In my world, the interesting (and annoying) point is the failure of the Giants and Farhan Zaidi to build a winner using a "Moneyball" approach. Watching them and the A's earlier - before their eeevil owner decided to completely mail it in so he could move the team to Vegas - I realized that "Moneyball" can get you an ok-to-good regular season team, but you still need "Star Power" - and luck + a great manager - to win in October.
I think part of it is sabermetrics isn't great at capturing which players play well in clutch moments or against elite (versus "statistically average") pitching, and that sabermetric-inspired strategies like "walk or swing for the fences because stringing singles together to score runs is too hard" also fail as elite, playoff-class pitchers give up less walks than the canonical league-average pitching that is the basis for stuff like WAR.
Your fellow Substacker Joe Posnanski writes at length on how the expanded playoffs have diluted the regular season. He also noted that all articles on baseball claim the sport was at its best when the writer was 10 years old. ;-)
As for the bottom of the order: the Cubs struggled mightily in the first half, due in no small part to the lack of production from their #8 and #9 hitters. Pete Crow-Armstrong and Miguel Amaya both had OPS's below .600 at mid-season. They both turned it around after the Break, and the Cubs put in a pretty decent showing in the second half.
(This is the third consecutive year the schizophrenic Cubs started slow, then turned things aro9und mid-season. Unfortunately, each time they found the hole they had dug for themselves was just too deep to climb out o9f.)
"A larger, less resilient ball would end up in play a lot more. There would not be so many strikeouts and home runs. Baseball would be more interesting." This fix sounds right. Too much all-or-nothing play.
I gotta crow: I am, uh, relieved that the Mets no longer have the worst season record in (modern) MLB history. Thanks, White Sox!
Interesting observation that it may be a better strategy to improve the bottom three in the lineup than the top three. Baseball is not a game of stars the way basketball is. It's usually more important for a team to plug weaknesses.
One of my little hobbies is to track baseball attendance over time. 2007 is still the peak year for paid attendance, with 32,700 per game. This year it was just over 29,000. The NL was higher than the AL by about 5,000 per game. With few exceptions, NL games have had higher average paid attendance every year since the 1950s.
There's excitement when the bottom of the lineup pulls something off. I guess that seems to me part of the interest. I have a memory of being delighted that Joe Niekro hit a home run. I thought it was not possible. I was probably about six.
Also, kind of like an 18-inning game when suddenly the center fielder is pitching. I know well enough - from a relative who's a baseball encyclopedia - this kind of shallow fandom - in it for the quirks - is maddening to actual baseball fans.
I always love your baseball articles, and enjoyed your analysis of the players and stats this season. As someone who watches (or more often listens on the radio) to about 150 / 162 Yankees games each year, I'm very attuned to the issues you have presented. FWIW, the playoffs have been totally electric so far. The past week has had some of the best baseball I have seen all year.
I don't agree with your suggested changes to the ball itself - that would turn baseball into softball, and no one watches softball!
I remember as a girl playing LL softball being actively annoyed by the size of the ball. My brothers played their games with baseballs. I, their little sister with tiny weak hands, had to play with a grapefruit.
"Apart from Gunnar Henderson, the products of the much-hyped Oriole farm system did not produce much. And Henderson’s OPS fell by 170 points the second half of the season—has he been figured out?"
The Orioles situation was interesting...and by that I mean frustrating. The big name prospects they called up, Heston Kjerstad and Jackson Holliday, did absolutely nothing. No hot streaks at any point, no "pitchers figured them out," just a sea of whiffs and weak groundouts. Meanwhile a couple of the lesser prospects had pretty good seasons for them, namely Jordan Westburg and Colton Cowser.
As for Henderson, it wasn't just him that struggled in the second half; it was most of the starting lineup. Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Ryan O'Hearn, Ryan Mountcastle, Cedric Mullins...all of them seemed to fall off a cliff, offensively, after about July 1st. Well, except for Mullins, who was bad all season, really.
AIs should be able to pick better Fantasy Baseball teams, but I haven’t heard of them doing so. Perhaps actual human performance variability makes probabilistic luck more dominant.
I’d argue a 5% increase in the size of the ball would be better than a decrease in resilience. Strikeouts are more boring than homers.
The "bigger ball" is basically a return to the Dead Ball Era, when baseball was dominated by hits, bunts, and stealing, and you could lead the leagues in HRs with a dozen.
The dead ball era ended after a player got killed by being hit with the ball, and they started replacing balls mid-game more frequently - and started getting rid of spitters and other "doctored ball" pitching strategies (at least officially). This also happened just about the same time as the 1918 Blacksox scandal...
