Watch an American baseball game and the thing you quickly notice, especially if it has been a while since you bothered, is that the game is riddled with interruptions to the point where it feels like more stoppage than gameplay. Baseball was always a leisurely game that evolved for a people who had long attention spans, so it is a poor fit for the modern American with their low IQ’s and high time preference, but it is also made unwatchable by the constant stoppages.
The league has tried to address the problem by speeding up the gameplay with a pitch clock that gives pitchers 30 seconds between at-bats, 15 seconds between pitches with no one on base, and 20 seconds between pitches with runners on base. According to major league baseball, this has resulted in a 24-minute decrease in the total length of the game compared to the 2022 season. The average length of a game is now two hours and 40 minutes.
That is fine, but it does not change the fact that the number of breaks in play has not changed much and is probably a little worse. The reason for the breaks is the specialization in the game. The days of nine guys playing nine guys are long gone, as now teams employ specialists who enter the game at various points, which slows the game play down. Specialization is the result of quantitative revolution that has happened in all sports, but especially baseball.
Baseball used to be a game run by men who wanted to put on a show for fans and build hometown pride. The owners of baseball teams were local rich guys who not only wanted to make money off the game but took some pride in their local community and wanted their team to win. They hired people to run their teams who had played the game and presumably knew what it took to win. Those guys found and developed players who had the skills to play the game.
That started to change with the growth of advanced statistics. Baseball was always a game of numbers, like batting average, earned run average and other measures of a player’s success in his role. Advanced statistics took that a step further and used quantitative measures to predict the impact of players on winning games, based on measures like on-base-percentage and wins above replacement. These new measures not only determine rosters, but they also determine gameplay.
That is why we get so many breaks in the game. After every at bat, both teams basically re-crunch the numbers to determine what they should do next. That may mean pulling the pitcher who has been on a roll to this point or pinch hitting for a guy who has had a monster game thus far. We now have scenarios in which a pitcher is pulled from a game while throwing a no-hitter. The numbers say he has reached his pitch limit, and the reliever has a better chance against the rest of the lineup.
You can see how this works by looking at the roster of the current best team in baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, and the roster of the 1970 Oriole team that went on to win the World Series that year. The first thing you will note is that the 1970 squad used a total of thirty-two players for the entire season. The current year Orioles have already used fifty-four players and will use many more once rosters expand in September. Baseball is now a game of roster rotisserie.
Another thing you will note is that the best starting pitchers on the current team will not reach 200-innings this year. Most likely, they will rest their best pitcher down the stretch so he will finish the regular season with around 175-innings. On the 1970s team, three pitchers pitched 300-innings. More shocking is the fact that the 1970 pitching staff had sixty complete games, while the current staff has none. Last year there were a total of 34 complete games in all of baseball.
The stat guys will tell you that the use of advanced statistics makes for a more competitive game by removing chance from the equation. People with a soul will tell you that the stat guys should be sent to a labor camp. No one watches any sporting event to see the stat guys show off their latest number crunching. Sport is human drama with all of the flaws that come with it. Removing the flaws inevitably removes the humanity from it and you are left with robots playing robots
The reason everyone who was aware in 1988 remembers Kirk Gibson hitting the homerun off Dennis Eckersley in the World Series is because it is the thing every kid who played baseball dreamed of doing. It is a scene every father taking his son to a game hopes they will see. The aging slugger called in to face off against the game’s best closer in the deciding moment. The old man mustering what little he has left to stroke one last home run to win the game.
If the modern stat head had been in charge, that moment never would have happened because Gibson would not be on the team, much less sent up to bat. Tommy Lasorda would not have been in the dugout to make the call. Instead, the robot manager would have sent up a specialist whose only role was to face Eckersley. Maybe the Dodgers win anyway, but no one would remember it because there would be no reason to remember what in the end was a statistical anomaly.
The reason that any of this matters is that baseball is a microcosm of American life in that society, like baseball, is now run by people who have no appreciation for the things that make life worth living. Instead, they view people as mere economic units or perhaps items to manipulate in the transactional world of managerialism. Society has been drained of its authenticity and in its place is the drab materialism in the meat space and the superficial drama of the virtual space.
