Everyone Wants to Go Home During Extra Innings, Maybe Even the Umps | Hacker News Reader

Everyone Wants to Go Home During Extra Innings, Maybe Even the Umps

fivethirtyeight.com

88 pointswglb97 comments

One idea I'd like to see spread from competitive gaming is the willingness of the powers that be to adjust the sport to improve it. I don't know the exact details of how rules officially get changed in sports, but man does it seem painfully slow for any changes to be made (overpowered pitchers in baseball, no video reviews in soccer, etc).

This is something I think MMA does really well, as the rules are mostly in place to prevent permanent injury and the "meta" seems to evolve nicely on its own. (I'd still like to see a version of MMA with no gloves - it would probably be much safer).

I don't always agree with changes that come to my particular game of choice (Starcraft II) but I think the steady stream of small adjustments is a boon that other competitive venues should learn from.

I really think as eSports audiences begin to grow comparable to and threaten to overtake traditional sports (I predict 2022), conventional competitive rules are going to start adjusting with the goal of "keeping the game interesting to play and watch", rather than legacy. The younger eyeballs are rapidly being siphoned into eSports and mainstream events will have to start doing something to get their attention.

> younger eyeballs are rapidly being siphoned into eSports and mainstream events will have to start doing something to get their attention

What do the data on this look like? Anecdotally, I know lots of sports fans and very few e-sports fans.

The esport fans I know have nearly zero overlap with the traditional sports fans. I don't think either is currently worried about losing their audience to the other.

I'm a huge sports fan and League of Legends eSports fan, and I try to watch Overwatch Legaue but just don't think the game itself is fun to watch. I don't think there are lots of people like me, but we do exist!

For me, I actually wish esports were more like traditional sports when it comes to game changes, rather than the other way around. There's no chance for truly deep strategies and specializations to develop when the rules are changed every couple months.

The problem with esports is that they can't often stay extremely static.

They tend to be much more unbalanced than traditional sports. If a "cheese" is found, then the game quickly becomes all about microsecond timing at pulling that strategy off, and no real innovation or change, which at least to me is boring to watch.

That being said, there are esports games that don't really "change" all that much or at all. Games like super-smash-bros melee or super Street fighter ii come to mind, where the "rules" have been fairly stable for a while now.

keep in mind that esports are still quite young. the top three games right now seem to be csgo, LoL, and dota 2. none of these games have lineages that go back more than twenty years. my guess is that the first twenty years of what became baseball, soccer, etc were even more unstable in their rulesets.

i think your take is correct in the long run, but developers have a long road ahead of them before they are creating truly balanced games that can endure decades without change.

I would suggest looking into Counter Strike as an eSport then... the esports scene for CS has been around since early 2000's and has a rich history of strategy as well as skill. The changes that Valve make to the game are always in respect to the professional game play and always cater to the high skilled arena.

I'll believe your statement when playing video games increases your chances of getting laid...

The imminent destruction of American football; however, is likely to change up the sports landscape. Football soaks up a lot of bodies that are going to be searching for a different sport.

I'd personally like for baseball to change even slower than it does. The continuity is a huge part of its appeal to me.

Continuity of players and teams you mean, or the pace of the game?

As a lifelong baseball fan, I'm curious what is too fast.

Not the commenter you're responding to, but given that they said they'd like slower change, "continuity" probably refers to continuity in the rules/the way the game is played.

Watching a high school baseball game this weekend, I was thinking of how little the rules of the game seem to change and also how slow performance gains are relative to other sports. Occasionally innovations like the infield fly rule come into play. Small tweaks of inches to the height of the mound seem to be the great majority of changes. Gridiron football grows faster and the style of play changes every year. Baseball is just baseball.

These are the subjective impressions of a fan who mostly dropped the game after the ‘95 strike. Perhaps the slow pace of the game shapes my perception.

As a normal geek, my entire knowledge of baseball comes from DS9 - hence the "infield fly rule" immediately ringing a bell.

