DrungoHazewood

I do think there should be individual punishments for players who participated. But how do we really know who participated? Or how much? What if no one flips, and testifies against their teammates? What if Altuve says Alvarez was in on it, and Alvarez claims innocence? Ban Alvarez for life? Asterisks... meh. I don't like them. If you do it for this, do you do it for every team that had a PED cheat? Do you do it for the '86 Astros division title, everyone knows Mike Scott scuffed the ball and probably learned it from Nolan Ryan. Do we put an asterisk on Gaylord Perry's cap on his HOF plaque?

When I was 12 I watched all the baseball I could, which included Saturday games of the week, Orioles games, whatever. All of that added up to less than you can just watch of the Orioles today. And my schedule is slightly more packed than it was when I was 12.

I guess it wouldn't hurt, but how often does a college game feature more than one or two high-round prospects? I really don't know.

What did baseball or individual teams do better or differently with Cal Ripken or Mickey Mantle or George Brett than they are with Mike Trout and Mookie Betts? When I was growing up I knew Cal and Brett because I was a big baseball fan, I don't think it was because of targeted MLB marketing efforts.

I'm kind of curious. What better decisions should Manfred have made? I guess two are suspending all the Sox and Astros for months or years, and explicitly changing multiple on-field rules to encourage contact and baserunning. I don't know that you'd get overwhelming support for either of those things. What else?

85% of the college football I watch is Virginia Tech, and I actively avoid watching teams that constantly win like the Yanks, Sox, Alabama, Duke, etc. I guess they could do a better job promoting prospects, but if you're flipping through the channels would you even think about stopping on the MLB network to watch a showcase of the D'back's or Twins' top prospect? I wouldn't.

I don't disagree with the ideas about the style of play and amount of action. But the attendance is due to a number of other things including many more entertainment options, and a concerted effort to maximize revenues rather than attendance. The baseline assumption has to be that attendance is going to decline, just how much.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

At least not your interest. It's an open question as to whether he's increased interest among others.

I can see a future where baseball is more like the other sports, and it's not a 2, 3, 4-year plan for even good prospects to make the majors. Much of what drives that is service time and contracts. Many guys in AA could play in the majors in reduced roles, but nobody wants to start their clocks. Baseball would probably be at least somewhat more popular if young players were allowed to try to make an impact earlier, instead of riding the bus to Davenport. Al Kaline was in the majors at 18. Robin Yount, too. Today they'd be lucky to get an at bat before they turned 20.

Who is Tua? I literally have no idea. College baseball is on TV as much as is warranted for something that would draw a few hundred or a few thousand viewers a game. At most colleges baseball isn't even a revenue sport, because if you charged for tickets 88 people would come to an average game. In 1950 college football was way more popular than pro football. In 1950 college baseball was about as popular as it is today, which is not at all. You're not going to change that by putting it on TV or streaming more.

I probably wouldn't watch the NFL draft if there were four or five Virginia Tech players projected for the first round. The only reason I watched the whole Super Bowl was that my kids were into it. I'd watch Unterhaching-Waldhof Mannheim before I'd watch a Redskins-Steelers game.

You know what's a bunch of nonsense? Hiring Mike Elias with an explicit plan to build a franchise to compete in 2022 and beyond, and measuring him solely by maximizing the Orioles' wins and losses in years where he said they wouldn't compete. It's nonsense to express your anger at the agreed-upon plan by complaining incessantly that an entirely different plan isn't being executed.

Sure, things have changed. But all the basic playing rules are the same as in 1904. 90 feet, three strikes, four balls, three outs, nine innings. Far, far, far more has changed as a result of changing strategies and use patterns than as a result of changes to rules. Baseball went from 0.06 homers/team/game to 1.39 and that had almost nothing to do with the rules. We've seen 2.7 strikeouts per game and 8.8 under basically the same rules. Teams used like 1.5 pitchers per game in 1915, and now use five or more, and no rules change drove any of that. The rules weren't substantially different when the 1905 A's used 19 players all year, and when the 2019 Orioles used 58.

There's no accounting for taste.

