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Comment by rossitter | Hacker News Reader

There's no watch to kill in baseball. You have to get the other team out a set number of times.

Correct, but the use of stoppage is a little bit similar to the use of timeouts in other sports, in my humble opinion.

Another dishonorable gameplay of baseball that makes me hate it (my apologies for not remembering how this is called): this move batters often do to just amortize the ball so the field players can snag an extra base!

What makes bunting dishonorable? If anything it's the opposite, the player sacrifices themselves to move a teammate.

> What makes bunting dishonorable?

Well, it is obviously subjective, but bunting can be used to prevent no-hitter which is why I personally see it as disgraceful.

Breaking up a no-hitter with a bunt requires bunting for a base hit, which is orders of magnitude more challenging than a sac bunt. It's not as rare as pitching a no-hitter, but it's rare enough to be notable when it happens. You have to place the bunt in one of only a handful of defensive dead zones and it requires elite base running speed.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "stoppage"? I think baseball does have a pacing problem, but it's really cultural more than anything else: games are about 1.5x as long today as they were 50 years ago, even though in terms of what happens (number of pitches, batters, etc.) they're basically the same. Unfortunately the main way to combat this, the "pitch clock" rule, is unenforced. I can't imagine why.

I don't understand what you mean by your "dishonorable gameplay" example. What does amortizing a ball mean to you?

> Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "stoppage"? When players or coaches call timeouts (I don't know if this is the official name), even tho there is no clock to interrupt, to interrupt the flow of the game at key moments.

> I don't understand what you mean by your "dishonorable gameplay" example. What does amortizing a ball mean to you?

It took me some time to find out, but this is what I was refering to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunt_(baseball).

Now truth be told, one thing that makes me love baseball is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gaedel#At_the_plate.

The Eddie Gaedel stunt was perpetrated by Bill Veeck [1], who came up with so many baseball stunts throughout his life and had many rules changed in reaction to them. Apropos to this discussion is that he is also the last person to buy a major sports team in the US without being massively wealthy.

A few days after that Eddie Gaedel stunt, Veeck did another one where the fans got to decide everything that the team did during the game, by holding up cards to vote.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Veeck

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