Babe Ruth figured out that the more tight balls could be hit a lot further, so he started to swing for the fences, and set a string of league HR records that were often double or more the totals of runners-up. This is similar to Steph Curry in the mid 2010s in 3 point shooting...
One fascinating thing about hockey is that the game itself changes dramatically from regular season to playoffs. Unlike the other major sports, hockey becomes significantly more violent during the playoffs, where the frequency of tactics like forechecking seems to ramp up dramatically. This can have a profound effect on the more finesse/space dependent teams, as suddenly the game becomes more physical and their systems break down.
See the 2021-2022 Florida Panthers, who won the President's Trophy thanks to a high-flying, speedy offense but got completely shut down by a much grittier Tampa team early in the playoffs. Florida subsequently retooled and became what was arguably the most physical team in the league the following year. Lo and behold, they made it to the Stanley Cup final two years in a row, winning it all on their second attempt.
In essence, physical teams—those that play "playoff-style" hockey as their default mode—tend to have a major advantage in the postseason, provided they can stay healthy; a dynamic that perhaps contributes to the notion that "the regular season hardly matters" in hockey.
I have watched one baseball game in the last quarter century and that was a college baseball game 3 or 4 years ago. I grew up playing the game and was an avid fan of Cincinnati the closest MLB team to where I grew up. Not sure why I lost interest in watching- I actually played the game into my mid 40s in rec leagues after picking it up again in 1994. From what I have read about the game of today, there is no chance I will ever be a fan again and Arnold mentions the reasons why.
Arnold - Let’s get working on this bigger less resilient ball. Concept phase begins now.
How big are we talking? This increased size will increase drag. Are there other ways to make the ball harder to grip? Would those be better.
Assuming we go forward with the bigger ball strategy, we’ll need a model or at least a rule of thumb to determine relationship between ball diameter and distance traveled for given throw/hit velocities.
In percentage terms how much less resilient do you have in mind? This requirement should be driven by your top level requirements. What are the top level requirements for your new game? Can you quantify it for us?
What about the late surge from Detroit??????
In my world, the interesting (and annoying) point is the failure of the Giants and Farhan Zaidi to build a winner using a "Moneyball" approach. Watching them and the A's earlier - before their eeevil owner decided to completely mail it in so he could move the team to Vegas - I realized that "Moneyball" can get you an ok-to-good regular season team, but you still need "Star Power" - and luck + a great manager - to win in October.
I think part of it is sabermetrics isn't great at capturing which players play well in clutch moments or against elite (versus "statistically average") pitching, and that sabermetric-inspired strategies like "walk or swing for the fences because stringing singles together to score runs is too hard" also fail as elite, playoff-class pitchers give up less walks than the canonical league-average pitching that is the basis for stuff like WAR.
Your fellow Substacker Joe Posnanski writes at length on how the expanded playoffs have diluted the regular season. He also noted that all articles on baseball claim the sport was at its best when the writer was 10 years old. ;-)
As for the bottom of the order: the Cubs struggled mightily in the first half, due in no small part to the lack of production from their #8 and #9 hitters. Pete Crow-Armstrong and Miguel Amaya both had OPS's below .600 at mid-season. They both turned it around after the Break, and the Cubs put in a pretty decent showing in the second half.
(This is the third consecutive year the schizophrenic Cubs started slow, then turned things aro9und mid-season. Unfortunately, each time they found the hole they had dug for themselves was just too deep to climb out o9f.)
"A larger, less resilient ball would end up in play a lot more. There would not be so many strikeouts and home runs. Baseball would be more interesting." This fix sounds right. Too much all-or-nothing play.
I gotta crow: I am, uh, relieved that the Mets no longer have the worst season record in (modern) MLB history. Thanks, White Sox!
Interesting observation that it may be a better strategy to improve the bottom three in the lineup than the top three. Baseball is not a game of stars the way basketball is. It's usually more important for a team to plug weaknesses.
One of my little hobbies is to track baseball attendance over time. 2007 is still the peak year for paid attendance, with 32,700 per game. This year it was just over 29,000. The NL was higher than the AL by about 5,000 per game. With few exceptions, NL games have had higher average paid attendance every year since the 1950s.
There's excitement when the bottom of the lineup pulls something off. I guess that seems to me part of the interest. I have a memory of being delighted that Joe Niekro hit a home run. I thought it was not possible. I was probably about six.
I could be wrong about which pitcher it was.