If the player touches the umpire does that player get kicked out of the field?

The umpire has lots of discretion. An ejection could well occur if the contact was intentional, but it wouldn't happen if it's an accident while, say, an fielder is chasing a fly ball faster than the umpire can get out of the way.

Not if that player is Robin Ventura.

Isn’t the infield fly rule essentially patching a bug once it was discovered that it could be exploited? I don’t know much about baseball, but it doesn’t strike me as a rule change that would effect the game negatively in any significant way.

That’s a reasonable way to look at it and not negative at all. Umpires do have some discretion as to what’s an infield fly, but it’s part of the game — and better than without the rule.

The only subjective element is ruling "ordinary effort" by an infielder. As for fair or foul, the rule is automatically void on a foul ball, although the umpire should explicitly call "infield fly if fair" on a fly that may land foul.

I literally saved my team's season one year when I wrote an upheld protest of a misapplication of the IFR. We won the replay, that got us into the playoffs, and we won the championship.

how slow performance gains are relative to other sports

Stephen Jay Gould's analysis of why nobody hits .400 anymore is relevant here, I think. His argument, basically, is that there have been massive performance gains over the past 75-ish years, just in a way that deceptively depresses many of the statistics we compare to from earlier days.

The overall ceiling of physical performance for a human hasn't changed much in that time frame, and generally doesn't seem to change much in modern developed countries. The occasional people who win the genetic and upbringing lotteries today have much the same physical capacity as their predecessors of decades ago. But thanks to improved training, conditioning, coaching and selection, the average major-league player today is vastly better than in, say, the 1940s or 50s. Which means the gap between the very best professional players and the average professional player is much smaller than it used to be.

So take Mike Trout as an example. He's consistently the pick for the best player active in the major leagues today. He put up a .326 batting average in his rookie year, and that's the highest he's gotten as a major-league player. Which seems bad compared to Ted Williams' .406 in 1941 (the last time any major-league player had a batting average of .400 or better in a full season).

But, of course, Ted Williams faced the average player of 1941, and Trout faces the average player of today. The gap between Trout and the average major-league player today is far smaller than the gap between Williams and the average player in 1941. And if Trout got to face 1941-level competition, he'd be absolutely slaughtering them, as we can see from his earlier statistics: in his final minor-league stint before being promoted to a full-time major league player, he put up a .403 average.

To really appreciate Mike Trout, we have to turn to more modern statistics rooted in a better understanding of what leads to winning baseball games. Only three players have had a season at 10 or more fWAR in this millennium, and two of them -- Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez -- had careers tainted by steroid use. The other player to do it is Mike Trout. In 2012 he was good for 10.0, with the next best player being the Giants' Buster Posey at 7.6 and only 26 players in the major leagues breaking even 5.0 fWAR. In 2013 he reached 10.1, and only 25 players were at 5.0 or higher.

But, of course, modern baseball statistics are unfamiliar and often impenetrable to people used to batting average, home runs, RBIs, and (for pitchers) ERA and win-loss records. Which means it's hard to explain how we know that Trout -- who, by virtue of being on the Angels, has only been in the playoffs once, where his team got swept in the first round -- is so amazingly good at baseball, and how good the average player now is, which in turn means the perception, based on the older stats, is that players must not have gotten much better since the old days, or may even have gotten worse.

Thank you for taking time to provide useful perspective.

part of the reason may just be that there's only one season a year, and you can't reasonably change the rules in the middle. i assume game devs are perfectly willing to push out balance adjustments more than once a year.

likewise there's limited opportunity to playtest -- MLB usually does this during spring training, for things like video reviews, the designated hitter, speed-of-play things, and so on.

Also. There's the minor leagues. Officially, those are (high to low) AAA, AA, high-A, and low-A. Then there's extended spring training, summer leagues, and associated leagues in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Independent leagues, college, high school, and youth leagues down to 4 year olds. International major leagues in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Cuba, and Mexico.

