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Comment by rip747 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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