Baseball has certainly gotten.. less interesting to watch in recent years, with doctored balls and players optimizing for homeruns (which increases strikeout rates), plus the game takes so dang long for so little action.
Foolish Baseball has IMO a great take on a list of things the MLB could do to "fix" baseball, with not blatantly allowing super sticky stuff being one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh_F8WtrDCo (I also like the idea of a shot clock for pitchers)
If sticky stuff didn't negatively impact the end product, then I'd say just allow it. But it does, even though I love seeing wiffle ball-esque nastiness, because it results in far fewer balls put in play. I want to see fielders making great catches and throws, crazy bassrunning, and legitimate hustled triples, not _just_ whiffs and homeruns and Shohei Ohtani.
So maybe there's a middle ground where they could provide a legal product beyond just a rosin bag that pitchers can use to ensure control without artificially boosting spinrates so significantly, and then continue to collect balls throughout the year and issue harsh suspensions for illegal foreign substances found.
I don't blame pitchers for having used it in the current environment, seeing as their paychecks were on the line and EVERYONE else was doing it too because it wasn't being enforced until social media put a spotlight on it (except DeGrom seemingly).
MLB is poorly run. They have lost viewers and stadium attendees, despite other sports growing. The commissioner doesn’t even appear to like the sport and the changes they’ve forced are ridiculous—especially the forced runner in tie games.
:) should have said "even less interesting" to emphasize my indifference to baseball related content besides Jomboy and Foolish Baseball. And I say this as someone who played baseball through high school.
It absolutely has. Defense is almost non-existent, and the way the game is played has completely changed. Basketball peaked in the mid-90s IMO. Now it just looks like a pickup game of basketball. Granted the people playing are better athletes than what you'll find at your average court, but the way they play the game is just... meh.
The pitch doctoring rule is an anachronism. It's a leftover from when they'd use the same ball until it was brown and falling apart. From before stadium lighting. They blamed the spitter for killing a guy who couldn't see it and banned it.
Of course, they didn't really ban it. They selectively enforce it. Joe West wants another headline, so he confiscates a dirty hat. And no umpire ever even raised an eyebrow at Mariano Rivera having some kayfabe ball trajectory that no one else does. It's a gatekeeping rule that allows the league to have another hand in who gets in trouble and who gets to excel.
Baseball banned the spitball for many reasons, but the main one was to increase home runs (Babe Ruth was proving to be pretty popular.) Another reason given reason, which I only give partial merit to, is because of the Spanish Flu Epidemic in 1918 and the lack of sanitary for the "unsanitary pitch".
It was banned in two steps. In 1920, players could assigned up to two pitchers to throw the spitball. After that season, 14 players were grandfathered in and allow to continue throwing a spitball. Burleigh Grimes threw the last legal spitball in 1934.
Carl May threw a pitch that killed Ray Chapmen in 1920, which the spitball rules still allowed teams to have spitballers. May was generally a wild pitcher, in fact he had hit Chapman's teammate, and manager, Tris Speaker in the head in 1918. May's claim was Chapman was crowding the plate, He throw a high inside fastball, that his May's teammates claim was a strike, to brush him off the plate. It was an unwritten rule about brush back pitches that lead to Chapman's death. Chapman's death had nothing to do with getting the spitball getting banned.
Rivera was the best pitcher I have seen in throwing a cutter. His long fingers let me get unique grip on it.
The problem that MLB didn't see was that my providing information about spin rates, pitchers would be able to start experimenting, see results, and adjust.
The Rivera comment is off-base: the movement on his pitches was because of his particular skill in throwing a cutter, not anything against the rules.
I agree baseball selectively enforces rules. But I think the spitball has been enforced since the 1980s/Gaylord Perry era. And Joe West is a particularly egregious umpire, probably the worst in the game.
What on earth is a "kayfabe ball trajectory"? Closest thing I could imagine is what's these days is called an eephus and which is complete legitimate and which some variant of has been occasionally tossed by pitchers for many decades.
Kayfabe comes from fake "pro wrestling." It means acknowledging that it's all scripted and puncturing that layer of fiction that it's a real competitive sport.
I want to go to a baseball game with a sign that says, "Legalize foreign substances".