There's a lot of room to test out new rule changes, but it would take a lot of effort to get them adopted every where.

There are some common rule changes that only make sense in leagues to limit length and discrepancies in competition. Limited innings, run limits per inning, mercy rule, home run limits, starting with runners in extra innings.

However, the rules that the MLB are looking into wouldn't make any sense in non-professional leagues. MLB is looking at limiting visits to the mound and pitching clocks.

Your local high school game isn't going to have pitcher-induced piece of play problems because the player's just aren't that good. Or, if they are, then the game will be forfeited early.

I can't imagine MLB fans being okay with rules that stifle competition. Starting an inning with runners on feels 'icky' for lack of a better term.

I remember when the NHL introduced shootouts. As an NHL fan, I was upset, but I understand the reasoning behind it. There's a large constituency that doesn't like games that end in a tie. Penalty shots are exciting, even when they're manufactured. And, it's a common rule in other hockey leagues (and football/soccer). So, not a big change, but disappointing to a lot of fans; myself included.

However, the change from 4-on-4 to 3-on-3. That was excellent, imo.

Just thinking about the number of rule changes in the NHL, since 2005, is pretty amazing. Certainly it is more exciting, but to get back to baseball, it has me thinking of all the room there is to adjust the game of hockey. Eliminate two line pass, adjust equipment size and materials, regulate goalies, regulate defense, regulate fighting, instant icing, concussion testing, etc., etc., etc.

I couldn't even come up with did ways to make baseball "more exciting". And, even if someone did, then I feel that it would be detrimental to the game.

Just for fun.

1. The first batter runner dictates which base is "first" by running left (to "third") or right (to "first"). This would make indeed infield defense more difficult and add an extra degree of thought into the game.

2. Fielders must rotate positions each inning. Now you can't just put the lefty, 250lbs guy at first because he'll have to shag some balls in the outfield and be a nightmare at shortstop.

3. Rescind the "ball in cap", which is a ground rule triple if a fielder catches a ball with his hat. Instead, make it an ground rule double-play. Just for the fun of seeing someone try it and, as a result, for all the dropped balls.

4. Any player that hits a home run may go back up to bat. Why, yes, i would love to see a single player go back-back-back HRs before taking himself out of the game due to exhaustion.

5. The starting pitcher may opt to throw a red/hot ball once per game. If he throws a strike, then it's a strikeout. If it's a ball, a walk. If it's hit, then it can't be caught (else it's a ground rule double). Hit by pitch is a HR. A batted HR is a grandslam. A foul becomes a do over.

6. The opposing team sets your lineup. Starting pitchers must have a minimum days rest. And, the lineup cannot be changed in the first inning except for injury.

  There's a large constituency that doesn't like games that end in a tie.

The downside is that teams that feel confident in their penalty shooting play not-to-lose for the last 10 minutes.

It's like using free throws instead of sudden death OT in basketball.

A better solution would be 4-point game scoring. 4 points for a regulation win, 3 for OT win, 2 each for ties, 1 for OT loss. Teams are incented to play hard all the way, and you don't get that mixup of games being 2 or 3 points.

I like rule changes that limit sleaziness, like no change or TV timeouts for icing, no-touch icing, limiting mound visits and batter delays in baseball. Teams like the Dodgers and Astros had turned mound visits into an art form.

i tend to agree that baseball shouldn't be tweaked. although I think if there's a way to incentivize small ball somehow without doing anything ridiculous, that would probably be good for the sport. the three true outcomes are dull.

if you were going to make an outrageous rule change, i've often thought that you could have some sort of "offsides rule", where either the outfielders have to be inside some line when the pitch is thrown (thus requiring them to run farther and limiting flyouts), or the infielders have to be outside some line (requiring them to sprint in and increasing the chance of reaching base on a grounder). or both, if you want things to be very silly.