Eh, they clarified the mound rule for 1969. Most of the problem with the 60s was that they just stopped enforcing the limit, I don't think they really changed much. A little like the catcher takeout rule - it had always been illegal to block the plate without the ball, they just tweaked things to also say it's a bad idea to give the catcher brain damage. I think it's a major change if you're sitting in the stands and you'd notice. You'd notice the DH. You'd notice foul balls not being called strikes. You probably wouldn't notice that the mound was 23" instead of 17". You wouldn't notice if a ball just above the letters was a ball, especially since they didn't call it prior to the rule change anyway. I suppose that makes replay a major change, just not to how you play the game on the field.

Okay, so the spitball was pretty consequential. So maybe two since the foul-strike rule.

Foul-strike rule was adopted by the AL in 1903. Had previously been adopted by the NL in '01. Previously you could foul off 23 straight pitches and the count would still be 0-0.

I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a pickle fork than watch poker.

Compared to 1960? Sure. Compared to most other sports, maybe not so much. The NFL changes things like kickoff and extra point placement and definitions of holding and pass interference and how you can and can't tackle every year and nobody bats an eye. Basketball changes the 3-point distance all the time.

MLB is the only one of the major sports with a very long schedule and large stadiums. The NFL has one game a week. The NBA/NHL have capacities capped in the high teens or low 20,000s. I think basketball and hockey could support higher capacity stadiums, but they have a gentleman's agreement to keep prices very high by limiting the number of tickets. So they will be delayed in seeing declines in attendance. I think if there were a metric like ticket waiting lists, you'd see similar declines in the NBA/NFL/NHL that you do in real MLB attendance. Demand has almost certainly declined, but not to the point where it's impacting ticket sales. I'm sure the O's saw declines in ticket demand years before the almost daily sellout streak ended at OPACY. I was on the waiting list for season tickets at one point, but by the time the waiting list shrunk enough to get to me I'd come to my senses about driving 2+ hours each way to Baltimore 20 times a year.

I think it's just stuff around the margins. A bit of replay here, a tweak to the playoffs there, nudge the strike zone once in a while. I guess they told players to not kill the catcher so much a few years back. They still have only changed one consequential on-field rule since 1904.

Yea, it couldn't be that your preconceived notions of gloom and despair are wrong. TV viewership is down for all sports, really for all content. That's as much a function of the splintering of the entertainment market as it is of anything else. By your model all entertainment is in decline with no floor, and everything people watch should prepare to close up shop sooner or later. What is the number of eyeballs they need on a MLB game to make money? How many programs does ESPN regularly air that get a few thousand people watching? How often to you turn on one of the ESPNs and they're showing a poker tournament or a Pac 10 track and field event, or ODU-UNC Wilmington basketball? They'd sell their soul to the devil to have 10% of the MLB audience for any of those events. You're only comparing MLB to the NFL, which is more popular and concentrates the audience into 1/10th as many games. I think MLB would look far better if you pulled NBA, NHL, and soccer numbers, even if those leagues have many fewer games.

When free agency came along we heard how it would ruin baseball because the Yanks would never lose. Then the Yanks didn't win the Series for quite a while and actually had a losing season or two in the 1980s and early 90s. That didn't make it untrue, it just took longer than expected for teams to fully adjust to the new reality. Now the Yanks haven't had a losing season in 28 years. The cable bubble might be like this. We know that teams are heavily subsidized by mandatory cable fees from people who couldn't care less about baseball. Sometimes it takes a long while for obvious inequities, imbalances... whatever you want to call this, to work themselves out. But they rarely stand forever. Eventually cable cutting will force MLB into the transition to streaming for many/most people. It will be a big challenge to get the same revenues out of a quarter or a third of the people. Even among the die-hards here we'd probably only have a 50% take rate on $100s of year to stream O's games.

I'm curious as to what stadium issues MLB has. 95% of the league plays in a relatively new or refurbished or classic stadium that was paid for by the taxpayers and that they rent at heavily discounted rates. I don't like the idea of socializing the costs of professional sports stadiums across the 75% of the population who doesn't care, but from an owner's and baseball fans' perspective the stadium boom is probably Bud Selig's greatest triumph and lasting legacy.