DrungoHazewood

I think you're whistling past the graveyard. Everything is fine... just fine, don't touch anything that might upset the guys who root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And soccer is reaching critical mass in the US, despite the top domestic league being what we'd call a minor league. There have been something like 20 new soccer-specific stadiums built for MLS in the last decade or so. I can watch every Premier League game on whatever device I want. And baseball would kill for soccer's demographics, most of the fans will still be alive in 20 years.

I'm sure MASN will be streaming in 4K in 2033. It takes a long time to build up those trucks, or so rshack said.

I don't think a league or a business of any type would take the approach that their product is fading away and they should just kind of accept that. I would expect that baseball fights for market share. I just don't see a situation where the owners and Manfred accept that baseball will no longer be viable on the level they are today. Can you imagine presenting a business plan to your investors that is basically making the aging and curmudgeonly fanbase comfortable until the end inevitably comes?

That's the challenge, isn't it? Any business has to walk the line between bringing in new customers and not alienating their existing base. Baseball has a huge problem in that they're popular enough now, but you can see the demographic cracks. The average age of a baseball fan is 174. I kid, but it's not great for the future of the game. Couple that with cable being a potential bubble - eventually there will be enough cord cutters to take a cut out of mandatory $3 montly MASN fees. Baseball may choose to follow your path and not change anything, and let the game wander around wherever it sees fit. That's how we've gotten to long games with relatively little action besides strikeouts and homers. Personally I think it's stupid to see the writing on the walls with regards to an aging fanbase and a younger generation uninterested in long, tedious games, and do nothing. I see baseball's current situation as somewhat analogous to basketball prior to the shot clock and 3-point line. College basketball wasn't exactly in trouble when they did those things, but they saw obvious problems like stalling tactics and four-corners, and the dominance of 7-footers instead of athletic players and they did something about it. And now March Madness is probably bigger than the World Series. It wouldn't be if North Carolina was able to hold the ball for the last 18 minutes of a 19-14 game.

I look forward to reading your analysis.

Couldn't you just as well say that pitchers (badly) hitting makes no sense because we've had year round interleague play for seasons now?

Most years you'll have one or two teams off by 10 wins. It's not a big deal, probably not indicative of anything. Sometimes it's an over/underachieving or poorly/well-leveraged bullpen. Could also be sequencing of events, bad luck in high leverage situations. I can't think of any reason that strikeouts would influence that much at all.

I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence. The O's totaled about 11 WAR by bb-ref and eight by Fangraphs. That's in the neighborhood of 50 wins.

I guess Americans have always bought their cars with an eye on dollars per pound. Used to be people lusted after 25' long Caddys that weighed three tons and you could put seven bodies in the trunk, now it's three-row SUVs larger than a Manhattan studio. I'm a contrarian on this, and every time I see an Escalade I want to go buy an imported Japanese Kei car or an old Austin Mini.

When analytics show that the best strategies are counter to making baseball a thriving commercial venture it's up to the powers-that-be to tweak the rules to encourage more engaging strategies. I don't have much faith in that because of history, and because Manfred talks about treating symptoms (i.e. ban the shift) rather than the disease (prevalance of three true outcomes strategies). Although the original post/article here has some ideas pointing in the right direction.

Yes, I understand that you're using your attendance projections as a way to state your dissatisfaction with the rebuilding plan.

I'm not even going to pretend to understand the appeal of a $75k generic 6000 lb GM SUV with 30" chrome spinners and a bunch of stick-on chrome bits that look like they came from the AutoZone clearance bin that has the handling characteristics of a Penske moving van.

That's a matter of fact. The 2003 Marlins won the World Series, and the 2004 team built on that, but both of those teams were out-drawn by every Oriole team from 1989-2017.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The Marlins' average attendance over their franchise history is about the same as the 2018 Orioles' attendance. Even when they opened their new stadium they had about the same attendance as the 2015-17 Orioles. They've had two seasons with under 1M fans, the last time the O's did that was 1974. As much as you'd like validation that Elias' strategy is wrong, Frobby's attendance estimate is probably pretty good. I know I'm more likely to pay to see games this year than last.