It depends what you mean by 'improve'.

Preventing permanent injury is in everyone's interest and the synchronised interest can mean it happens quickly, yes.

On the other hand, video reviews in soccer create a bit of controversy and a human element that people enjoy.

FIFA's 2005 comment on this: "It's part of football" is undeniable.

I've never understood the desire for a human element in officiating. It's not like people sat around hundreds of years ago and said, "You know what would really make this game fun to watch? Completely flawed referees/umpires/officials!"

Yeah it's definitely odd, and rationally makes zero sense as you've pointed out, but feelings are weird, especially feelings of nostalgia and tradition.

The main thing is the amount of time it takes to get a call right. If there is technology available to make certain calls immediately, then I'm all for it.

Unfortunately with video review, it can take several minutes to look over which completely disrupts the pace of the game and any momentum one team may have had.

Yeah, that I definitely get. It's the people who legitimately believe that blown calls now and then are a benefit to the game.

Yes, and specifically in the case of Premier League it seemed to cause problems with needing extra stoppage time. There was a recent match experimenting with video replay, and one side's manager complained that more extra minutes should have been added because of the video review, but wasn't (presumably because of TV advertising scheduled).

Theoretically they’re playing the same game that’s being played in high schools, parks, etc where the officiating has to be human (currently.)

It is part of the fun, though. What percentage of soccer conversations include some opinion about the officiating?

The history of basketball is full of these: repeatedly widening the key because big men were OP, introducing offensive and defensive goaltending rules because big men were OP, outlawing zone defense in the NBA because zone defense was OP, followed by legalizing it because isos were OP.

Baseball and soccer are two of the most traditional and conservative sports, so it's not as fair to single them out, even though baseball goes through periods of raising and lowering the pitchers' mound.

What does "OP" mean in this context?

"Overpowered." It's video game slang.

I agree with most of what you say. But why do you think no gloves would be safer in MMA? Without gloves, you would have guys breaking their knuckles on people’s skulls. It would be like how Anderson Silva broke his leg.

You just answered your own question. People would be more likely to to break their knuckles on people's skills which means there will be less hits to people's skulls to cause concussions.

I'm very into combat sports and I've seen this argument a lot. It makes no sense to me. Watch some bareknuckle boxing, people are not holding back and just break their hands all the time and knockouts happen much earlier. The newest science on CTE makes it seem like accumulated small damage might actually be worse than periodic large damage, so the only argument in favor of bare knuckle boxing is that you get knocked out so quickly that you don't get a chance to accumulate damage.

8oz gloves seems to be a very reasonable middle ground to me.

>The newest science on CTE makes it seem like accumulated small damage might actually be worse than periodic large damage

That's the idea of gloveless, you can't just trade blows all day. It probably would make boxing safer (where safer means choosing hand damage over brain damage).

In MMA I believe it would reduce boxing and increase the prevalence of grappling and muay thai. Ultimately the goal I'd like to aim for is less chronic head injuries, I think gloveless would do that, but who knows.

On the topic of ditching "safety gear" I'm curious what CTE rates are comparing American Football to Rugby or Australian Football.

It's mostly an idea that is repeated ad infinitum by Joe Rogan and because of his large audience people have begun repeating it as if it made sense. Just like playing on a basketball court, it's not a good idea.

It’s been suggested - and backed with studies - since the 80s. Your recently bias is showing.

Joe Rogan is a tool but he’s not always wrong.

There would also be a lot more blood and blood exchanges would happen every match (bloody knuckles hit bloody face).

I used to enjoy the changing meta, new heroes, balance patches back when I played dota a lot.

Now that I haven't played in years I don't enjoy watching any more because it's too far removed from the game it was when I played. I can't tune in to an important final and follow along at anything other than the most superficial of levels.

If the meta was static then id be a casual follower, as it is I'm not any sort of follower.

