The game I grew up with...

[sevastras]

On 5/30/2024 at 10:20 AM, FlipTheBird said:

Watch UFC if people beating each other up is what gets your rocks off. 

I don’t like ufc. I do enjoy a nice boxing match. I just enjoy when men were men, but I get it if you enjoy the security your girlfriend provides for you. 

[Greg Pappas]

The game, as in most sports, has changed to some degree.  As I said in the OP, that's to be expected.  I understand the reasoning why it's changed, and don't believe things like Complete Games will make a comeback anytime soon, if ever.  But I stand by wanting to see less K's and less of some players swinging for the fences most at bats. Getting runners over and bunting are skills that seem worse today than in years gone by.  It would be nice to see more of modern hitters hitting the ball in that huge hole because the middle infielder left his position to stand behind the pitcher. 

Anyway, I still love baseball, but was waxing poetic... missing some aspects that were appealing.  Nothing wrong with that.

[Emory Eagle]

On 5/29/2024 at 11:13 AM, DrungoHazewood said:

Show me a pitcher today, throwing how pitchers today throw, who gets to 110 pitches and is just cruising with no fatigue. Back it off, throw in the 80s on an arm that could hit 98, and put four guys in every lineup who really can't hit at all and you might have a strategy that works. Otherwise you're just creating work for surgeons. 

Pitchers have always gotten hurt, even back when nobody cared about pitch counts and pitchers knew they couldn't throw every pitch like it was their last. The '61 Orioles won 95 games with four starters aged 23 or younger who all threw at least 177 innings. Steve Barber was hurt off and on the rest of his career, described in Ball Four a having an arm held together with chewing gum and baling wire.  Chuck Estrada's career was effectively over at 25. Jack Fisher's best year was at 21. Only Milt Pappas survived relatively unscathed.

The answer could be to significantly expand the league… water down talent sufficiently and maybe you don’t need to throw at 100% effort if you’re one of the better pitchers around.  Maybe total offense increases (runs slightly counter to earlier point, but not necessarily inherently) due to drop off in pitching talent being steeper than comparable drop off for hitters in a sufficiently expanded pool, which makes games more exciting for the average fan.

Add a bunch of mid tier cities with smaller stadiums, and expand rosters, etc.  Just need to prove to the owners it would mean they make more money.  Not sure about that part.

Edited May 31 by Emory Eagle
Typos

[FlipTheBird]

6 hours ago, sevastras said:

I don’t like ufc. I do enjoy a nice boxing match. I just enjoy when men were men, but I get it if you enjoy the security your girlfriend provides for you. 

Men aren’t men because the game was tired of players getting hurt on useless collisions at the plate that have nothing to do with good baseball?

[FlipTheBird]

5 hours ago, Greg Pappas said:

The game, as in most sports, has changed to some degree.  As I said in the OP, that's to be expected.  I understand the reasoning why it's changed, and don't believe things like Complete Games will make a comeback anytime soon, if ever.  But I stand by wanting to see less K's and less of some players swinging for the fences most at bats. Getting runners over and bunting are skills that seem worse today than in years gone by.  It would be nice to see more of modern hitters hitting the ball in that huge hole because the middle infielder left his position to stand behind the pitcher. 

Anyway, I still love baseball, but was waxing poetic... missing some aspects that were appealing.  Nothing wrong with that.

Some of those things may swing back through, in time. The game is ever evolving. Eras come and go. This one will go, eventually, too.

[DrungoHazewood]

12 hours ago, Emory Eagle said:

The answer could be to significantly expand the league… water down talent sufficiently and maybe you don’t need to throw at 100% effort if you’re one of the better pitchers around.  Maybe total offense increases (runs slightly counter to earlier point, but not necessarily inherently) due to drop off in pitching talent being steeper than comparable drop off for hitters in a sufficiently expanded pool, which makes games more exciting for the average fan.

Add a bunch of mid tier cities with smaller stadiums, and expand rosters, etc.  Just need to prove to the owners it would mean they make more money.  Not sure about that part.

Yes, I think that would be a solution that just might work. If you doubled the number of MLB teams it might take a decade or two for talent to catch back up. One of the reasons many strategies of 100 or 150 years ago worked was a much lower talent level, and much bigger spread between the best and worst MLB players. Even just going back 50 years or so it's clear to me one of the reasons pitchers could throw 300 innings was a much shallower pool of hitters, or at the very least choices that favored .220 hitting shortstops with no power.

But, what do you think the odds are of Major League Baseball expanding to 60 teams in the next decade? 0.001%? 0.0000001%? The owners would look at such a proposal as an idea for how to slash their shared revenues by 50%, and would probably rather spend the last 20 years of their life fighting it in court than let that happen.

This is like the discussions I have with soccer fans on promotion/relegation in the US. Great idea, tremendous benefits, works beautifully in the rest of the world, fosters all kinds of local grassroots interest in the sport, punishes tanking. But current owners would rather gouge their eyes out with their thumbnails than implement it here.

[DrungoHazewood]

15 hours ago, Greg Pappas said:

It would be nice to see more of modern hitters hitting the ball in that huge hole because the middle infielder left his position to stand behind the pitcher.

Isn't is just weird that it took 100+ years to figure that out? Hey, that guy hits a bunch of balls right through the box, maybe we should have the second baseman move over that direction a little? Nah, if we do it so will everybody, and we like .350 hitters even when they're on the other team.

It would be like a football game where there's a formation where a WR keeps getting completely open downfield and busting 40 yard plays, and it takes 35 years for defenses to adjust. "It's just how it is! If we cover that guy, then the running back might average five yards a carry!"

[DrungoHazewood]

10 hours ago, FlipTheBird said:

Some of those things may swing back through, in time. The game is ever evolving. Eras come and go. This one will go, eventually, too.

Baseball will change, there's almost no doubt about that. But it's very unlikely to change back to the ways of 50 or 100 years ago because there's no competitive advantage to do so. It will probably change in ways that we don't fully expect, and that haven't happened before. Unless the powers-that-be change the rules and conditions, which they've always been very reluctant to do, the strategies of today are the strategies of today because they win a lot more games than the strategies of 1970.

I think it's more likely that we see individual pitchers pitch even less in each outing (although possibly more frequently) than it is we go back to complete games. Even if the rules are changed, say you can only have nine pitchers on the roster like was common 50 years ago, today's GMs and managers would just use each pitcher for three innings every three games instead of a four-man rotation with lots of complete games.

[Just Regular]

Some time in the 2010's, I heard Sam Miller on Effectively Wild guess by 2050 starting and relieving as baseball has known them would mostly go extinct save for perhaps the best 20-30 talents (maybe think Kyle Bradish on up these days).

Living through it, we'll get to see our Orioles contribute a verse as they scientifically curate the careers of Grayson Rodriguez, Chayce McDermott, Luis De Leon and others.

Cade Povich with a strong assortment of benders and not a huge fastball for me is trending towards the Kyle Gibson way of leading his team in regular season innings pitched and being a marginal Start/Sit if his team makes the postseason.

With good fortune by the end of 2026 Cade Povich will be almost as prominent an MLBPA member as Grayson Rodriguez as the players collaborate on negotiating priorities.    Like say maybe...the club's current opportunity to make a pitcher's 6.000 years of team control take up 7-8 years of their baseball lives in the best case scenario because they "aren't built up" to be Roy Halladay.