The massive increase in ratings for the 2016 World Series was clearly due to the Cubs. That was the year they finally broke the curse.
I still enjoy the game more than you, but yes, the games are too long and contain too many True Outcome plays (Homeruns, strikeouts, walks).
I find it interesting how extremes dominate sports now (the 3-pointer in the NBA and the homerun in MLB). It mirrors what's going on with our politics, where Woke World and Trump World get all the attention whereas the vast majority of society lives somewhere in between the two.
Not to be too clever about it, but today's post and yesterday's speak to each other in an interesting way. As you (rightly) pointed out yesterday, Marx's work is a supremely rationalistic skewering of the apparent rationality of capitalist production and liberal democracy; it's the culmination of the Enlightenment project because it has the courage to reflect Enlightenment thinking back on itself to say, "my god, what great and terrible things have we made." This is why _Capital_, for example, takes the form a critique. In that book, Marx over and over again shows that the supposedly rational things capitalists do—and the supposedly rational explanations of them by their backers among the economists—not only are shrouded in mystification, not only produce huge amounts of misery, but also don't actually make good sense, in the end. So capitalists rationally chasing profits end up changing the concentration and composition of capital in ways that spur periodic crises of overproduction and cause the rate of profit to tend to fall, and so on. As Marx loves to slyly note, the very same capitalists who are obsessed with managing and organizing their factories are running around in a state of anarchy amongst themselves, with no idea where they're steering the ship and no way to steer it if they had a clue.
Anyway, the critique of binder-style baseball you sketch here takes a similar tack. Clearly what the front offices think they've been doing is rationalizing (run) production. There's probably an argument that three-true-outcome stuff is the triumph of a kind of neoliberal reason: maximizing the human capital returns of every individual player while mostly ignoring the fact that baseball is (or was) played by teams. But as you point out, for all the extraordinary advances made through shifts and launch angle and motion-capture-aided pitch design, this has also created enormous problems for baseball that the rationalizers themselves can't fix. They can only chase what they chase and optimize what they optimize. A better way will have to come from a different level of organization and a different purpose.
One upshot of the economic and baseball examples together is that they raise the question of whether crisis, self-defeat, and so on are inevitable outcomes of human attempts to rationalize the ways we do things. Marx with his equations and Freddie with his graphs here seem clear enough in their faith that we can rationally diagnose the problem and see our way toward some solutions. But now we're in deep waters, indeed, and so this cultural theorist will get out of the way of the philosophers and others who really know the ins and outs of this discussion...
Also this is a tangential gripe but I was listening to a podcast about this year's Hall of Fame eligible players and it was almost entirely stats-based debate about fWAR and bWAR and OBPS and shit. Sorry but it's the Hall of FAME, not the Hall of Stats. I think you should get in the Hall of Fame based on vibes. If your career got derailed by injury but you shown incredibly brightly for a few years, if you're a beloved local hero, if you made the diving catch that saved the World Series or whatever - those things should all count as much as being a very good personality void that managed to play 20 seasons free of injury.
One thing that's played a big role in the reduction of balls in play is pitchers throwing harder. In 2021 the average fastball velocity for starting pitchers was 93.4mph. In 2007, only 15 starters (of 127 who pitched 100+ innings) threw that hard! This is in part due to training improvements, including guys just prioritizing velocity. Harder fastballs means less contact and more strikeouts, which raises the relative value of a home run relative to other types of hits (since much of the value of singles is advancing runners - that value goes away when nobody is on base). So it creates a feedback cycle that the team analysts are always going to exploit. So the simplest change would be to move the mound back to reduce the effective velocity of pitches
It's funny to me that you use the NBA as a comparison point because the NBA is increasingly unwatchable - at least during the regular season. Baseball may be slow but at least the players pretend to care about their season. NBA regular season games might as well be the pre-season because players take it about that seriously and it's about that enjoyable at this point.
I've been watching some old Seinfeld episodes since they put them on Netflix. It's really striking how the show's references to baseball really feel antiquated. I'm old enough to remember when baseball was central enough to American culture that these references felt like the most natural thing in the world. But watching in 2021, they feel out of place.
I read box scores. I watch baseball all the time. I take children to MiLB games. I go to college BB, I watch Tampa Bay Rays and Atlanta Braves (WS winners). I even watch Winter baseball and follow spring training--Grapefruit and Cactus leagues. I attend Little League games. It is not boring ever. The stat heads are a sidelight.
One night I saw a NH on a Thursday in Tampa with Matt Garza. I've seen the cycle. Well, not to be a baseball bore, but I am not no one and I watch baseball--and listen to baseball on the radio a lot. It is not unwatchable.
