Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

I want to go to a baseball game with a sign that says, "Legalize foreign substances".

Casual viewers like games with lots of hits and lots of runs, and the MLB has gone through a lot of effort to facilitate this (ie: runner starting on second in extras), but as someone who is really into the long-haul aspect of baseball (I like the whole farming and development system, I like the idea that baseball is not fair in terms of cap space, I like that the season is so long with so many games, I like the strategy around managing the bullpen), I really like watching "boring" games where pitchers are just throwing disgusting nasty pitches for 7-8 innings. There is nothing more exciting to me than a no-no. I really don't have any issue with foreign substances -- it's still impressive nonetheless.

To me, baseball is the only sport where fandom really makes sense. In basketball, you'll see fans of players moreso than teams -- their fandom will follow ie: LeBron around. And why shouldn't they be mostly fans of players? The coach and management makes little difference. This is opposed to in baseball where when you're a fan of a team, you're also a fan of the management and the owners and the coaches and the little decisions they make over the time-span of weeks (and even years) to get to a winning team. A lot of pieces have to come together, you can't just buy a superstar -- although you're free to try.

When one pitcher can throw nasty stuff (not necessarily throwing hard, just throwing precisely) and save his team from using the arm of someone in the pen, it's super exciting to me. If a little bit of pine tar is facilitating that, it's all the same to me.

>To me, baseball is the only sport where fandom really makes sense.

It seems like more realistically, baseball is the only support that you understand enough to appreciate to this degree? I don't think you can make a legitimate argument that soccer, for example, has less tactical depth and management pressure than baseball?

Generally sports that are about controlling the ball (or puck) will be more about superstars and less about teams relative to other games. At any given time one person has the ball and that person has an outsized effect on the play in that moment. If one player is significantly better than the rest of the team, you can make sure they're the one doing most of the playing.

With baseball the pitcher of course plays a similar role, they have a major outsized effect since they are involved in every single defensive play, and in a critical way. But they can't physically play very much. And then on offense the best you can do is put your best folks at the start of the lineup so they get an extra at-bat over the course of a game.

(Of course none of this justifies the claim that only in baseball does team-fandom make sense; fandom isn't a logical construct to begin with and doesn't need some logical reason to exist.)

That's probably fair. Soccer is a great example that I wasn't really considering as an American.

That being said, if you haven't seen the movie Moneyball, I'd recommend it. Baseball was truly transformed by computerized statistics, and because baseball is basically decided as a series of batter-pitcher matchups, it lends itself to being predictable in a way that other sports can't be. Baseball is the monte carlo simulation of sports.

Yes, Moneyball's exceptional. There's a great book about similar influences on soccer, called Soccernomics. :)

The German National Football team employed a bunch of computerised statistical analysis for the 2014 World Cup to play their matches. They literally enhanced their tactical and strategical plays through AI.

Soccer does have less management pressure induced strategy because the rules and flow of the game demand that.

Soccer is about flow not stoppages so you only can sub 3 players and the game doesn't stop as much with injury time added on later. Players are being asked to make more meta decisions.

Doesn't make fandom only make sense though in baseball. Fandom is so much bigger in soccer, it includes national struggles and regional struggles and is so engrained in local culture. Soccer hooliganism exists where baseball hooliganism doesn't.. baseball has a long term view on passionate (if my team loses it is okay because we have 160 more) where in soccer one goal decides a match and every match means something always to some group of people.

Right, but in soccer it's the coach's decision what positions are even being played on the field. In my opinion, the combination of player's individual agency straining against a manager/head coach's /system/ makes it even more challenging.

So what's the point? Further degrade a sport where pitching is already the dominant side of the equation to the point where a good hitter hits .190? Where's the limit to what you accept?

If you propose unlimited doctoring then I propose unlimited corking and composite bats with unlimited diameter. Then together we can make a complete joke of baseball.

I think you're ignoring the entertainment value of hitters getting more hits. In general, more balls in play means more exciting scenarios. Baseball, a beautiful game, has an innate natural balance in its dimension and timing. Yes, I like a good pitchers duel as well. But for reasons of likely the sticky stuff, the scales are currently tilted too far towards the pitcher.

I don't know almost anything about baseball (European) an reading your post made me think you're arguing about legalized steroids until that pine tar bit.

Kind of switching subjects here, but I don't have a real problem with steroids either. Society is already fine with the idea that athletes will destroy their bodies as a part of competing at a high level. Plenty of kids around 15-16-17 will have torn their rotator cuff just from pitching in highschool baseball; or given themselves a concussion from a hard hit in football or a header in soccer. Weight lifting, even with proper form, is bad for your joints once you get to a certain point. They take a lot of supplements that aren't really healthy to chase maximum performance. A lot of the time, they're engaging in the same sort of practice that recreational drug users will find themselves in: using drugs that accomplish roughly the same thing before enforcement agencies know to look for it. Arguably, it'd be safer for them to just use well-researched steroids under the supervision of their team doctors.

I don't see why supplementing your endocrine system is categorically different than anything else these career athletes do.

Did you ever figure that some candidate pro athletes DONT want to use steroids? Do you see the ethical problem here as well as the total pool of participation problem?

You could say the same about all the downsides and risks involved. Maybe some people don't want to risk CTE ? Maybe some people don't want to mess up their joints for the rest of their life ? Professional sports is about extremes and this myth about healthy lifestyle is there to promote amateur sports. In that context it makes sense to ban steroids because you don't really want to promote steroids to teens. And in contact sports I think the ability to inflict damage is increased disproportionately so more injuries. But they still get used all over the place.

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