2025-off...
if it leads to more solid hits and plays in the infield, i'm for it.
unclear which one, i look forward to finding out more.
The typical baseball bat's balance - very different from say a sword's - has always felt wrong to me, and i've just chalked it up to my not being a baseball player and thus not understanding. The new shape seems to improve the balance toward the centuries established for swords, etc.
What makes a spectator sport "serious"?
The average MLB game had almost 30,000 spectators in the 2024 season[1]. That's a lot of statisticians.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2024/10/01/mlb-atten...
What the heck is this confident assertion based on?
That said there’s actually a fair amount going on during any one play; who’s warming up in the pen? Where are fielders shifting to? What’s the lead off look like? television and radio both edit most of this out to focus on the pitcher or the hitter, which I think makes baseball less interesting to watch or listen to than to attend. Of course you might want to bring some extra entertainment to the park, just in case
Otherwise this is just more proof that Yankees fans are the same kind of people who would cheer when the casino wins another slot machine pull.
This will make the team owners either do their own analysis, or come up with yet more excuses to hide the fact that while they could afford it, they won't.
