Agreed, as amended: No shoot-out at all. Bring back ties. Extend overtime to 10 minutes if you don’t want so damn many of them.
Better yet, if they don’t want any ties at all, let 'em play all night until someone scores.
NASCAR:
- Make the cars fit the exact template of the production version. The chassis and engine can be racecar specific, but I want stock body lines.
- Get rid of the gear, transmission gear, and suspension rules and allow teams to run different setups. It’s not a spec car series.
- Get rid of the Lucky Dog rule. The wave around is fine because they can’t pit, but the lucky dog rule has always been stupid.
- Get rid of the Chase. Playoffs eliminate teams, so it doesn’t work for racing. Give the 43rd place car one point and give the 1st place car 43 points, but add 10 bonus points for a win. That way, consistency and wins make a difference. If someone runs off with the championship that way, they deserved it.
- Chicago, Phoenix, and New Hampshire don’t need 2 races when Rockingham doesn’t get one.
- The Nationwide series needs to limit Cup drivers to 15 races and it needs to go back to a more unique schedule, like it had in 1997 or so. The same with the trucks.
Indycar just needs to scrap everything they’ve got and start over. There needs to be more than one car and one engine. Someone suggested any engine combo you want (v8, v6, i4, turbos, etc.) but you have a fuel pump that limits how much fuel gets to the engine. That would make things interesting. Some teams might go with a turbo 4 cylinder that gets better gas mileage and some might go for a v8 that makes more power but has to stop more often. Anything is better than a spec series.
Yes, that would give them especial incentive to score, ending the game and avoiding the tie, which seems absent in many games in which both teams seem to cautiously defend against giving up a goal, satisfied with the 1 point.
Well, what if drivers who didn’t qualify for the “chase” were eliminated?
I pay to see a full field. I don’t want to see only 2 cars racing each other on the track for 500 miles at end of the season.
I heartily agree.
I have long thought that pro sports coaches manage to** minimize their chances of being fired,** rather than to maximize the chances of winning. This is very, very apparently in both football and baseball, where coaches/managers are pathologically conservative to the point of doing things that are unquestionably counterproductive.
What you are proposing is not only physically impossible, but would be hated by 99.99% of baseball fans, and to be honest would rob Major League Baseball of much of the physical beauty of its parks.
It’s also not at all analagous to basketball teams changing the basket height or an NFL team adopting a Canadian field. The fundamental dimensions of a ballpark are not the outfield fence distances - which aren’t really hugely different, anyway - but the core dimensions of the infield, batter’s box and pitcher’s mound, which are absolutely fixed in stone. Raising a basketball net would be like making the pitcher’s mound 53 feet away instead of 60.5.
Of course not, but what about the twelve best? Is the presence of thirty non-contenders essential for a good race? (I’m not a racing fan, I really don’t know.)
Well, a 53-foot pitching range would be a huge difference. That really would warp the game. But I’d be very happy to see different ballparks with slightly different infield dimensions. I think 88 or 92-foot baselines would represent a smaller variance than, say, the altitude difference between Denver and San Francisco.
I like to see baseball teams forced to compete under the widest practical range of conditions. This is a truer test of a range and set of skills. This is why baseball should generally be played outdoors under variable weather, under sun and under lights, in cold and in heat, and so on. Variation among ballparks is just another axis of variation, another kind of testing.
Also I know basketball courts haven’t always been standardized. Possibly a history-minded basketball fan can comment on that?
Do you actually think that the only reason coaches bother to run is to avoid criticism by the media? I find that hard to believe. Not that coaches behave as you say, which is obviously false, but that you actually believe it.
Do you really see no value in running the ball? If so, are you a big Madden player or Arena League fan or something?
For context, passing every down is equivalent to every batter swinging for the fences with every swing, and complaining that the only reason managers don’t have the players do this is to avoid criticism by the media.
I think it is. Different drivers are good at different tracks. If only the top 12 in points are racing at the end of the year, you may exclude some of the better drivers at a certain track just because they had some misfortune earlier in the year. Take Jamie McMurray, for example. So far this year, he’s won the Daytona 500, Brickyard 400, and the fall Charlotte race. He’s also finished 2nd two or three times in other big races. He’s not in the top 12 because of some inconsistency, but I think he has a chance to win at least 2 of the next 3 races. It would be a shame to exclude him just because of a bad championship format.
To me, racing is about that specific race. Drivers have changed the way they drive because of the format. People used to race hard all year long. Now, several teams take it easy and go for a safe top 10, rather than risk wrecking going for a win just because it might hurt them in the points. The current system rewards playing things safe, rather than going all-out for a win. I think that’s part of the reason they had to announce “have at it boys” this year, so people would start bumping again.
Sure it would be hated by the purists, but imagine baseball was something just invented with no history or tradition behind it. What’s the argument for making parks different? Why should one have to hit the ball higher in one park to score a run and not as much in another? Wouldn’t the players whose home field is more acclimated towards easier home runs be statistically better than a player who plays more in a park that’s harder to score? With the fact that baseball diehards are stat freaks, I don’t see how one can even compare players who aren’t on the same team, let alone leagues
And I don’t think that your analogy is correct. The difference in parks is a smaller one than your pitcher’s mound example but still a difference. To me, you would be more correct to say that it would be analogous to a 3-pt line being different in each basketball arena.
What if a field was nearly impossible to score homeruns in? What if they made a park where the walls were 700 ft back? Would you agree that there’s an unfair difference then?
Expense and available space, really. Baseball fields are massive - a baseball field is more than twice the space of an NFL-regulation football field - and the dimensions of the field historically were determined by the architectural needs of the edifice that surrounded it, and to some extent, still are.