Professional sports seem to have very large casual fan bases. If you kept changing the rules then maybe they'd be fine with that, or maybe they'd be like me and stop watching.

Yeah there is a balance to be struck, you don't want baseball evolving into hockey over the course of a decade. I'm not suggesting we go the Calvinball route.

I'm with you on this. I feel exactly the same way. I played Dota casually for years (i.e once every couple of months I jump into a pub game with my friends and have some fun) but I used to enjoy watching high level tournaments. In my opinion they ruined the game by iterating through changes way to quickly. It feels like to me every successive patch in last 2 or 3 years there has been huge sweeping changes. The Dota I see now is not the game I fell in love with all those years ago. Almost everything has changed.

Sometimes you need to realize when you have a good thing and leave it alone...

On the other hand, if you are a casual but regular follower the constant changes can make it more exciting - every other month it felt like "Holy shit! They changed X! This changes everything!", and my day would be full of in depth discussions on the implications with my friends.

The thing is, most of the changes MLB (well, basically Rob Manfred) has proposed lately don't really "improve" anything.

The last good change was introducing the ability to challenge a call and get it reviewed. Since then we've seen the slide and collision rules, which mostly nobody -- even, at times, the umpires -- seems to understand well enough to apply. And the new pitch-less intentional walk, which was just pointless as a time-saver. And this year the mound-visit count, which is pointless again. And now proposals like starting extra innings with a runner in scoring position, because apparently the drama of a tied game with potential sudden-death situations isn't interesting and we just need to make sure it ends as quickly as possible, or ideas for how to make defensive shifts illegal so hitters never have to adjust to how the defense is playing.

Baseball is always going to be a more slow-paced game than the other major sports. That's inherent in the game. The solution should be to find ways to embrace that and showcase the interesting things that lead to it having the pace it does. And really the biggest focus ought to be on solving the ridiculous maze of restrictions on watching major-league baseball without a cable TV subscription, since the game needs to maintain a base of younger fans and those fans increasingly are not going to have traditional TV subscriptions.

Baseball is currently literally in the business of telling people "it's nice that you want to pay hundreds of dollars to watch our sport, but we're not in the business of letting you do that". This recent article gave a good overview of how that happened despite MLB having probably the best streaming and online service of any major US sport:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/major-league-baseball...

Rob Manfred has been pretty open about one of his goals being pace of play and speeding up games. Pitch-less intentional walks and limiting mound visits both help achieve that goal.

> proposals like starting extra innings with a runner in scoring position

Manfred has said this is a rule that will not make its way into the majors [0]. The objective is to lower pitch counts for developing pitchers in the minor leagues.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxMK_Wwgvl8&feature=youtu.be...

> Pitch-less intentional walks... help achieve that goal.

IBB occurred 970 times in 2017. Assuming the pitch-less intentional walk saves 5 minutes each time it occurs (which is a high estimate), the average game time dropped by 2 minutes.

That's not a huge difference.

EDIT: had the wrong numbers, updated with the right numbers.

Average game time dropping by 2 minutes with miniscule to zero effect on gameplay (may change player fatigue slightly) is absolutely massive in my opinion

> no video reviews in soccer

It's interesting to compare that to cricket. Umpires can direct decisions to the "third umpire", and teams have a limited number of reviews (which they can ask the third umpire to review the decision), and the third umpire has access to replays (including slow-motion), Snickometer (microphones detecting the sound of the ball hitting the bat/player), Hot-Spot (thermal imaging cameras showing where the ball struck), and Hawk-eye (ball trajectory tracking).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umpire_Decision_Review_System

So why are they not using this tech for balls/strikes? The point of this article is that during extra innings, umps are miscalling pitches. With Hawk-eye the home base ump could know near-instantly if the ball is in the zone. Then there is just the arguments of the batter swinging..

As far as soccer goes, fifa resists video playback so that the quality of available officiating tools are the same in first and third world countries. In other words, rich countries don't deserve better officiating enabled by video replay just because they're rich.

