The Simple Technology That Accidentally Ruined Baseball | Hacker News Reader

The Simple Technology That Accidentally Ruined Baseball

theatlantic.com

40 pointsrfugger64 comments

A well played 1-0 baseball game that takes 2 hours to complete is an absolute joy to watch. A 1-0 game that lasts 3:30, not so much.

It's not the score or HRs or or the hits, it is the length of the game that is ruining baseball. Get the games back to 2 - 2.5 hours and it will be fine.

you hit the nail on the head. watching a baseball game is like poking your eye with an icepick. there are too many breaks, too many commercials; thus too slow of a pace. they need to pick it up so that a game is shorter and the action is constant. viewers don't have that long of an attention.

We are framing it as a show but what about people who actually play baseball for the sake of playing a game ?

Major League Baseball is a business, nobody is playing it purely for the sake of playing a game.

What about them? What exactly are you trying to say?

Changing baseball rules because there are too many breaks and the viewer is likely to find it boring is an acceptable position to hold when you are in the "business".

But people actually playing the game and enjoying it (those that aren't on a TV screen) don't need this problem to be solved because they simply don't have it. So "their" game rules are being changed for the sake of baseball seen as an entertainment show, not for the sake of people actually playing it because they like playing the game more than watching it.

How is that a problem? Who "playing the game for enjoyment" is picking up every rule change from MLB? Who "playing for enjoyment" has strike cameras set up at their field?

I am answering to that comment, not the specifics in the article:

> watching a baseball game is like poking your eye with an icepick. there are too many breaks, too many commercials; thus too slow of a pace. they need to pick it up so that a game is shorter and the action is constant. viewers don't have that long of an attention.

I'd say the same about any sport for which rule modifications only benefit TV viewers or people with financial incentives.

When designing the rules for a spectator sport I think it makes sense to pay more attention to the experience of millions of viewers than to the dozens of players in a given game.

A classic take on the situation can be found at http://www.npr.org/2011/03/30/134960461/its-time-for-basebal...

From a related article:

"According to MLB.com, the average time for a nine inning game in the 1970s was around two hours and 30 minutes."

"In 2010, games lasted on average about two hours and 55 minutes, according to Baseball Prospectus. The average game has increased steadily in length every season since, and contests in 2014 have averaged about 3:08."

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/07/baseball-games-length-pitche...

And lots more delays here:

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1271178-major-league-base...

Same situation with cricket in the UK. The newish 20/20 cricket is an evening's entertainment. Normal cricket can take all damn day.

Or even five days.

That's more a case of changed expectations due to shifts in demographics. Cricket used to be a sport for upper and middle-upper classes: people with a lot of spare time for whom filling whole days (or weeks) was actually a very attractive proposition. Now it's a spectator sport for masses of TV viewers who work for a living and only have a few hours of free time every day.

I think pitcher pace is one area that the umps could enforce better. When you get a guy like Mark Buehrle pitching (avg 16 seconds between pitches) the games going to go a lot faster than somebody that averages 25 seconds between pitches.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/pitcher-pace-time-between-pit...

Is there an actual rule on how much time a pitcher can take? I'm not aware of such a rule, but I think it should exist.

Heres the rule that defines how much time the pitcher has to throw the pitch.

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/pitcher_...

8.04 When the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball. Each time the pitcher delays the game by violating this rule, the umpire shall call Ball. The 12-second timing starts when the pitcher is in possession of the ball and the batter is in the box, alert to the pitcher. The timing stops when the pitcher releases the ball. The intent of this rule is to avoid unnecessary delays. The umpire shall insist that the catcher return the ball promptly to the pitcher, and that the pitcher take his position on the rubber promptly. Obvious delay by the pitcher should instantly be penalized by the umpire.

> Both home runs-per-game and runs-per-game are down about 20 percent from their early-2000s highs. Strikeouts are up about a fifth.

There's an english style guideline that says if you need to use a concept more than once, you should use a different word every time, lest you seem like the sort of clod who only knows one word. But doing it with numbers feels like a purposeful attempt to mislead the reader.