I was physically at Game 162--baseball's greatest night.
my pet idea for making baseball more exciting -- subtract a fielder. Have six fielders plus the catcher and pitcher, instead of seven. Either two outfielders instead of three, or eliminate the shortstop. Instantly the cost/benefit between hitting the ball in play vs a home run changes radically, and instantly athleticism and speed is far more important, both in fielding and in running out hits. A simple change that would shake up the game radically. Of course, I don't expect it to happen.
1) Stats/analytics can improve a sport or make it worse. Football has been improved by the quants' insistence that teams should go for it more on fourth down. Bill Belichick is heavily influenced by analytics and his Patriots, however you feel about them, have been an exciting team to watch. On balance, I think FdB is right that analytics has been bad for baseball although there are some aspects of the game that have been made more interesting to me through the lens of analytics. It's hard to believe that we didn't have pitch counts until somewhat recently, and I remember being disappointed when my team's leadoff hitter got a walk, which is dumb.
2) The length of the games is worse than anything. It's a baseball game, not the Ring Cycle. I don't have five hours to spend on it. I have no idea why owners can't fix this.
I remain a big baseball fan but I basically agree with everything in this article. There are definitely rule changes that I'd like to see but IMO the decline is inevitable at this point- it's a weird, dumb midcentury sport with strange rules that swings wildly between being unbearably tense and exciting and being leisurely and boring. That's exactly why it's good, but that's why its moment in the sun has passed.
Incidentally if you ever feel like it I would love to see a post explaining football to idiots like me. I didn't grow up watching it and I really struggle to grasp its appeal and why it's far and away the most popular american sport.
Something that I rarely see discussed -ever- is the effect of commercials and advertisements on games. You referenced soccer wrapping up under 2 hours, and I think it has something to do with not having 5 minute commercial breaks all the time. If we could figure out a way to play a full inning without a single commercial break, that would certainly shorten the game time as well.
My only small quibble with this is the assumption that teams are dedicated to winning. Another big problem that baseball has (outside of the on the field state-of-play issues you correctly summarized) is that so many teams are not even faking trying to build a competitive team. Flush with revenue sharing and television money, many teams don't have to worry about fielding a competitive teams in order to get people to buy tickets. Half-empty stadiums just aren't as big of a deal to the bottom line anymore. These years-long 90+ losing season rebuilds are depressing a third(?) of the leagues fanbases. That doesn't seem sustainable either. We'll see if the MLBPA has any success fixing any of those issues in the next CBA. I'm not holding my breath.
"Or you could decide to become a fan of this instead."
Well, my understanding is that basketball is undergoing the same kind of thing, with the 3-pointer becoming the dominant shot in much the same way that you say baseball's only hit is the home run. The problem is that ever since the industrial revolution people who care about numbers more than people have been trying to turn people into machines and it's ruining literally everything. Sports are just relative latecomers to this unwelcome development.
I think that the problem is the ball. When I was a kid, a major league ball did not bounce very high if you bounced it on concrete. Now it's almost a superball. Go back to a less resilient ball, and it will stay in the park more.
I think the ball also should be slightly bigger, because pitchers' hands have gotten bigger, and that enables them to throw faster with more spin. They wear out their arms trying to miss bats. It takes a lot of pitches and a lot of time to finish a game.
With a less resilient ball that is slightly bigger, pitchers will get used to batters making contact and putting the ball in play, not over the fence. There will be more action. My hope is that pitching won't be so intense and hard on the arm, in which case fewer pitchers will be used per game, which will help speed things up.
Agree with all of these critiques. Another one is that a full quarter or more of teams in any given season aren't even trying to win. Who wants to watch anybody play the Pirates?
There are a few bright spots and maybe there will be cyclical swings. A team I follow, the St Louis Cardinals, have been mildly successful with a pitch to contact and play great defense model. They are "moneyballing" it with some old pitchers like Wainwright or Lester that don't throw hard any more but have some control. Cardinals are still doing 3 true outcomes on offense, though. Would love to see a lot more doubles, triples, steals, etc.
Part of the demise among young fans is partially related to youth sports. My son played Little League from 5-12 and was a good player some years but got worse comparatively as he became older and ultimately lost interest. The players that are good right away play all the good positions, receive all the coaching, and end up on two or even three teams at a time. Usually those same kids are sons of the various coaches. The focus is on winning and being the best, and anybody who doesn't serve that goal doesn't have nearly as much fun.
The massive increase in ratings for the 2016 World Series was clearly due to the Cubs. That was the year they finally broke the curse.
