Baseball The MLB is on pace for more strikeouts than hits this season

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

There is some pretty eye-opening stuff in this article about the state of baseball.

 

But this REALLY stood out for me:

 

The average time between balls put in play, according to "Sports Illustrated," is a staggering 3 minutes, 45 seconds.

 

WHAT THE HELL?!?

[Ricofoley]

As they mention in the article towards the end, a common solution that's been presented is pushing the mound back a little. But, assuming that you want to keep all baseball diamonds from at least high school on up adhering to MLB regulations, think of the number of diamonds around the country that you'd have to alter to do that.

 

Also Fan Graphs had a piece a couple of weeks ago showing that there's been some evidence that something has changed with the baseballs and they're not traveling as far as in the past few years and home runs are down some. It's easy to imagine a scenario where something slightly changes again with how they manufacture the baseballs and home runs drop even further and you end up with an environment where there's still a ton of strikeouts and practically no scoring at all.

 

Anyway, based on the ideas he's already floated, I'm terrified Rob Manfred is going to try addressing this in the dumbest possible way. They've already changed the rules in the minors so that teams start with runners on 2nd if the games going into extras. And something leaked out a while back where Manfred floated an idea at some kind of rules committee meeting where teams would get to set their own batting order in the 9th inning of games. Which... just... what??

[rc0101]

Wonder how long until the DH is implemented into the NL? 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

1 minute ago, rc0101 said:

Wonder how long until the DH is implemented into the NL? 

Within the next 5 years according to the article.

[Dodger]

When the Stanley Cup was on I was flipping back and forth between that and a Giants-Diamondback game that was on ESPN with my dad. On the baseball game, they had some announcer on a boat, and were basically talking about everything but the damn game. We flip back to the hockey game, the announcing is 100% about the accident and my dad noticed there is so much going on they don't have time to talk about anything else.

 

While I'm not a ludite and like and understand sabermetrics, it looks like advanced stats have killed baseball. Now that strikeouts are seen as no big deal and stolen bases are seen as bad and not worth it, the action on the field has become nonexistent. Everyone is swinging for the homerun. No one is trying to "create" runs anymore. Every piece of shit left handed hitter hitting .220 gets a fucking shift now. They used to save that shit for guys who could actually hit. Now some scrub from AAA gets a fucking shift. 

 

Baseball was never the most action packed sport in the world, but the sabermetric revolution has killed what excitement it used to have. 

[Biggie]

@Dodger you got this.  It’s homerun or nothing it seems like. And I’m tired of these damn shifts. I’m even more tired of these ball players not taking a sure hit/single when that shift is on.  If more players would take the single and punish the other team for implementing the shift it would stop a lot of it. Like you said, it used to be just for the stars but now every scrub batting 200 is getting his own personal shift. 

[RedSoxFan9]

The Adam Dunnification of baseball

[Kal-El814]

If it took more than a fucking century to figure out that you get more batters out if you stand here instead of there, the entire sport should be federally banned and all wins should be vacated from every team. Erase it from existence.

[Joe]

That article is the biggest piece of shit I have ever read. Seriously, baseball may have a problem, but the entire article is just so pathetically anti-analytics that it shouldn't even be taken seriously. 

[johnny]

9 hours ago, Dodger said:

When the Stanley Cup was on I was flipping back and forth between that and a Giants-Diamondback game that was on ESPN with my dad. On the baseball game, they had some announcer on a boat, and were basically talking about everything but the damn game. We flip back to the hockey game, the announcing is 100% about the accident and my dad noticed there is so much going on they don't have time to talk about anything else.

 

While I'm not a ludite and like and understand sabermetrics, it looks like advanced stats have killed baseball. Now that strikeouts are seen as no big deal and stolen bases are seen as bad and not worth it, the action on the field has become nonexistent. Everyone is swinging for the homerun. No one is trying to "create" runs anymore. Every piece of shit left handed hitter hitting .220 gets a fucking shift now. They used to save that shit for guys who could actually hit. Now some scrub from AAA gets a fucking shift. 

 

Baseball was never the most action packed sport in the world, but the sabermetric revolution has killed what excitement it used to have. 

If players would be willing to bunt during the shift it would stop teams from doing it for the most part. But no, half of baseball can’t bunt. 

 

The A’s have 15 fucking stolen bases this year.