Not sure I understand what you're saying -- is it that runs-per-game and homeruns-per-game are the same thing? Because they're not.

No, it's (I think) that 20 percent and a fifth are the same thing.

No. 20% = one fifth.

I think the problem might be that strikeouts will be a percentage - I don't know baseball, so I'm making up numbers - say it's 30%.

Now if you say "Strikeouts are up about 20%." what are you saying, are you saying that strikeouts are now at 50% of batter-innings [again, not sure on terminology] or are you saying that strikeouts are up 20% of the 30%, ie are now at 36% of batter-innings?

If you say it's up "a fifth" then it seems more clear to me that it's up on what it was before, ie 30% + (30/5)% = 36% [using my made up 30% figure].

Interesting - in cricket there is a similar problem - the umpire has to judge if the ball was going to hit the wicket (similar problem to going 'over the plate'). They brought in a computer review system in and it also increased how often you were out LBW (similar to 'struck out').

"[ the review system ] has increased the bowler’s potential target area by a remarkable 70 per cent" [1]

However, it has improved things because it forced the player to do something rather than block the ball and hope they wouldn't be given out. So, technology helped in this case.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/engla...

Interesting article. DRS has revamped the motto "When in doubt not out" considerably. I also think it has helped reverse swing bowlers (Steyn, Harris) more than pure swing bowlers (Anderson) through the length of the innings. Test cricket I do think has resulted more because of drs, but also because teams have become more aggressive (a change made by the great aussie team under steve waugh).

It started under Mark Taylor

Assuming that this is all true, and that MLB wants to do something about it, isn't there a simple solution? Simply raise the actual strike zone to put it in line with where umpires used to judge it.

This article reinforces my theory that baseball is just a beard for people who love statistics, but don't want the stigma of being called a math nerd.

It's the only explanation for how a sport this dull could survive outside the British Empire.

Agreed. Baseball's always been boring. Not just since '06. Maybe 1906.

You seem willing to assume that there are millions of more math nerds in the U.S. than I am.

Given the way that many of my friends who are in to sports talk, I'm inclined to say it's statistics for the math phobic and fantasy sports is DnD for the geek phobic.

Baseball is one of the few sports you can watch with other people and talk over. The pace of the action can be a draw if you're going to pass time with other people rather than obsess over plays. I guess it's like the difference between a lounge and a dance club.

It's not JUST about the strike zone being enforced so heavily. The number of pitchers a batter sees per game is higher than it has ever been. Many teams are opting for a shorter bench and deeper bullpen. Toronto this year carried an 8-man bullpen for most of the season.

The whole point of sports is not about perfectly enforcing the rules. I remember an article a while back on here about speed walking, and how a staggering majority of speed walkers actually violate the main rule of speed walking (you can't have both feet off the ground), and while that rule could easily be enforced with cameras it isn't because it would just ruin the sport.

It seems to me like the easiest thing to do would be change the rules, bringing the strike zone back to what it was. It'll most likely cause outrage, but ironically you'd be going back to the way things were before. It all comes back to the fact that the reason for sports is not to perfectly follow some set of bizarre rules, its just to be entertaining.

> It all comes back to the fact that the reason for sports is not to perfectly follow some set of bizarre rules, its just to be entertaining.

The participants or the audience?

I'm trying hard to imagine a world where the rules of chess are changed to turn it into a more spectator friendly sport.

I imagine time limits on moves are partly because of spectators.

I think those are mostly to make sure a game will actually progress rather than that one party can force a losing game to a standstill.

In a sense, the rules of chess are frequently changed - speed chess, chess-boxing, Cheshire Cat chess, etc.

I would consider those 'variations' rather than rule changes.

In baseball, the rules were not being 'changed' they were just being applied inconsistently because of human limitations. The umpire (or is it referee in baseball) is just another player - human and error-prone. When 'he' (is there a 'she'?) becomes a faultless, indisputable 'it', then that part of the game is lost.

Even in chess, these problems exist. Think of Bobby Fischer moaning about the cameras in 1972.

