DrungoHazewood

I'd rather lose with integrity than win as a scumbag. Life shouldn't just be transactional.

On the Yomiuri Giants site it looks like reserved seats are between 3000 and 5500 yen, or roughly $30-50. Which is pretty comparable to an Orioles game. The Orioles are still among the cheaper tickets in MLB.

They referenced that show occasionally on Top Gear, and I've wanted to watch it. I think I saw part of one episode. I need to add it to the queue.

It is curious. NPB has a higher average attendance than MLB, and the second highest total attendance of any sports league in the world. I see Chewbacca's post about market-rate rent on stadiums, which isn't insignificant, but probably not the primary reason. I think part of it is that traditionally the baseball teams have been run as promotional arms of their parent company. Nippon Ham uses the Fighters to promote sales of their products, maybe to the detriment of maximizing revenues for the baseball team. Perhaps Nippon Ham gets the most lucrative advertising spots at the stadium and during telecasts. I also don't know how TV operates in Japan. MLB is able to extract huge sums from cable and satellite TV through mandatory fees for RSNs. It wouldn't be at all surprising if another country made that kind of thing illegal. Little old ladies in Japan who only watch old movies and talk shows may not be subsidizing the Fukuoka Hawks.

Jason Giambi.

No argument here, but LeBlanc was very good in the rebooted Top Gear. Surprisingly good. As for Wade LeBlanc it's only a matter of time until someone says it, so I'll just get it out of the way... Maybe he's the next Jamie Moyer, All mediocre lefties with 88 mph fastballs have a 0.001% chance of miraculously having a near-HOF career that lasts into their late 40s.

Don't disagree with any of this. My point was simply that an elite athlete tried to become a soccer player after a career in another sport, and the result was kind of inconclusive. At best Bolt looked like he could have been a halfway decent player in a low-level league. Which strongly contradicts the idea that Lebron would be the best center back in the US after two months of practice.

Concur. It makes scheduling a disaster, and I think the attendance gains are small. What I'd really like to see is geographical division of the leagues with little or no inter-league play. Then you'd have minimal games outside of your timezone.

It's a little embarrassing that knuckleballers look like they're playing soft toss, yet a 70 mph knuckler is about as hard as I ever threw a fastball in front of a radar gun. I blame a speed pitch booth at a Harrisburg Senators game for some of my shoulder issues.

Always happy when the org signs a knuckleballer. He's just 31, that's young for someone like him. And on a team that doesn't really care what their win loss record is he could pitch five innings of mopup relief every three days. Jannis was a Southern Maryland Blue Crab in 2014. I don't know if there's ever been a player who went from the Blue Crabs to eventually play on the O's. Maybe one or two went the other way. Joe Gannon was another knuckleballer who briefly made it as high as AAA Ottawa before ending up on the Blue Crabs for years.

Usain Bolt, who's certainly on the same level as Lebron as an athlete, tried to become a soccer player a little over a year ago. He had a trial spell with an Australian A League team. He did have two goals in a friendly (i.e. exhibition) against a lower-level side, but then called it quits. So elite-level Olympic athlete trains at soccer for a year and looked like he might have been passable in what's probably the 30th or 40th-best soccer league in the world.

That's an untestable assertion, but it's also comically ridiculous. You're saying that the value of the innate feel for the strategies and techniques and flow of soccer that you spend decades grasping in practice and games is zero. Or near zero. When's the last time Lebron played soccer? Has he ever since middle school? There have to be thousands of U12 players with a better first touch on the ball than he has.

I'm seriously for the idea that the extra point should be kicked by whomever scores the touchdown. Requires players to learn a new skill, and probably means more going for two in situations like a lineman returning a blocked punt for a touchdown. Also like the rugby idea of the point after coming from directly back from the point where the touchdown was scored. If you dive for the pylon the snap for the extra point is placed nearly on the sidelines.

Edgar Martinez would have had a long, successful career in a non-DH league. He just would have been a poor first baseman. Don't forget that Martinez' career was shortened by probably 750, 1000, or more PAs because the Mariners of the mid-to-late 80s were stupid. He wasn't a regular in the big leagues until he was 27, which is exceptionally late for a HOFer. It wasn't because he wasn't ready, his career AAA OPS is .944. The Mariners just believed that Jeffrey Leonard and Jim Presley and other mediocre talents were better players. In '87 he hit .329 for Calgary, and still played 32 games in AAA in '89.

Yes, and I think it's presumptuous and flawed to assume that Icelandic people are so genetically superior that they naturally produce soccer players at a rate 1000s of times that of the US, or even other European countries for that matter.

One option I used to oppose but might not mind is an eight-man lineup. Eliminate the DH and pitcher hitting in one fell swoop. Sure, everyone would get about 10% more plate appearances, but so what? The game is probably better if Mike Trout gets 10% more impact on the offense.

The real separation between leagues has been ceremonial for a long time. They used to have separate AL and NL umps, league presidents, league offices. They didn't use the same baseballs. There were various restrictions on trading between leagues; ever notice that many, many players from prior to the 1960s played their whole careers in one league, even though they were traded multiple times? The AL adopted the modern foul-strike rule in 1902, the NL not until '04 (or it might have been the other way around). Of course there was no inter-league play until the 1990s. There were at least perceived differences in strategy and strike zones. Today the only thing left is the DH, they're really just conferences in the same league otherwise.

The DH rule makes it very clear that it's optional. Any AL team could choose to not use the DH in any game.

The rule specifically is to allow a DH to hit for the pitcher, and only the pitcher. There is no way to DH for anyone else. They would have to rewrite the rules to allow for a DH for the SS (or whatever other position) and have the pitcher bat.

I don't think Ohtani has ever batted in a game where he also pitched. It looks like most of the time they'd DH Albert Pujols, which is kind of ironic since at this point in their careers Ohtani is a far better hitter.

Handy reference point for this discussion: 2019 NL pitchers hit .131/.161/.168 with a .329 OPS. They struck out in 43% of their plate appearances. They stole four bases. The average NL pitcher had an OPS .252 points worse than Richie Martin.

I will have one semi-serious problem with the NL using the DH. Pitchers batting is a great datapoint to help up determine the overall quality of the league. Pitchers are trained, selected, recruited, trained in a way that completely ignores their ability to hit. So as the league gets better (or in the case of expansions and wars briefly gets worse) pitcher hitting tends to track that. And we can use that as a measuring stick for just how good MLB is, and how good it has been over time. Universal DH eliminates that measuring stick. But that's probably okay, since we're getting pretty near to a theoretical minimum, and it's not that useful to know if pitchers are 30% of a real hitter, or 32%.

The Lost Cause mythos will have nothing on the NL purists who will go to their graves lamenting the loss of the God-given right for pitchers to OPS .288.

Hunter Dozier and Michael Cuddyer were drafted as shortstops and were basically 1B/RFers by the time they got to the majors.

I think there's some truth here. Larger players are favored as goalies, small players are often asked to go play somewhere else. It's like first base, or even pitcher. A smaller person can do it, Nick Rimando is one. But typically smaller, quicker players have other places their skills can be better used.