Casual viewers like games with lots of hits and lots of runs, and the MLB has gone through a lot of effort to facilitate this (ie: runner starting on second in extras), but as someone who is really into the long-haul aspect of baseball (I like the whole farming and development system, I like the idea that baseball is not fair in terms of cap space, I like that the season is so long with so many games, I like the strategy around managing the bullpen), I really like watching "boring" games where pitchers are just throwing disgusting nasty pitches for 7-8 innings. There is nothing more exciting to me than a no-no. I really don't have any issue with foreign substances -- it's still impressive nonetheless.
To me, baseball is the only sport where fandom really makes sense. In basketball, you'll see fans of players moreso than teams -- their fandom will follow ie: LeBron around. And why shouldn't they be mostly fans of players? The coach and management makes little difference. This is opposed to in baseball where when you're a fan of a team, you're also a fan of the management and the owners and the coaches and the little decisions they make over the time-span of weeks (and even years) to get to a winning team. A lot of pieces have to come together, you can't just buy a superstar -- although you're free to try.
When one pitcher can throw nasty stuff (not necessarily throwing hard, just throwing precisely) and save his team from using the arm of someone in the pen, it's super exciting to me. If a little bit of pine tar is facilitating that, it's all the same to me.
>To me, baseball is the only sport where fandom really makes sense.
It seems like more realistically, baseball is the only support that you understand enough to appreciate to this degree? I don't think you can make a legitimate argument that soccer, for example, has less tactical depth and management pressure than baseball?
Generally sports that are about controlling the ball (or puck) will be more about superstars and less about teams relative to other games. At any given time one person has the ball and that person has an outsized effect on the play in that moment. If one player is significantly better than the rest of the team, you can make sure they're the one doing most of the playing.
With baseball the pitcher of course plays a similar role, they have a major outsized effect since they are involved in every single defensive play, and in a critical way. But they can't physically play very much. And then on offense the best you can do is put your best folks at the start of the lineup so they get an extra at-bat over the course of a game.
(Of course none of this justifies the claim that only in baseball does team-fandom make sense; fandom isn't a logical construct to begin with and doesn't need some logical reason to exist.)
That's probably fair. Soccer is a great example that I wasn't really considering as an American.
That being said, if you haven't seen the movie Moneyball, I'd recommend it. Baseball was truly transformed by computerized statistics, and because baseball is basically decided as a series of batter-pitcher matchups, it lends itself to being predictable in a way that other sports can't be. Baseball is the monte carlo simulation of sports.
The German National Football team employed a bunch of computerised statistical analysis for the 2014 World Cup to play their matches. They literally enhanced their tactical and strategical plays through AI.
Soccer does have less management pressure induced strategy because the rules and flow of the game demand that.
Soccer is about flow not stoppages so you only can sub 3 players and the game doesn't stop as much with injury time added on later. Players are being asked to make more meta decisions.
Doesn't make fandom only make sense though in baseball. Fandom is so much bigger in soccer, it includes national struggles and regional struggles and is so engrained in local culture. Soccer hooliganism exists where baseball hooliganism doesn't.. baseball has a long term view on passionate (if my team loses it is okay because we have 160 more) where in soccer one goal decides a match and every match means something always to some group of people.
Right, but in soccer it's the coach's decision what positions are even being played on the field. In my opinion, the combination of player's individual agency straining against a manager/head coach's /system/ makes it even more challenging.
So what's the point? Further degrade a sport where pitching is already the dominant side of the equation to the point where a good hitter hits .190? Where's the limit to what you accept?
If you propose unlimited doctoring then I propose unlimited corking and composite bats with unlimited diameter. Then together we can make a complete joke of baseball.
I think you're ignoring the entertainment value of hitters getting more hits. In general, more balls in play means more exciting scenarios. Baseball, a beautiful game, has an innate natural balance in its dimension and timing. Yes, I like a good pitchers duel as well. But for reasons of likely the sticky stuff, the scales are currently tilted too far towards the pitcher.
I don't know almost anything about baseball (European) an reading your post made me think you're arguing about legalized steroids until that pine tar bit.