- Baseball doesn't have to have 3-5 minutes of commericals for every stoppage in play. Supply and demand - less commerical time means more value per commercial minute. Soccer has halftime as the only break and the Premier League has the same or more revenues per team than MLB, in a country that has 1/5th the population. - Major League Baseball does have a persistant problem with younger fans. It's like Cadillac. Cadillac makes some sports sedans that compete quite well on features with BMW, Audi, Mercedes. But they can't shake the Grandpa's Car label, or the fact they made a crappy product from roughly 1970-2010. You can't force cool, it just has to happen. - What needs fixing is the type of game. In the 1970s and 80s we had a diversity of strategies. Some teams hit 80 homers and stole 250 bases, some teams hit 200 homers and stole 30 bases. There were 8 or 10 more balls in play per game, there was more action. There were guys who sometimes hit 20 triples. Now every team tries to strike out 10 men a game, and get their swing planes such that they'll hit the ball over the shift and into the RF stands. Nobody steals bases much, triples are an oddity, ISTP HRs happen when someone falls down and breaks a leg, and my kids don't even have a chance to look up from their tablet to watch the game end on the 19th strikeout of the night because they've been asleep since the 5th inning.

Mea culpa. In the beginning the idea was that the pitcher was just there to "pitch" the ball up to the batter so he could put it in play. There were restrictions on delivery brought over from the way cricket was played then: underhanded, no breaking the wrist, maybe even the rules (still in cricket) about a stiff elbow. Creighton was one of the first or at least better pitchers at getting away with snapping his wrist a little and getting a little something extra on the ball. Balls and strikes came about because pitchers, being limited in what they could to, started throwing everything just out of reach of the batter. Eventually, usually, the batter would get frustrated and swing at bad balls. So the concept was that the ump would start calling unfair pitches and after a limit the batter would get first base. When they first tried this it was overly complicated, like you'd walk on four or five balls, but the ump didn't call a ball until the pitcher had been given a warning, so in essence it was 9 or 10 balls for a walk. As they were trying to make for a more enjoyable commerical game int the 1870s and 1880s they tinkered with the ball and strike rules almost annually, before finally settling on four balls/three strikes in 1888. And by 1903 the foul strike rules were what they are today in both leagues. As late as 1902 in the AL you could foul off 20 pitches in a row and the count could be 0-0.

1. No, we don't need pitchers goofing around. They don't have to get up for work at 5:45, they don't have to drive two hours home, so they don't care. But MLB should care about their paying customers. In 1920 an average game was around 2:00. It can be done. 2. 26th roster spot could be good, but without other limitations current managers would almost exclusively use it for a 13th or 14th pitcher. We desperately need a limit on pitchers. Either max number on roster, or max number you can use per game. I think I'd be good with either. 8, 9, 10 total pitchers on roster including rotation. Or three pitchers per nine, with an additional pitcher for each two extra innings. You get an extra in case of injury, but then the injured pitcher can't pitch for 10 days. 3. I don't really care about the mound. I don't think we have enough data to know the impact. We have stories about huge mounds corresponding to low runs, but little actual evidence. When they started enforcing the mound height in '69 (?) they also tinkered with the strike zone, right? Hard to tell which was the predominant cause of the offensive blip, espeically since offense stayed low in the early 70s. What was it... '73, '74? when the O's allowed 450 runs all year and didn't even win the division? 4. Could do like in Japan. If a regular season game lasts (IIRC) 12 innings and it's still tied that's how it stands. I know the O's have had some epic, long extra inning games (Davis, Sakata) but the fans vote with their feet - by the 12th inning there are usually 1200 people left in the stands.

