Hello! I couldn’t find a thread for baseball made after 2015; I wonder if any TL users watch the sport? Feel free to join the discussion about the league, your favorite teams, players etc
This upcoming season is going to be very different from last year, largely because of the rule changes by Mr. Manfred: the bases are going to be 3 square inches larger, in an attempt to increase the stolen bases. The shift is being banned, and the pitch clock, something implemented in the minors for a while now, is being brought to the bigs.
I think the change to the base size is just straight up good, maybe we’ll see a new line of youngsters who’ll have 40+ SB seasons again. I’m a bit iffy on the shift change. Yes, on one hand it increases offense and stops being a statcast BABIP blackhole for pull-hitters. On the other hand I think defensive innovations are cool and shouldn’t be externally limited. I think the stubborn hitting into the shift is also the result of the three-true-outcomes style, which I understand is frustrating for many to watch.
By far the most talked about thing is the pitch clock, you even see non-baseball people rant about it on social media. I think we need a larger sample size of games to actually say this or that.
The WBC is also coming up, so that’s interesting! First one since 2017 and a lot of the rosters are absolutely stacked. As far as the regular season goes, I’m looking at the AL West to be really interesting. The Mariners broke their playoff curse last season, the Astros won it all, Rangers added deGrom, A’s possibly having their last seasons in Oakland, Angels adding quite a bit of talent to hopefully keep Ohtani in his contract year.
I don’t know if I’m the only one interested in the sport on this site at this point, but feel free to chime in to the conversation
I think the pitch clock is great. Games take forever.
I think banning the shift is silly. I think the proper approach is that players learn how to bunt. An average bunt onto the wrong side of a big shift gets the player on base every time.
I'd like to see a return to large ballparks like Tiger Stadium that had center field at 440 feet and Yankee Stadium had Left Center field at 430 feet. This will discourage every player from constantly swinging for a home run. This will then encourage more stolen bases and more hitting to get on base. It will force outfielders to have actual skills. I do like making the bases a bit bigger because umpires are now very strictly calling whether or not a player remains on the base after initially touching it. To encourage more bunting I'd like to see rules put in place about how tall the grass is on the infield.
I think baseball's most fascinating and popular era occurred from ~1960 to ~1993. It had a good balance between speed, hitting to get on base and power hitting. I'd like to see a return to that level of balance in the game.
The MLB style is baseball is pretty meh.... overall baseball and fastball as sports are great. I also like fastball as well. In Canada, "Fastball" is played with a ball that is half way between the size of a hardball and the size of a softball. This allows women and men to both be good at pitching. In fastball you can have women competing legitimately with men... that aspect makes the sport pretty cool.
There seems to be this weird stubbornness with hitting into the shift regardless of its effectiveness. Like lose the pride big guy and just hit a blooper down the third base line.
And I agree with the balance of the game in the early 90s. Prior to this season I would have probably argued that the most unbreakable Bonds record was not his career HR, but the fact he has 400 homers and 400 steals. Maybe now players like Tatis could become these power speed guys.
For me baseball is a very dear sport and I know I posted this talking mostly about MLB, but due to growing up there I've always followed the NPB more. And the games are so much more interesting in my opinion. They still have such a diverse style of hitters and pitchers that make it super interesting to watch. This guy hits for average, this guy's good at technical stuff like bunting and hit'n'runs, and this guys swings for the fences. And fastball sounds interesting! I know there is a very small women's softball scene in my country and I think they just use slowpitch so not really familiar with fastball. Would be great to try, sounds like a cool middle ground!
MLB starters used to laugh at the Japanese philosophy of having bullpen pitchers warming up in the 1st and 2nd innings so they can immediately replace the starter. Welp, the Blue Jays had 2 guys warming up in their bullpen while the starting pitcher struck out 5 guys in the first 3 innings of the game. Every hitter was over matched by the starting pitcher of the Blue Jays. It didn't matter... they replaced him.
it didn't matter what the starting pitcher did. The Blue Jays upper management decided before the game started that the starter was going to be replaced early. LOL.
"Trust The Algorithm"
Over the decades we've gone from 4 to 5 to 6 man rotations. I built an algorithm that came up with a new idea. a 10 man rotation. Each member of the rotation pitches 2 innings every 2nd day.
Yes this was very interesting, I'm guessing you're referring to the playoff game between the Twins and Jays. The management got a ton of shit for bringing in Kikuchi especially since he got lit up by the Twins offense. I guess that has been a general topic of discussion in the MLB on how much you should truly rely on analytics. Sure, the data suggests that facing the lineup for the third time increases the chances that a starter will allow runners, but perhaps it shouldn't be blindly followed in a case where the starter is completely shutting down the opposing lineup.
And yeah, I've seen that suggested where you'd only have "openers" who go a maximum of 2-3 innings before getting switched to another guy from the pen. I get it on some level, I mean bullpen days have been a thing for a long time now. But I still personally think that a good starter can garner so much more value from pitching deep into a game that it shouldn't become the norm. I believe there was a game in this year's WS where both the Dbacks and Rangers had an opener instead of a starter. Kinda takes away the hype of a good pitching matchup...
So, like with most things there is probably a healthy middle-ground. Sure, analytics can be a guiding factor on managerial decisions during a game, but maybe the eye-test and trusting your gut is not always a bad thing either...
EPT