Kind of switching subjects here, but I don't have a real problem with steroids either. Society is already fine with the idea that athletes will destroy their bodies as a part of competing at a high level. Plenty of kids around 15-16-17 will have torn their rotator cuff just from pitching in highschool baseball; or given themselves a concussion from a hard hit in football or a header in soccer. Weight lifting, even with proper form, is bad for your joints once you get to a certain point. They take a lot of supplements that aren't really healthy to chase maximum performance. A lot of the time, they're engaging in the same sort of practice that recreational drug users will find themselves in: using drugs that accomplish roughly the same thing before enforcement agencies know to look for it. Arguably, it'd be safer for them to just use well-researched steroids under the supervision of their team doctors.
I don't see why supplementing your endocrine system is categorically different than anything else these career athletes do.
Did you ever figure that some candidate pro athletes DONT want to use steroids? Do you see the ethical problem here as well as the total pool of participation problem?
You could say the same about all the downsides and risks involved. Maybe some people don't want to risk CTE ? Maybe some people don't want to mess up their joints for the rest of their life ? Professional sports is about extremes and this myth about healthy lifestyle is there to promote amateur sports. In that context it makes sense to ban steroids because you don't really want to promote steroids to teens. And in contact sports I think the ability to inflict damage is increased disproportionately so more injuries. But they still get used all over the place.
Steroids then sign stealing using cameras then super sticky baseballs. If you look at other areas of our society, you will see the same evolution in cheating. Look at education and research: college admissions scandal, replication crisis, peer review scandal. Look at tech: Leetcode to get into companies, selecting who gets prized projects, shipping abandonware in order to add them to promotion packets, etc… Media: not reporting news that goes against your narrative, reporting news that you know to be false, adding your narrative to events where there is no connection, etc…
There's too much money in sports for anyone in power to give a damn. Cheating doesn't interfere with the cash flow from fans so why should they care? Take something where cheating does interfere with cash flow: academics. Your first incidence of cheating means you fail the course and the second means you get expelled from the school. Imagine if using sticky stuff in baseball, deflating the ball in football, or taking dives in soccer meant the player was suspended for an entire season for the first offense and banned for life for the second offense.
Baseball is my favorite sport. There’s no clock. The defense controls the ball. There is no body type for positions. The tactics and strategies used and pitcher on hitter matchups are like chess matches and card games. But… the people who own MLB teams and republicans the organization seem to be completely passionless and to not understand their fans. I really what they could do if Manfred was forced out and had a commissioner who actually focused on getting new fans and and expanding teams internationally.
Sadly Manfred is allowing this cheating to continue. He didn’t punish the Astros or Red Sox significantly so everyone is cheating now. It really reminds me of society in California that quickly has become somewhat lawless towards property crime.
Baseball is great, just not major league. Minor league games are so much more entertaining. You have some serious action going on because the pitchers aren't ball cannons and the hitters are banging balls out left and right. The hype is a lot more intense in the small stadiums. Plus you can stream games for $40 a year.
MLB looks more like a chess game than a baseball game. Who wants to watch a no-hitter really? I mean it's cool that your team is doing well, but it's just plain horrible to sit through. (At least if you are sober and doing nothing else.) Half the Dodger games I attended, the fans left early to beat the traffic.
How is this a secret? I don’t follow baseball. I’ve never seen a baseball game. I’ve never talked baseball with anyone. Yet I somehow always knew they did this. How? I think it was an open “secret” that was really common knowledge but is just now being openly discussed.
It's not on the balls alone, it's on the pitcher's gear. Glove. Hat. Etc. If you watch the clip halfway through the article, you can see a pitcher bent over liberally applying the bullfrog sunscreen to their arms to mix with the rosin.
>Maybe with a video clip of that play. It would probably be profitable.
This could be the next NFT! They could sell the rights ahead of time (1st hit attempt for _x_ player), or after the fact. Maybe if you catch the ball you get the rights automatically to incentivize buying tickets to the games.
I am reminded of the old adage "what can be measured can be optimized".
Pitchers have always added substances to baseballs, but they were mostly doing it by feel. It was only roughly a decade ago that technology was first introduced that could accurately measure a pitch's movement. It was even more recently that technology was introduced that could accurately measure the spin of a pitch. Now that pitchers are armed with this tech, they can optimize for spin and movement. They can experiment with all sorts of different substances, do the exact experiments described in this article, literally hire chemists to come up with better formulas, and share the most effective substances with their teammates.