This isn't precisely the same, but there are many proposals to change the rules of tournament chess to try to limit the number of draws.

I agree completely.

The football World Cup in Brazil this year showed something similar with the 'goal line technology'. When Benzema scored against Honduras, in previous years, arguments would have persisted for years about whether the ball crossed the line. Now it was over within seconds. Similar story in tennis, cricket, athletics, and a lot of other sports.

Moaning about bad decisions is part of the fun. When you can't do it, the sport does get a bit more boring.

I agree partially. Refereeing mistakes are part of the fun of soccer and other sports, but it is not so funny when the team you support ends up losing a game or a championship because of them.

In football it's fairly simple, the rule used to be "you have scored a goal when you have shot the ball far enough into the net that an old half-blind referee can see that it's in the net". Sure there are mistakes with that rule, but the whole game is about subjective calls from the ref, so saying that a cup would hinge on a few millimeters is just silly. The ref could still have missed six penalties for the other team. GLT removes the obvious mistakes, which is good because they are controversial and it's bad PR for the sport, but football will always be about subjective calls.

> the whole game is about subjective calls from the ref

No it's not. The referee is just the shortest practical path to enforce a set of rules, which are the real essence of the sport. This is why people play just fine in parks without referees.

Refs are there to enforce the rules; if the same set of rules can be better enforced by other means, referees should be replaced. Subjective referee calls are a plague on the sport, and they are a prime cause for the dismal amount of corruption in it. The sooner we can get rid of them (or at least reduce their role), the better.

I'm sorry but maybe you are confusing "football" with "American football"? In "soccer" (ahem), the game is completely subject to the ref's discretion. If the ref gives a red card in the first minute, it will affect the game. If the ref chooses not to give that red card, it will affect the game and how it is played. There's no other logical way to view it.

There is no such thing as "American football", that's gridiron ;)

Back to the subject, what I meant is that the fact that the ref has power of life and death over a game is a side effect of his role as the enforcer of rules; but we don't define the game of football as "the game where you have a referee", do we? The essence of football is in its rules, not in how they are enforced; otherwise people couldn't play it in parks without refs.

If tomorrow we could have a perfect "refbot" software that can automatically call fouls from TV with better accuracy than human referees, using it wouldn't mean that we are not playing "football" anymore -- the game would be exactly the same, only rules would be enforced without a human ref. (as a sidenote, such a refbot would wipe out a lot of corruption overnight, and I for one would welcome it with open arms -- never again should we see shambolic farces like the 2002 World Cup, Henry's and Maradona's "Hands of God", etc etc).

I disagree. There are plenty of bad decisions to moan about without having to artificially cripple judges.

I look forward to automated offside calls (and I would really love to modify the offside rule), and video reviews before penalty kicks (which is a really harsh and match-defining punishment, shouldn't be taken so lightly).

I like basketball, and while video reviews do sometimes detract from the flow, I think they do add some excitement (especially when a shot goes off just before the clock goes out).

Interesting. I neither knew that speed walking had rules, nor that it was ever practiced in the sort of contexts where enforcement would be necessary.

I think they should follow through on reducing to 7 innings per game (with all the rules about extra innings still applicable).

Sure, it would more-or-less destroy relief pitching as a profession, but relief pitchers are basically the placekickers of MLB anyway (people know the really good ones, the rest no one cares unless they mess up royally).

It would shorten the game enough to be enjoyable, and people would get to watch their favorite pitchers play entire games, similar to football and basketball (with obvious exceptions for one-sided games).

I expect relief pitching would quickly re-enter the picture. Starting pitchers pace themselves to go 7-8 innings (100 pitches is the unwritten rule, as much as I hate it). They might be able to deliver a higher quality start if they are targeting 80 pitches (or 5-6 innings) instead.

This sort of thing is a fundamental problem of professional sports, and one of the major reasons why I'm sort of agnostic about the very idea of pro sports in general.

