DrungoHazewood

I like it. I want to know if the pitch is objectively a strike or not in near real time. You just can't tell with the offset center field camera.

Fan response: "Yea, I know what the rule book says. But it looks stupid to me and umps don't call it, so the rules are dumb."

One thing I could be convinced of is no replay in games where both teams have been eliminated from the playoffs. Or maybe no replay in any game where a team is ahead by 10 or more runs. But I'd also be good with no mid-inning pitching changes in either of those circumstances, too.

Arby's roast beef isn't quite up on Roy Rogers level, but those are few and far between nowadays.

And I get the idea of the celebration in real time. But we can't go back. Not when we'll all see the replay five seconds later and know what the right call was. It feels just as bad to have benefitted/been hurt by a wrong call as it does to not have that instant celebration.

Inherent in sports is the idea that we're deciding the games based on the abilities and skills of the participants, to the greatest extent possible. Before technology caught up we really didn't know if the umps were right or wrong. Now we know. Now everyone knows. The vast majority of the time within seconds we know if the ump was right or wrong. "The replays are not even that accurate." I'm not even sure how to respond to that. They're dramatically more accurate than people trying to judge bang-bang plays they often have poor views of in real time. Ignoring all that and accepting that games will be decided incorrectly because we didn't want to do it isn't going to fly anymore. It did in 1880 and 1920 and 1970 because there was no better standard, but there is now. Baseball has no problem with 11 pitching changes and arguing and adjusting batting gloves 19 times an at bat. But we're going to accept obviously wrong calls that decide key games because it interrupts the game? Really? Without replay an average 2019 MLB game has like 30 commercial breaks. 33 is straw that broke the camel's back?

It would obviously be great to be there for an epic playoff game. But the harder thing is how to get people to drive 90 minutes in weekday rush hour traffic and get home at one in the morning on a work night to see them play the Royals in May. I've literally gone to more Orioles playoff games in the last 20 years than weekday regular season games.

This data is from ticket purchases. The Steelers have probably sold out Heinz Field for years and years. You don't just say "hey, let's take the family to the Steelers game on Friday" First, there's no game on Friday, it's three hours away, and taking the family to an NFL game probably costs you $800. It's a whole different thing to decide to go to a baseball game. You can get bleacher seats for $20 the week of the game, and eat at Arby's on the drive down. Also, we have no data on NFL ticket sales in central PA. So are they really all Steelers fans?

I agree, no more challenges. Have someone sit in the booth watching the game and tell the umps when they're wrong right away. Much quicker. "The human element" is just another phrase for "I value not having pauses in the game over getting it right despite the fact baseball is already broken up into nine innings with long pauses between each half-inning, plus all the pitching changes, plus stepping out before every pitch, and every time the manager or coach comes out to calm down the pitcher or stall for time, and the arguing, and sending in pinch runners, and waiting to pinch hit until the pitching change is made... but all those are fine. I'm drawing the line at a couple replay reviews a game."

Angelos is a lawyer, he can't help himself. I mean, how many times has Frobby sued the Hangout?

Is there multi-year data, and if so what is the year-to-year correlation between managers/teams? Is it possible that random chance is most of the variation here?

Washington County probably bought 633 Nats tickets, 573 Pirates, and 489 Orioles. In another year that could flip 180 degrees.

I want to see a heat map. I'd bet that ticket sales fall off exponentially by distance. The Nats "won" Roanoke, Virginia and Wilmington, NC. But they probably sold 5000 times as many tickets in PG County. Some of the counties in Alaska that are "owned" by the Mariners probably bought 8 tickets. From Harrisburg it's 1:20 or so to Baltimore, two hours to Philly, and three to Pittsburgh.. That's why the O's own south-central PA. I am disappointed that St. Mary's County flipped to the Nats. I wonder how the map looked three years ago, when the records were different. There are still a lot of O's gear-wearing people here. Many of the oldtimers don't see themselves as DC people. Harrisburg is 40 minutes closer to OPACY than my house is.

The only time in my life I lived walking distance from a stadium was college. I did go to every Virginia Tech home football game in college, but that doesn't really count since I was in the band and had to go, although I would have anyway. But... I did go to 20 or 30 basketball games. The whole rest of my life I've seen four college/pro basketball games in person. I'd probably go to 15, 20 or more O's games a year if I lived really close.