Never heard this reasoning before. Do you have a source?

IMHO FIFA isn't the best place to look for clarity. The theory used to be that it needed to be universally/easily applicable. And (maybe) not interrupt the flow of the game. They allowed goal line technology as it was instant and poor decisions in huge matches became embarrassing. Rugby and cricket both use it very well at high levels.

There is plenty of material out there from the past few decades.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2010/jan/24/video-repla...

edit: I know I didn't address your issue, I'm trying to find this argument but Google has become quite useless.

edit: “protect the simplicity and universality of the game”

https://www.theguardian.com/football/when-saturday-comes-blo...

> no video reviews in soccer

VAR (video assistant referee) will be used at World Cup 2018 in Russia. It's already being used in Germany and MLS (US). Most leagues are planning to implement it within the next few years.

It's been very clumsy at first, but over the last few years, there have been so so many high profile stupid mistakes by refs. The success of the goal line tech just made VAR a natural evolution IMO.

I think it is a big mistake to introduce Video evaluation into footbal. Main reason is that you would just be taking away the authority of the referee and giving it to a machine and to other referees who will be evaluating the video. The mistake is to think that there is an absolute truth and we can arrive at this truth by introducing observational tools with more resolution. This is not true. As the resolution increases it becomes more difficult to make a decision. There is also the point of view of the referee. The referee cannot see everything. And this is the beauty of the game. Referees make mistakes but if all referees call everything as they see it this will average out for each team during the entire season. But referees are human too. And they have to control the game and control footballers with big egos. Also footballers are very sophisticated con artists and they continually try to fool the referee. All these are part of the game. Football is the game of mistakes. It's a huge mistake to try to get rid of mistakes by introducing technology into the game.

> no video reviews in soccer

Call me cynical, but I am convinced this is because the brass of soccer are corrupt to the core, and this threatens their business model. They are going at it as slow as humanly possible.

Sepp Blatter, and the Qatar vote, have forever ruined what little trust I had in association football.

The constant changes to Starcraft II are why I don't play it anymore. I can see them changing it with each install, but after LotV they really needed to leave it be.

Sure, change the rules once in a while, but not every other patch.

This happens in Formula 1 almost every year but people always complain about the changes. Some people want the rules to stay the same, some people want the best version of the sport. I can see both sides of the argument. Can't please everyone.

You big American softies. Cricket matches last FIVE DAYS, with breaks for tea.

That sounds interesting! What about breaks for sleep?

It's five days of play, during normal day-time hours. It's like a festival that you go to.

Up to ten days if the Cranker can't get committee approval for third season overtime. (Sucks too cause then mandatory tea breaks swap out biscuits for bread and jam)

I think you're yanking my chain ...

The fact that I can't tell says something about cricket ...

I took an American colleague to watch the cricket on the village green one lunchtime, just a few minutes from our office. Nothing professional, this was just the local cricket club.

They bowled about four balls before there was a shout from the clubhouse, and all the players left the field to drink sparkling wine and eat strawberries.

I think my colleague understood the spirit of the game.

Yes, but they also learned from that and created one dayers. Even that proved too slow for some, so now we have 20-20...

It might just be the purist in me but I don't really enjoy limited overs cricket.

Test cricket (the 5 day matches) on the other hand is just about the perfect spectator sport for the Australian summer I reckon. You have the Xmas Holiday period with time off from work combined with the fact it's too hot to do anything around the house. So putting your feet up enjoying a few beers and watching the cricket with your extended family is a great way to pass the time.

Nah, I disagree. I do like test cricket but I absolutely have to be doing something else at the same time to watch it (like playing a game or programming). It's a terrible spectator sport.

On the other hand, limited overs cricket doesn't do much for me either. I'd rather just watch a footy game at that stage.

20-20 is really fun but it’s almost a whole different game in approach than Test cricket.