Well,
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Baseball fans are quite aware of the differences that fields make in statistics and much work has been done into accounting for them, and
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Really, the distance to the outfield walls, or height thereof, really is not as big a factor as you might think. The things that MOST affect a ballpark’s proclivity towards helping or hindering the batter are things you cannot control - most specifically, the altitude at which the park is constructed, and the prevailing weather. You can build a dome to keep the weather out, but then you’re just altering the conditions in a different way.
It would be pretty stupid to do that and MLB would never allow it - field dimensions are subject to the approval of the league - but what would be unfair about it? Both teams are dealing with the same conditions.
You could, of course, build a genuinely bizarre stadium and then go to the trouble of staffing your team with players suited for that stadium. For instance, in 700-foot-fence Stadium, you could emphasize the acquisition of speed players and pitchers who give up a lot of fly balls. But in truth, it’d be a hell of a lot of trouble and a questionable strategy. Trying to draft and acquire good ballplayers is hard enough as it is without adding the little-understood complication of passing up one ballplayer for a slightly inferior one (which is really what it would amount to) who you think has a specific skill suited to Weirdo Park. You might get yourself a passel of fly ball pitchers for 700 Foot Fence Park, thinking your speedy outfielders will murder the opposition by running down all those fly balls that can never go over the fence, only to find the enormous outfield can’t be covered by any human and your pitchers are giving up an endless stream of extra base hits in the gaps.
American football and basketball would both benefit by adopting elements from baseball. Specifically, no more than two players on each team will carry baseball bats and can swing at the ball anywhere, anytime.
It would sure make the games more interesting!
Alright, practical constraints I can accept. I just don’t buy the “it’s all different and it adds to the game!” It doesn’t, it takes away from it
#2 goes to the practicality thing. Cities are different, weather is different, and that’s across all sports and really, all activities in life.
But #1, are you sure? I’ve never heard of home run stats being measured by ball park, as in “Barry Bonds has 7XX home runs, but his Yankee Stadium home run total is XXX if he had played there all his career because of the difference in ball parks”. He just has 1 home run number, and that’s tainted more by steroids than anything else. What stats are you referring to that have been adjusted due to differences in park dimensions?
Really? You wouldn’t think it would be unfair? Just because players for that specific game are dealing with equal conditions cannot make it unfair? Wouldn’t such a park totally change a large part of what makes baseball “baseball”? Taking your logic, couldn’t stadiums have “House rules” that favor their teams? I guess what I find objectionable is the fact that you seem to think equal footing specific to a park cannot be equal, whereas I can imagine that if one stadium decides on some radical change, it wouldn’t and shouldn’t be considered the same game. How far do we take that line of reasoning? If a stadium changes their rules arbitarily, but keeps it for the life of that stadium, is that ok? (and I mean really crazy rules, like using rubber bats, declaring right field to be home runs, and having an extra base or 7)
I refer you to my OP in this thread:
Assault with a deadly weapon - ie being struck with a baseball bat - is no way to improve any game.
There is a LONG history of stadiums being setup to favor the home team, or the team set up to do well in their stadium. Things as trivial as how long the grass is, and how hard the infield is packed can have an effect. Not to mention the importance of having outfielders that are well suited to the areas they have to cover.
With regards to your 700 foot ballpark, have you ever heard of the Polo Grounds? Center field was close to 500 feet and the corners 250 feet. Yankee Stadium was also nearly 500 feet to center, heck they had the monuments IN the field of play, it was so hard to get a ball out that far. Who needs a 700 foot stadium, we’ve already had plenty of stadiums where certain areas are no homerun zones.
The reality is that there are only so many things you are allowed to do with the dimensions and ground rules of a ballpark, and a good team is still going win most of the time, regardless of what you try to do. 90% of the game is played at a 60’6" distance anyway.
Not meaning to answer for another poster, but park-adjusted and era-adjusted statistics are very common. Baseball-reference has a feature where you can put a player into a different park or era and it will convert his stats.
Here is a lolsy line for Bonds in 2001 if he had played in 2000-era Coors field:
.400/100/197
Barry Bonds Batting Stats | Baseball-Reference.com - go to the bottom for “Neutralized Batting”.
Bill James once argued that variation in stadium size is helpful in allowing a sport to adapt. He argued that if basketball courts were not standard sized, we could see which court size would allow for the most interesting game. Perhaps, players have outgrown the current court size, an opinion that I think has merit. With only one available option it is very difficult how well it works.
Plus the distances are arbitrary in baseball anyway. Why not add some variety to give park some character? Then again I’m one of the few people who like the hill in Houston.
If I’m in charge of baseball. I dump revenue sharing, and base sharing on market demographics instead. I’d expand to 32 teams, 4 divisions of 8, with 1 of the teams in Charlotte and one in Jersey. I have a veteran or retired ump watch each game with video in front of them and let them override any safe/out or fair/foul call. I leave the umps to call strikes for now, because I don’t think the technology is as ready as some others here think.
The concept of “park effect” and how it should be adjusted for is at least thirty years old and is the subject of considerable analysis. This sort of stuff fairly covers www.baseballreference.com - every park is assigned “park factors” for every season in use. All player OPS’s are adjusted for home park. ESPN has park factors for a variety of possible outcomes. Park factor considerations have been the subject of study for decades, and even among casual fans it’s understood that players get a lot of cheap homers in Coors Field and pitchers have an easy time of it in Petco Park.
But again, we’re not talking about changing the core rules, we’re talking about changing the fence distances, which within certain parameters are NOT core rules.
The differences between major league parks in terms of the effect of the positioning of the fences are simply not that substantial.