I'd be fine with a rule that says the reliever has 30 seconds to be ready to pitch to a batter. The manager has to alert the ump of a sub. The pitcher, who has already walked in from the pen to the dugout, goes to the mound and we're ready to go. I have a strong memory of my first game at the age of eight, sitting in yellow seats in the mezzanine. So someone will probably post a photo of 1979, with the mezzanine being blue or green. The pitch clock might work, but it's failed in some experiments. Banning the shift will do nothing to fix balls in play - in fact it might exacerbate the problem by making it easier for Chris Davis types who both strikeout every third PA and pull the ball a ton to succeed. There is no real difference between the leagues besides the DH rule. They used to have seperate umps, offices, presidents, etc. Offensive levels often varied by quite a lot. Balls were different. Now the differences are the DH, paper, and history. Baseball has refused to change almost any rules for over a century. And the game has evolved itself from a game of 2.50 ERAs, two Ks a game, and teams with < 10 homers a season to what we have today. When you never change anything people get really good at finding loopholes and ways around the rules. I doubt any rules changes they'll consider will be a greater impact than the differences we've seen organically. At least with rules changes they have a chance to drive the changes in positive directions. As it is now they're random. I really, really want to see a park with a really, really deep outfield. I wish New Yankee Stadium had the same dimensions as original Yankee, which was something like 310, 350, 466, 450, 315, 296. The Polo Grounds might be a little extreme - I doubt 257' signs would go over well with pitchers, even if balanced by a CF fence that's over 500' with a 50' wall that's in play. My feeling is that free agency has had a significant impact on dimensions. It's hard to get pitchers to sign with the Rockies, so it might be difficult to get any sluggers to go to a place where it's 475' in the gap. What I really want is a test case - it just has to be one or two fields. I want to see if it's the dimensions or the quality of the fielders that has driven triples and ISTP HRs to near-extinction. It's probably both, so I'd bet that even with a bunch of huge parks we'd never get back to the triples levels of the deadball era and the 1920s. The fielders and positioning are too good.

I don't know how anyone ever went to a weekday baseball game prior to lights. It's probably a miracle that baseball didn't settle on a 50-game schedule with almost everything on weekends. You literally had to skip out on work or school to go to a weekday MLB game. But by the 50s everyone except the Cubs had lights. I think there's a lot of interacting reasons. One is lower disposable income. Poorer transportation. Smaller population. Stadiums were... different. Memorial Stadium, for example, was much harder to get to than OPACY and there was nothing around the stadium besides residential areas. And these weren't mallparks with Korean taco stands - these were either 60-year-old stadiums with limited amenities, or the newer multi-purpose concrete behemoths with limited amenities. Memorial was kind of a hybrid of those two types. Attendance surged in the years right after WWII, but then TV got big and attendance fell a lot by the mid-late 50s. Some was probably urban decay, this was the start of flight from cities by middle class mostly white people. Football and basketball really took off as rival sports. And I don't think you should discount the Yankee dominance. It's hard to fathom this, but from 1921-64 the Yanks were in the World Series 29 times. At the same time the old franchises owned by a guy who'd been kind of rich in 1920 lost all the time. The Browns and Phils and Braves and A's more often than not were 30, 40, 50+ games out of first, barely making ends meet, no farm systems. If you were the Browns you knew as a matter of absolute fact that you were going to finish 43 games behind the Yanks, it didn't matter what year it was. This could go on forever, but other things like very rapid expansion, leading to a large number of teams with no real history or organic fanbase. And the unfettered movement of franchises in the 50s and 60s. I know I still feel like the Marlins and Rays aren't exactly on par with everyone else... in 1972 eight of the 24 teams didn't exist 10 years prior and a bunch of others had moved, some more than once. It's complicated.

Dick Stuart had a job for 10 years with numbers like Trumbo, and he was a -59 first baseman in the pre-DH era. There have always been Roy Seiverses and Mike Epsteins and Frank Howards. The calculus was just a little different when you had to shuffle them off to be pinch hitters when they got too bad in the field. Remember, prior to the DH pinch hitters could get into almost every game, that was a job. I guess it still is in the NL. Matt Stairs.

That's a good tip, I really don't know much about history and stuff.

That concept is why Sean Foreman puts dWAR on bb-ref. It's totally misinterpreted all the time, but I get why he did it.

Did you know Trumbo has played 788 games between the OF and 1B, and only 308 games at DH? There have always been players like Greg Luzinski.

1957. No war. Post-WWII economic boom. Baseball was still the unrivaled king of US professional sports, and the Yanks were in the middle of arguaby the most dominant period of any team in baseball history. And they drew 100k fewer fans than the 2018 Orioles.