Generally, over time, sports teams gradually make advances in strategy: discovering exploitable weaknesses, coming closer to optimal play, etc.
For example, in (American) football, in the last 20 years or so teams have more or less figured out that a Running Back who you can slam into the line 25 times per game for 3.5 yards per carry isn’t actually helping your team all that much. Likewise, they’ve gotten smarter about run/pass distribution: if you’re averaging 4 yards per running play and 5.5 or whatever per passing play, then passing plays should probably be your first option. Or, in baseball, you could go the Moneyball route: teams in very short succession realizing the importance of things like On Base Percentage.
But what about when the opposite happens, and a league or sport collectively takes a step backwards and embraces a *less *efficient way of doing things?
The only example that immediately comes to mind for me is the development of the closer in baseball. The wiki for the position gives a pretty decent rundown, but basically the best relief pitcher on a team used to be used as a “fireman,” deployed in particularly dangerous (high-leverage) situations to shut down an opposing threat. Today, every team basically reserves its best reliever for the start of the 9th inning of games in which they lead by 3 or fewer runs (i.e. “save situations”). The problem is that the old way was much more intelligent. If you’re up by 1 run in the 7th and the other team has runners on 1st and 2nd with nobody out, and you have a dominant relief pitcher in the bullpen, you hurt yourself quite a bit by employing a mediocre reliever in this spot. Nonetheless:
Not quite what you were asking, but when I saw the thread title, I immediately thought of flopping. Originally pretty limited to soccer (though there are definitely examples in basketball as far back as the 50s), it saw a pretty big increase this decade. It’s gotten to be rampant in the NBA, and it’s just an embarrassment.
I would agree with that, but flopping seems to be a fairly effective strategy in basketball at the moment, sadly. I was asking about new strategies (be it on the field/court or in the front office) taking hold that are actually a step backwards. That is, a new, less effective strategy supplanting (even partially) an older one that yielded better results.
Interesting premise - but hard to think of examples that squarely meet the OP.
One that could literally represent ‘a less efficient way of doing things’ is the world rally championship. A modern rally car is heavily regulated and restricted in design, needing to be clearly related to a production car. The group B era of the 80s - a golden era to rally fans - had little restriction so the cars were a lot more powerful. Fatalities (driver and spectator) led to new rules that restrain car performance.
You also have sports like F1 or cycling where there are clear team hierarchies - this sometimes leads to devolved / sub-optimal performance (e.g. Wiggins / Froome 2012 Tour de France, loads of examples in F1) when there is discord between the two top men.
Not really the examples of sports strategy that you’re looking for I guess, but tangentially related.
I think the only way a highly competitive endeavor like sports could have such a devolution is the introduction of some outside influence (money, generally) to cause sub-optimal deviations from the norm.
Your baseball closer situation (a really good one, IMO) was entirely due to the creation of a new statistic which, in turn, led to good money for “closers”. No save rule, no closer, IMO.
It’s possible that another baseball statistic causes some sub-optimal decisions - the pitcher win. I’ve certainly seen managers leave a pitcher in longer than he should so he could “get the win”. Complete games and shutouts as well. Although I don’t think this is a devolution since starting pitchers in general are pitching less than they used to.
It’s possible that the new-found realization by front offices that low batting averages and high strikeouts aren’t as bad as previously thought (as long as they come with some power) has led to decreased offense as the overall power numbers come down (whether due to PED testing or some other reason). So it’s possible that the previous preference for high-BA line-drive type hitters would be more efficient in today’s MLB environment than high-SLG fly-ball type hitters.
I think flopping is also finding its way into the NFL, as offenses become more and more efficiently fast. When hurry-up offenses are making quick progress to the goal line, someone on the defense is “hurt,” necessitating an injury timeout and stalling the offense’s drive. The offense isn’t penalized (as when a soccer or basketball player is called for a foul), but it takes a lot of the momentum out of the drive.
I think Denver fans may see more of it because of PFM’s relentless no-huddle offense in the last couple of years.