I still enjoy the game more than you, but yes, the games are too long and contain too many True Outcome plays (Homeruns, strikeouts, walks).
I find it interesting how extremes dominate sports now (the 3-pointer in the NBA and the homerun in MLB). It mirrors what's going on with our politics, where Woke World and Trump World get all the attention whereas the vast majority of society lives somewhere in between the two.
"Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls...it's more democratic."
-Crash Davis (Catcher, Durham Bulls)
Not to be too clever about it, but today's post and yesterday's speak to each other in an interesting way. As you (rightly) pointed out yesterday, Marx's work is a supremely rationalistic skewering of the apparent rationality of capitalist production and liberal democracy; it's the culmination of the Enlightenment project because it has the courage to reflect Enlightenment thinking back on itself to say, "my god, what great and terrible things have we made." This is why _Capital_, for example, takes the form a critique. In that book, Marx over and over again shows that the supposedly rational things capitalists do—and the supposedly rational explanations of them by their backers among the economists—not only are shrouded in mystification, not only produce huge amounts of misery, but also don't actually make good sense, in the end. So capitalists rationally chasing profits end up changing the concentration and composition of capital in ways that spur periodic crises of overproduction and cause the rate of profit to tend to fall, and so on. As Marx loves to slyly note, the very same capitalists who are obsessed with managing and organizing their factories are running around in a state of anarchy amongst themselves, with no idea where they're steering the ship and no way to steer it if they had a clue.
Anyway, the critique of binder-style baseball you sketch here takes a similar tack. Clearly what the front offices think they've been doing is rationalizing (run) production. There's probably an argument that three-true-outcome stuff is the triumph of a kind of neoliberal reason: maximizing the human capital returns of every individual player while mostly ignoring the fact that baseball is (or was) played by teams. But as you point out, for all the extraordinary advances made through shifts and launch angle and motion-capture-aided pitch design, this has also created enormous problems for baseball that the rationalizers themselves can't fix. They can only chase what they chase and optimize what they optimize. A better way will have to come from a different level of organization and a different purpose.
One upshot of the economic and baseball examples together is that they raise the question of whether crisis, self-defeat, and so on are inevitable outcomes of human attempts to rationalize the ways we do things. Marx with his equations and Freddie with his graphs here seem clear enough in their faith that we can rationally diagnose the problem and see our way toward some solutions. But now we're in deep waters, indeed, and so this cultural theorist will get out of the way of the philosophers and others who really know the ins and outs of this discussion...
Also this is a tangential gripe but I was listening to a podcast about this year's Hall of Fame eligible players and it was almost entirely stats-based debate about fWAR and bWAR and OBPS and shit. Sorry but it's the Hall of FAME, not the Hall of Stats. I think you should get in the Hall of Fame based on vibes. If your career got derailed by injury but you shown incredibly brightly for a few years, if you're a beloved local hero, if you made the diving catch that saved the World Series or whatever - those things should all count as much as being a very good personality void that managed to play 20 seasons free of injury.
One thing that's played a big role in the reduction of balls in play is pitchers throwing harder. In 2021 the average fastball velocity for starting pitchers was 93.4mph. In 2007, only 15 starters (of 127 who pitched 100+ innings) threw that hard! This is in part due to training improvements, including guys just prioritizing velocity. Harder fastballs means less contact and more strikeouts, which raises the relative value of a home run relative to other types of hits (since much of the value of singles is advancing runners - that value goes away when nobody is on base). So it creates a feedback cycle that the team analysts are always going to exploit. So the simplest change would be to move the mound back to reduce the effective velocity of pitches
It's funny to me that you use the NBA as a comparison point because the NBA is increasingly unwatchable - at least during the regular season. Baseball may be slow but at least the players pretend to care about their season. NBA regular season games might as well be the pre-season because players take it about that seriously and it's about that enjoyable at this point.
I've been watching some old Seinfeld episodes since they put them on Netflix. It's really striking how the show's references to baseball really feel antiquated. I'm old enough to remember when baseball was central enough to American culture that these references felt like the most natural thing in the world. But watching in 2021, they feel out of place.
I am not no one.
I read box scores. I watch baseball all the time. I take children to MiLB games. I go to college BB, I watch Tampa Bay Rays and Atlanta Braves (WS winners). I even watch Winter baseball and follow spring training--Grapefruit and Cactus leagues. I attend Little League games. It is not boring ever. The stat heads are a sidelight.
One night I saw a NH on a Thursday in Tampa with Matt Garza. I've seen the cycle. Well, not to be a baseball bore, but I am not no one and I watch baseball--and listen to baseball on the radio a lot. It is not unwatchable.