Shifts don't take 5-4 and 7-5 games and turn them all into 1-0 games. Shifts are only detrimental to the sport in that a few fans find them distasteful, but I think most are good with it. Plus, there's an easy way around them: just hit where nobody is standing. It's not change for change's sake. It's change to make for a more engaging, poplar, sport that might appeal more broadly to people under the age of 50. Baseball has changed one major rule in the last 115 years, and the game has gone from eight homers leading the league and pitchers throwing 400 innings to teams hitting 300 homers and the Cy Young winner sometimes throwing 180 innings. Strikeouts have gone from two a game to nine. Teams used to use 1.5 pitchers a game, now its five or six. Baseball will change whether the rules do or not. It's up to the powers-that-be to make the change into something positive, or otherwise let it run uncontrolled and have no input on where the game ends up and whether or not anyone likes it.

Why? Because teams have used the absence of roster rules to evolve strategies that are more optimal for winning, but may be less optimal for an enjoyable, financially lucrative game. It's like the four-corners in basketball, but perhaps less extreme. Why should the basketball powers-that-be dictate what strategies teams should use? That's obvious: the strategies were good to win, but horrific from the standpoint of fan experience. What if teams figured out that if they had 25 pitchers on the roster each throwing to one or two batters, the other team would never get a hit? The whole team would be pitchers, the fielders would be out-of-position pitchers, standing out there on the off chance that someone didn't strike out. Wouldn't it be incumbent on the league to stop this, because nobody wants to watch 27 guys strike out every game? At some point the league has to step up and say we need to make this something people want to watch and pay for. It can't all be about the purity of 100+ year old rules.

I think this is step one. They could start lowering the number of allowed pitchers in a few years to 12, then 11, then 10. To me that's the only sure-fire way of getting individual pitchers to pitch more, and back off from max effort all the time. And I think they decided to make these irrelevant rules defining when a non-pitcher can pitch just to show they're putting something in the rules drawing a line between pitchers and non-pitchers. And to keep teams from stashing an extra real pitcher on the bench as a position player for use in real game situations.

Should be like 100 years ago, when you sometimes have a coach who you'd stick in a game once or twice a year until he was 48 or 54 or something. Just for the heck of it, in September, or some game you didn't really care about when the Boston Braves were starting some kid who was bound to get shelled. See: Deacon McGuire, Arlie Latham, Nick Altrock. They could do that with Trumbo, he could start two games at DH in September until he was 55. If Stevie Wilkerson can get a save, who not let Trumbo get six PAs in 2032?

Stevie has a chance to make the 2020 roster.

When you compress the season into 10 great plays you can forget that they only won 54 games. In my mind they're already a goofy bunch of guys on our team we can kind of look back fondly on, kind of like the 1988 Orioles.

Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but rather than make a new one on an old topic... have they ever clarified the new pitching rules for 2020? Did they definitively state that teams will be limited to 13 pitchers? Or how they're defining a pitcher? Does this mean position players can't pitch anymore? This was all a little hazy when we started this thread in the spring.

That's an exaggeration. He had almost 200 PAs in 2017-18, and almost 300 in 2016-17. Then this year he had 503. He didn't play most of 2018, but that's it. I'm sure the Marlins are hoping that his .537 OPS, and zero home runs across AA/A and the Fall league is just fine. Maybe it is.

You can't be just another dude when your name was plastered all over the national media for being fired for antisocial behavior while the team you work for is in the World Series. At the very least he's got to go away and spend a year meditating and begging forgiveness in a Himalayan guru's hut before anyone is going to touch his resume again.

You could use the backup catcher supposition: If you're in AAA with occasional callups to the majors despite a .577 OPS, someone thinks you're a hell of a catcher. If a guy is an obvious jerk with serious problems with social interactions and is in a position of fairly high authority someone probably thought he was awesome or they'd have fired him years ago. No, that doesn't always work. Sometimes/often being a horrific jerk is mistaken for being a strong leader.

Agreed, but it's some good schadenfreude when you lose out on the equivalent of a 1/1 pick and he hits like Mark Belanger at 22 in A ball.