It’s swinging back the other way in baseball. Teams are starting to figure out that it makes more sense to have someone other than their best reliever be their closer. Not just for strategic flexibility, but because closers get paid a lot more than non-closer relievers, so teams can save themselves some money on their best reliever when it comes time for arbitration or free agency.
No kidding? Examples? It often happens when a team has an established closer who keeps his job because of his legacy for a few years while they have a better young reliever in the wings, but I can’t remember the last time I saw it planned that way.
I’m going off memory here, but I recall hearing a Dave Cameron/FanGraphs podcast where it was discussed that this might be more of a thing going forward. The reason is that guys with saves on their stat sheet command a lot more in free agency/arbitration than middle relievers, so teams can keep their costs down by keeping their best relievers in 7th/8th inning roles and using a worse reliever in the 9th inning.
But it does seem that the general trend is still to have your best reliever pitch in the 9th inning, at least for now.
The problem with baseball closers is that pitcher workloads fell and managers made an adjustment, but it wasn’t the optimal adjustment.
Yes, firemen like Bruce Sutter and Goose Gossage would come in the seventh or eighth inning, typically with men on base. But they would still finish the game. They were closers, in the sense of closing the game, even though nobody called them that. They just weren’t one-inning closers.
Pitcher workloads fall over time. This has been happening since overhand pitching was legalized in the 1880’s and will likely continue to happen. I am NOT going to hijack this thread with a discussion of the reasons, which we have covered dozens of times. Suffice it to say that pitcher workloads have fallen.
So there were fewer complete games and relievers were needed more often–as in, almost every day. And, reliever workloads fell, so that it was less plausible to have a reliever working multiple innings. Mike Marshall pitched 208 innings as a relief pitcher in 1974. That won’t and can’t happen today.
So, you had to pick your spots for your best reliever, as opposed to bringing him in any time you had a lead (and the starter was faltering) and leaving him in for the rest of the game.
The optimal adjustment is to bring him in in the first tight situation and then take him out. The adjustment that was made was to save him for the ninth, on the theory that the ninth inning was always tight. But, sometimes it isn’t.
Formula One is always rewriting the rules to slow the cars down, and the damned designers just keep making them faster!
To respond to the OP’s point about football, I tend to disagree. At the college level, there are whole conferences that are know for “3 yards and a cloud of dust” offenses.
Icing the kicker is a good example.
There are probably good examples of strategies that are more advantageous when they’re rare, but are sub-optimally adopted widely across a league. I suspect part of the continual NFL swing from 4-3 to 3-4 is because if everyone else is running one version, you can get very cheaply the players that fit the other version. So you have on average better players and go on a win streak. Then everyone sees you winning and adopts your version, making the players more expensive, and the cycle goes back the other way.
The NBA going from a team ball concept where an offense of five players is set up and they work the ball to the net to a superstar sport where the best guy slam dunks the ball as much as possible.
Although the trend seems to be reversing, during the Steroid Era of baseball the basics of strategy and base-to-base play seemed to be mostly forgotten, while Home Run Derby took over.
Similar to icing the kicker, sometimes a basketball coach calls timeout to ice an opponent’s free throw shooter. If you think about it, it just gives the shooter a chance to catch his breath after busting his buttocks on the court.
Purists have been complaining about declining team work for like 50 years. But there’s always “team” teams and iso-ball teams. It’s hard to work the ball around when you have one good player and a bunch of bums, but letting that good player do everything can get you far so it’s actually a good strategy. But the best teams usually run a well managed offense because they have a bunch of good players who can do multiple things.
I believe platooning (a definite advantage in baseball) to gain the opposite-hand advantage has decreased since the 70’s and 80’s. It’s coming back up now, but is still probably below optimum.
I think the causes have been higher player salaries (making it less conscionable to platoon a guy) and larger bullpen rosters (giving you fewer options to platoon with).
The A’s and a few other teams have made a habit of doing it recently, and it’s possible it will catch on again.
The causes you list are pretty good reasons, though. Larger bullpens are typically a defense against platoons, and things are starting to hit an equilibrium. I think that’s a good example.
To contribute to the OP, while the numbers are getting a little better, you still see players terrible at getting on base hitting at the top of the lineup.