Also, kind of like an 18-inning game when suddenly the center fielder is pitching. I know well enough - from a relative who's a baseball encyclopedia - this kind of shallow fandom - in it for the quirks - is maddening to actual baseball fans.
I always love your baseball articles, and enjoyed your analysis of the players and stats this season. As someone who watches (or more often listens on the radio) to about 150 / 162 Yankees games each year, I'm very attuned to the issues you have presented. FWIW, the playoffs have been totally electric so far. The past week has had some of the best baseball I have seen all year.
I don't agree with your suggested changes to the ball itself - that would turn baseball into softball, and no one watches softball!
I remember as a girl playing LL softball being actively annoyed by the size of the ball. My brothers played their games with baseballs. I, their little sister with tiny weak hands, had to play with a grapefruit.
How about if we have the starting pitcher either have to play to a fixed number of innings or a fixed number of runs given up, whichever comes first?
"Apart from Gunnar Henderson, the products of the much-hyped Oriole farm system did not produce much. And Henderson’s OPS fell by 170 points the second half of the season—has he been figured out?"
The Orioles situation was interesting...and by that I mean frustrating. The big name prospects they called up, Heston Kjerstad and Jackson Holliday, did absolutely nothing. No hot streaks at any point, no "pitchers figured them out," just a sea of whiffs and weak groundouts. Meanwhile a couple of the lesser prospects had pretty good seasons for them, namely Jordan Westburg and Colton Cowser.
As for Henderson, it wasn't just him that struggled in the second half; it was most of the starting lineup. Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Ryan O'Hearn, Ryan Mountcastle, Cedric Mullins...all of them seemed to fall off a cliff, offensively, after about July 1st. Well, except for Mullins, who was bad all season, really.
I worry that tinkering with the ball would lead to more pitching injuries, which are already too frequent
AIs should be able to pick better Fantasy Baseball teams, but I haven’t heard of them doing so. Perhaps actual human performance variability makes probabilistic luck more dominant.
I’d argue a 5% increase in the size of the ball would be better than a decrease in resilience. Strikeouts are more boring than homers.
The "bigger ball" is basically a return to the Dead Ball Era, when baseball was dominated by hits, bunts, and stealing, and you could lead the leagues in HRs with a dozen.
The dead ball era ended after a player got killed by being hit with the ball, and they started replacing balls mid-game more frequently - and started getting rid of spitters and other "doctored ball" pitching strategies (at least officially). This also happened just about the same time as the 1918 Blacksox scandal...
Babe Ruth figured out that the more tight balls could be hit a lot further, so he started to swing for the fences, and set a string of league HR records that were often double or more the totals of runners-up. This is similar to Steph Curry in the mid 2010s in 3 point shooting...
One fascinating thing about hockey is that the game itself changes dramatically from regular season to playoffs. Unlike the other major sports, hockey becomes significantly more violent during the playoffs, where the frequency of tactics like forechecking seems to ramp up dramatically. This can have a profound effect on the more finesse/space dependent teams, as suddenly the game becomes more physical and their systems break down.
See the 2021-2022 Florida Panthers, who won the President's Trophy thanks to a high-flying, speedy offense but got completely shut down by a much grittier Tampa team early in the playoffs. Florida subsequently retooled and became what was arguably the most physical team in the league the following year. Lo and behold, they made it to the Stanley Cup final two years in a row, winning it all on their second attempt.
In essence, physical teams—those that play "playoff-style" hockey as their default mode—tend to have a major advantage in the postseason, provided they can stay healthy; a dynamic that perhaps contributes to the notion that "the regular season hardly matters" in hockey.
I have watched one baseball game in the last quarter century and that was a college baseball game 3 or 4 years ago. I grew up playing the game and was an avid fan of Cincinnati the closest MLB team to where I grew up. Not sure why I lost interest in watching- I actually played the game into my mid 40s in rec leagues after picking it up again in 1994. From what I have read about the game of today, there is no chance I will ever be a fan again and Arnold mentions the reasons why.
Arnold - Let’s get working on this bigger less resilient ball. Concept phase begins now.
How big are we talking? This increased size will increase drag. Are there other ways to make the ball harder to grip? Would those be better.
Assuming we go forward with the bigger ball strategy, we’ll need a model or at least a rule of thumb to determine relationship between ball diameter and distance traveled for given throw/hit velocities.
In percentage terms how much less resilient do you have in mind? This requirement should be driven by your top level requirements. What are the top level requirements for your new game? Can you quantify it for us?