I was physically at Game 162--baseball's greatest night.
https://talkingpointssports.com/mlb/game-162-10-years-later/
my pet idea for making baseball more exciting -- subtract a fielder. Have six fielders plus the catcher and pitcher, instead of seven. Either two outfielders instead of three, or eliminate the shortstop. Instantly the cost/benefit between hitting the ball in play vs a home run changes radically, and instantly athleticism and speed is far more important, both in fielding and in running out hits. A simple change that would shake up the game radically. Of course, I don't expect it to happen.
Two quick thoughts:
1) Stats/analytics can improve a sport or make it worse. Football has been improved by the quants' insistence that teams should go for it more on fourth down. Bill Belichick is heavily influenced by analytics and his Patriots, however you feel about them, have been an exciting team to watch. On balance, I think FdB is right that analytics has been bad for baseball although there are some aspects of the game that have been made more interesting to me through the lens of analytics. It's hard to believe that we didn't have pitch counts until somewhat recently, and I remember being disappointed when my team's leadoff hitter got a walk, which is dumb.
2) The length of the games is worse than anything. It's a baseball game, not the Ring Cycle. I don't have five hours to spend on it. I have no idea why owners can't fix this.
I remain a big baseball fan but I basically agree with everything in this article. There are definitely rule changes that I'd like to see but IMO the decline is inevitable at this point- it's a weird, dumb midcentury sport with strange rules that swings wildly between being unbearably tense and exciting and being leisurely and boring. That's exactly why it's good, but that's why its moment in the sun has passed.
Incidentally if you ever feel like it I would love to see a post explaining football to idiots like me. I didn't grow up watching it and I really struggle to grasp its appeal and why it's far and away the most popular american sport.
Something that I rarely see discussed -ever- is the effect of commercials and advertisements on games. You referenced soccer wrapping up under 2 hours, and I think it has something to do with not having 5 minute commercial breaks all the time. If we could figure out a way to play a full inning without a single commercial break, that would certainly shorten the game time as well.
My only small quibble with this is the assumption that teams are dedicated to winning. Another big problem that baseball has (outside of the on the field state-of-play issues you correctly summarized) is that so many teams are not even faking trying to build a competitive team. Flush with revenue sharing and television money, many teams don't have to worry about fielding a competitive teams in order to get people to buy tickets. Half-empty stadiums just aren't as big of a deal to the bottom line anymore. These years-long 90+ losing season rebuilds are depressing a third(?) of the leagues fanbases. That doesn't seem sustainable either. We'll see if the MLBPA has any success fixing any of those issues in the next CBA. I'm not holding my breath.
"Or you could decide to become a fan of this instead."
Well, my understanding is that basketball is undergoing the same kind of thing, with the 3-pointer becoming the dominant shot in much the same way that you say baseball's only hit is the home run. The problem is that ever since the industrial revolution people who care about numbers more than people have been trying to turn people into machines and it's ruining literally everything. Sports are just relative latecomers to this unwelcome development.
I think that the problem is the ball. When I was a kid, a major league ball did not bounce very high if you bounced it on concrete. Now it's almost a superball. Go back to a less resilient ball, and it will stay in the park more.
I think the ball also should be slightly bigger, because pitchers' hands have gotten bigger, and that enables them to throw faster with more spin. They wear out their arms trying to miss bats. It takes a lot of pitches and a lot of time to finish a game.
With a less resilient ball that is slightly bigger, pitchers will get used to batters making contact and putting the ball in play, not over the fence. There will be more action. My hope is that pitching won't be so intense and hard on the arm, in which case fewer pitchers will be used per game, which will help speed things up.
Agree with all of these critiques. Another one is that a full quarter or more of teams in any given season aren't even trying to win. Who wants to watch anybody play the Pirates?
There are a few bright spots and maybe there will be cyclical swings. A team I follow, the St Louis Cardinals, have been mildly successful with a pitch to contact and play great defense model. They are "moneyballing" it with some old pitchers like Wainwright or Lester that don't throw hard any more but have some control. Cardinals are still doing 3 true outcomes on offense, though. Would love to see a lot more doubles, triples, steals, etc.
Part of the demise among young fans is partially related to youth sports. My son played Little League from 5-12 and was a good player some years but got worse comparatively as he became older and ultimately lost interest. The players that are good right away play all the good positions, receive all the coaching, and end up on two or even three teams at a time. Usually those same kids are sons of the various coaches. The focus is on winning and being the best, and anybody who doesn't serve that goal doesn't have nearly as much fun.