I curse the day replay was introduced into any sport. For the NFL, I know so much revolves around gambling and gambling will only get more important.
But for baseball, how much action can really be at stake for a Tuesday game in April?
What do you think is the relevance of gambling to replays or vice versa? I don’t see a connection that stands up to any sort or real scrutiny.
Allegations, legitimate or not, of refs rigging calls in NFL games could kill that golden goose of gambling money in the NFL.
Every sport has had gambling issues over the years, but all eyes are on the NFL as so much of its interest is from gamblers and fantasy players
The NFL has not seemed to be cleanly officiated for decades. The Rules committee can’t seem to make rules that are easy to officiate and have broken the integrity of the sport themselves. So I guess they need Instant game delay to help.
Baseball does not really suffer from this problem.
George Springer to make his Jays debut tonight as DH.
I was thinking more in terms of flattening the seams - just to force pitchers to lower the velocity. I don’t know if that would work, actually. I do know that in an effort to deaden the ball this year, they managed to unintentionally raise the seams (increasing pitch movement to favor pitchers).
I don’t understand what those two things have to do with one another. Why wouldn’t people still gamble without replay?
They’ve been gambling since the days of Jim Thorpe. But, replay helps gamblers stay confident that a crooked ref won’t blow a call on purpose, ruining a point spread but not a victory.
Anthony Rizzo struck out Freddie Freeman tonight. They look like they were having fun:
Yanks are out of last, thank you O’s.
Just some more blathering about the DH. LOL
I won’t link to it but Bryce Harper got hit in the face with a 97 mph fastball, just awful.
In theory, perhaps, but in practice it doesn’t seem to slow 'em down, and professional baseball has never had any serious accusation of game-fixing in a rather long time, anyway.
Commercial breaks have already been reduced. 2 minutes isnt too long for players to take their positions and for the pitcher to warm up. Players are putting the ball in play 2.5% of the time less than 10 years ago.
Taking pitches and going deep into counts is a smart way to hit elite pitching (Hitter Discipline Can Beat Elite Pitchers - Collegiate Baseball Newspaper).
I have no problem with longish games. I love the sport.
I think his weight is something to be concerned about. He is what, 23? It will make him more injury prone and his value will diminish if he has to be a DH only.
In last nights Rocks v Giants a Rocks batter left the box before the ump signaled TO. Wood threw a pitch and the umpire called it a strike. Its progress.
In theory, I’d have no issue with the fact that games are more than a half-hour longer now than they were when I first became a baseball fan, as a teenager, in the late '70s and early '80s…if that additional half-hour meant a proportional increase in game action. The sad truth is, it hasn’t. Hits are down, strikeouts are up, and it’s become a station-to-station game while waiting for a home run. That extra half hour per game is pitchers fiddling around, batters fiddling around, mound conferences, official replays, pitching changes…and, yes, more commercial time. All of that stuff is minimally interesting to me, and I’ve considered myself a baseball fan for over 40 years.
But the only suggested proposals to reduce game time are artificial. Games will get shorter when teams again value pitchers who pitch to contact. Hopefully deadening the ball a bit will raise the value of contact hitters and shorten ABs.
This is my out of left field guess but the value of single wins has increased as parity in the MLB has become more common. Each game is played more like a playoff game. I prefer this era of baseball to days of yore when it was Yanks, Red Sox and dynasties.
Guerrero is visibly slimmer than he was last year, which is a very good sign; overweight though he was, he apparently has the discipline to improve that.
The similarity between Guerrero and Miguel Cabrera is very striking. If Guerrero ends up being anywhere near the player Cabrera has been I’m sure the Jays will be delighted.
That will never happen, because pitchers who pitch to contact simply aren’t as good as ones that strike men out. Strikeout rate is an extremely good indicator of future success. Pitchers who are successful without striking men out almost always fall apart. All of the greatest pitchers of all time I can think of had above average strikeout rates in their prime. Yes, even Greg Maddux, who if anything was the LEAST strikeout-dependent great pitcher of modern times, usually struck out more men than the average pitcher.
If you want to reduce strikeout rates - and that’s a TERRIFIC idea - waiting for teams to deliberately get worse pitchers isn’t gonna work. You have to
-
Make it physically more difficult to strike men out - by moving the pitcher back six, twelve inches, let’s say, or changing the baseball
-
By making contact hitting more of a viable strategy - by, say, moving fences back, or
-
By not asking teams top emphasize worse pitchers, but rather emphasize pitchers who don’t just pitch to a few batters as hard as they can… and in fairness they’re trying this, sort of, though they should go further.
For those who have MLB.tv, they’ve started a “Hot Inning” channel, which is essentially NFL Red Zone for baseball. It’s fantastic, especially if your team isn’t playing.