In the end, this measurement technology has led to a drastic improvement in the effectiveness of the use of these foreign substances. That has altered the balance between pitchers and hitters that is important to keep the game actually entertaining to watch.
Excellent point! When a technology becomes more efficient it goes from being something useful to something game-altering (literally).
There's a good analogy to professional road cycling. Before Lance Armstrong, of course cyclists did drugs and tried to gain ever dietary/fitness/metabolic advantage they could through experimentation. But then we got well-funded and systematic methods to measure the effects of the cheat, methods to cleanly implement the cheat at the professional level, and methods to bully everyone on the team into compliance...
The reason people care is because balls in play are hitting historic lows and to many that is making baseball less exciting, and the league is worried about the fans losing interest.
This particular form of manipulating the ball is just too widespread and too effective and that is why the crackdown is happening.
If controlling foreign substances is too difficult, MLB could change things they can easily control like mound height and ball elasticity. Pitchers can coat their hands in whatever, but if they're throwing superballs from a one-inch mound it won't help them.
I think this is actually the way the players have preferred it be regulated. A good grip on the ball means batters have to worry less about getting randomly pegged. Not to mention how difficult it is to check every square inch of a pitcher to determine if he/she has sticky spots to touch when pitching.
Though there should probably be a single "approved" substance, and the rest be banned so we're not dealing with balls covered in whatever random slime the team came up with
Yeah "Dirty little secret" - at this point, is it really a secret?
Scuffed balls, spitballs, various sticky substances, etc has been used to alter baseball pitches for decades. A pitcher from my high school got caught (and banned from the league) for doing this in 1992. It's all fairly obvious how it works from a physics perspective. There's absolutely no secret at all.
I think many fans are oblivious to the scale of tampering, they just remember the few instances that get called out (which are usually particularly sloppy cases weaponized by the opposing team).
There are multiple people in the league that corroborate the fact that most pitchers are doing this. Some clubs are allegedly paying chemists to improve their doctoring. It's come too far from putting a little spit on the ball. Time to drag it into the light.
Sure, tech isn't new either. People have been doing startups and tech forever, it's nothing new. Better not have any discussions about tech since it's old news. Humans have always been innovating.
Right but when people post about a new tech, they don't say "Tech's dirty little secret is out". This post is pretending ball tampering is a secret. What's the secret if it's been a thing forever and has always been public?
The secret is out. That's the point. Not many people were talking about it before. The "secret". Now a lot of people are talking about it. The secret is now "out".
There have been lots of highly-upvoted and heavily-commented "dirty secret is out" posts on HN's front page. I don't want to argue so I'll just leave it at that.
> The secret is out. That's the point. Not many people were talking about it before. The "secret". Now a lot of people are talking about it. The secret is now "out".
But that's what I'm saying. This has been talked to death. For years and years it has been talked about. Someone hearing about it for the first time does not make something a secret.
> I don't want to argue so I'll just leave it at that.
"I don't want to argue so I'll just argue and then say I don't want to argue" ? Anyway if ball tampering is a new thing to you, I hope you learned how terrible and problematic it is for the sport.
Foolish Baseball has IMO a great take on a list of things the MLB could do to "fix" baseball, with not blatantly allowing super sticky stuff being one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh_F8WtrDCo (I also like the idea of a shot clock for pitchers)
If sticky stuff didn't negatively impact the end product, then I'd say just allow it. But it does, even though I love seeing wiffle ball-esque nastiness, because it results in far fewer balls put in play. I want to see fielders making great catches and throws, crazy bassrunning, and legitimate hustled triples, not _just_ whiffs and homeruns and Shohei Ohtani.
So maybe there's a middle ground where they could provide a legal product beyond just a rosin bag that pitchers can use to ensure control without artificially boosting spinrates so significantly, and then continue to collect balls throughout the year and issue harsh suspensions for illegal foreign substances found.
I don't blame pitchers for having used it in the current environment, seeing as their paychecks were on the line and EVERYONE else was doing it too because it wasn't being enforced until social media put a spotlight on it (except DeGrom seemingly).