It feels like the difference between the NFL & Rugby - related but a vast strategic and game flow difference

We're talking about sports with real athletes.

What makes baseball more athletic than cricket?

Faster pitches, not a gigantic paddle, and running even when you may not have liked how well you hit it.

> running even when you may not have liked how well you hit it.

How many times are you expected to run in baseball though? In cricket, it could easily be 100+ (22-yards a time).

Same with bowlers - a 10-20 yard run up for potentially hundreds of balls is a not insignificant amount of work.

I feel like you are comparing two things that are _different_, and just deciding one is lesser for no clear reason (both sports seem quite athletic to me). I'm also not sure what difference the size of the bat makes to athleticism (they also aren't _that_ much different in size: <4.25in width vs. ~2.7in for baseball, <38in length vs. ~42in for baseball, and weigh roughly the same: ~1.2kg for a cricket bat, ~1kg for a baseball bat).

I'm just joking around, but I think it was taken very seriously.

Cricket deliveries are similar speeds to baseball pitches, aren't they?

Also, outs are cheap in baseball, but very expensive in cricket - so playing more conservatively is optimal.

Yes - 95-100mph is very common in fast bowlers. Also the bounce gives a much larger variety of angles and spins.

Plus the ball is a LOT harder. A lot.

The quality of the ball also becomes very important later in the game. I don't think baseball/rounders has the New Ball aspect.

If I remember my baseball enough (I'm a casual fan) they rotate the balls regularly in baseball to actually specifically avoid that factor.

And the bat is a LOT bigger. A lot.

Oh absolutely, but the game is very very different in so many ways.

Baseball would probably have more game days in a year than the average international cricketer would, counting all levels they are involved in.

The US baseball season seems to make it impossible to watch all your teams games, even for the most dedicated fan.

You can watch an average American baseball game in a ‘condensed’ format in under 20 minutes. The condensed format shows key pitches and plays.

The blackout rules don't help either.

This is a positive to me. Pretty much every day during baseball season, if I feel like watching baseball I have the option. I don't want to watch everyday, but I love being able to watch basically any time I want.

Us Cubs fans had a truly awful decompression in 2016. Don't get me wrong, winning the world series was amazing. But, I wish they did it in less dramatic fashion.

And, to stifle the high, there was an absolute (and ongoing) tragedy less than a week later.

> even for the most dedicated fan

I watched 100+ regular season games of the Dodgers last season. It was a lot of baseball. That plus an exhausting World Series meant I had to decompress and avoid sports for a few months.

Think about how the players must have felt!

Meh, I watch (or listen to on radio) a good majority of SF Giants games. Definitely not all the home games, but I can usually watch 2/3 of just about every broadcasted home/away series, so maybe 120 games, give or take 15? That's not unreasonable.

Oh, like in Twenty20 cricket?

For those interested, the longest baseball game in history:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_professional_basebal...

(From a baseball player who once attempted to play cricket with my Indian friends. Threw out my shoulder in the first “at bat”)

So how would you rank Rugby here?

They also need to play fewer games. The Cubs' star Anthony Rizzo said he would gladly take a pay cut. Teams play 162 games a year. That's just insane considering how demanding the sport is and how frequently players get injured.

I would think it'd only work if everyone in the game was willing to take x% off their revenue. If you take out 10% of the games, the revenue would fall off.

If the schedule is reduced, a certain amount of payback or retroactive contract negotiation would have to occur with the myriad of networks paying to broadcast the games.

I don't think they need to. Baseball's been run this way for decades, and people are only now complaining about the number of games per season.

One part of the entire draw of baseball is that (usually) it's looked at more-so as a marathon of a sport. It's all about which teams can withstand the long season than not. You could have a 10 game win streak in May, but that doesn't make a difference in September if your team's division is still close. You need to have the health at that point and durability of players to continue to be successful, especially through the playoffs.

I feel like fivethirtyeight is like the Freakonomics of sports.

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