Sports are supposed to be a game, they are supposed to be non-serious, but also competitive. Therein lies the fundamental conflict at the heart of all sports, especially at a professional level. It can quickly become difficult to find the right balance between utter seriousness and playfulness when it comes to sports. This gets even worse when millions of fans and billions of dollars play a role. They tip the scale from the playful side to the serious/business side. Sport stops being play and becomes more and more a job. A thing to be executed to the utmost at all cost.

That's why you get massive steroid and other drug use, which has been a problem in all sports for perhaps half a century, if not longer, though not widely known. That's where you get fans whose emotional well-being are tied to whether their favorite team has won or lost recently (domestic violence is heavily affected by sports outcomes, for example). Then you have sports riots, and so on. It's quite a mess all around, but it's not exactly an easy problem to fix.

I went and watched a sports riot once. The majority of the people around were like me, there to watch.

It was a small minority that were setting police cars on fire.

I don't think the sports allegiance caused the riots, they just happened to be the thing that the riot coalesced around. There was certainly a feeling in the air that there was going to be some riots in that city (friends and I drove in from ~1 hour away), and I think many of the actors went there to take advantage of the (so to speak) opportunity, not because they were upset about the loss.

Sounds like they need to change the rules, not the cameras. If the strike zone is too big for entertaining play, shrink it.

The solution is to lower the pitcher's mound... this is a variable that has been tweaked a number of times in baseball already! It has been shown that a higher pitcher's mound favors the pitcher. A lower mound would shift the balance a bit to the batter, leading to more hits, and thus a more exciting game.

If you enjoyed this article and find the unintended side-effects of new technology fascinating, I would encourage you to read anything by the author Neil Postman -- particularly his works _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ and _Technopoly_.

Equating runs scored with game interest is mistaken.

Agreed. This article does a lot of comparing to 2006, in which a lot of technology has happened — not just on the field but off. From what I've seen, many people "watching" games these days aren't doing just that, they're multitasking with three or four other things: checking feeds, timelines, stats, other game scores, fantasy updates, etc.

To me, in-game changes seem to be only a minor contributor. More so, I'd like to hear more about how people are so easily distracted these days. Notifications for this and that, work emails checked all night, game on in the background while surfing reddit or ESPN or whatever. It's becoming extremely easy to forget you're watching baseball at all.

I'd rather watch golf. OK, that was a bit over the top, but seriously, I don't have all that passion in the sport in order to wait for 30 minutes or so for someone to bat the ball... and see it's an out.

Why not just shrink the strike zone a little?

It's possible, but it's also difficult. The strike zone is not a static box; it's relative to the batter. Thus, the umpire needs to be able to compare the location of the pitch to the batter himself, and so the zone should be defined relative to points on the batter.

Currently, the points of reference on the batter are the knees for the bottom and the team letters on the jersey for the top (though technically it's the midpoint between belt and shoulders). These are convenient reference points. Shrinking the strikezone a bit would yield something like "two inches above the knees to 1/3rd the distance from the belt to the shoulder", which would require more explicit rather than subconscious analysis from the ump.

Why not just fully use computers, then?

If the problem is that an incomplete switch to technology left us in a chimeric state where we have the worst of both worlds, why not remove one of the two? If we remove the cameras, old umpire error will move the box up; if we remove the umpires from pitch calling, the new computers will have no trouble doing a bunch of math and moving the box up.

This seems more like an incomplete implementation of an idea, rather than a fundamental flaw.

Our collective inability to conceive of the idea that perfect enforcement of previous sloppy rules may require the rules to be adjusted is scary in light of the increasing ability of computers to enforce laws, too. MLB is a sideshow by comparison. If even HN-type readers have a hard time with the idea, we're in some deep trouble over the next couple of decades.

> Why not just fully use computers, then?

Because that will kill interest in watching the game much more thoroughly than a more accurate strike zone. Viewers like the subtle things, like that moment's pause that leaves viewers on the edge of their seat before the ump rings the batter up on a called third strike.

Plus, imperfection causes water cooler buzz much more than perfection (people LOVE complaining about missed calls).

They could put marks on the thighs and chests of the uniforms to denote the upper and lower boundaries.

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