The answer to fixing baseball and other sports is to open the windows of the skyboxes where the stat guys run the game and throw them out of those windows. Let the players play the fans enjoy the human drama. Similarly, the answer to what ails the modern world is to throw the managers off the roof of their offices and let people go back to figuring out how to live. The results may not make for an impressive pivot table, but no one should live inside a pivot table anyway.
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I would just add that live baseball is now a luxury product. No working man can afford to take the wife and kids to the park to see a game. Gone are the days of $3 bleacher tickets and $1 cold National Bohemian at Memorial Stadium. Parking alone is $40 at Yankee Stadium. Bankers feast on $30 crab cakes at Camden Yards.
If you have a local minor league team it’s not too bad. Our local team sells lawn tickets in the outfield starting at $13 (bring your own blanket or chairs) and topping out at $32 in the stands. They often do “Thirsty Thursday” nights with reduced priced beer, a $1 menu night (hot dogs, popcorn, pretzels, soda, water), and often run “Kids Eat Free” games on a Sunday afternoon.
I just don’t like it’s all non-cash.
Do they blare nonstop rap over the loudspeakers? To my mind, this is the most gratuitously offensive aspect of modern sports.
Luckily no. 😅
Crap, can’t spell without rap.
And at the community swimming pool, and at the fireworks shows, etc. Nobody wants to be alone with their thoughts.
Or, nobody wants to leave us alone with our thoughts. Or even to play our music rather than theirs. It’s a negroid country, y’all.
Double-A baseball is the best. Doesn’t break the bank, stadiums aren’t huge, you get to see future stars, kids get to meet them, etc.
$13 to sit on grass???
Well since the local Cineplex charges $12.99 for a movie ticket to goodness knows what remake or reboot, it’s not out of line.
And you’re sitting on a berm overlooking the outfield wall.
Pawtucket Rhode Island had a guy named Ben Mondor who saved the team in 1977 from bankruptcy and made McCoy Stadium one of the most family-friendly, lovely places to visit for over 35 years. Very cheap tickets and a beautiful evening in a city that was (and still is, obviously) dead. Larry Luciano of the Boston Red Sox salivated over that AAA team for years, and when Mondor died, circled around Ben’s widow until she finally relented. Now the team is in Worcester, MA, attendance is dismal, prices are absurdly high for the product on the field, and Luciano is… Read more »
First off you KNOW I’m gonna ask: Did they serve Pawtucket Patriot beer at McCoy Stadium? (Laughs like Peter Griffin) Secondly, sorry to hear a greedy bastard ruined a local treasure. Seems to happen a lot these days. Finally your team sucks, nobody attends games, tickets and concessions are absurdly expensive, AND you want a new stadium? Who in the Hell do these jokers think they are, the Chicago White Sox? (As of this post the White Sox have not won 30 games THE ENTIRE SEASON. But yeah, a new stadium on the taxpayer’s dime will fix things up right… Read more »
It was great while it lasted. It coincided with the spirit of American culture from the 70s through the 1990s. I remember a night game in the late 90s there that was like a little bit of heaven. Hard to believe it ever happened, honestly, given the state of affairs.
It’s funny that Family Guy refers to Pawtucket. I’ve never watched it. I hope they pronounce it correctly. It’s “PUH-tuck-it.”
New stadium: way to launder money into the coffers of your favorite political donor, usually via their construction firm.
So much has changed. If you look at photos of baseball crowds from the first half of the 20th century, almost everyone is nicely dressed. The men, including working class guys, are almost all in what would today be called dress shirts. Many in the earlier 1900’s are wearing suits and ties.
Then there’s how much thinner everyone was–players and fans. It’s really shocking.
Online betting has also ruined sports. I have no problem with betting per se, but the way it’s promoted and encouraged, like legal weed, the lottery, etc, is yet another sign of cultural decay.
It corrupts the game implicitly even when it doesn’t do so explicitly. Because now that the betting line is common knowledge, whereas before it wasn’t, it is in the head of every player and coach, which corrupts the game even when they haven’t bet on it or taken any money themselves. That’s before we get into the explicit corruption, always present, all the way back to the Black Sox, probably all the way back to injuns playing their brand of lacrosse, but you’d have to be naive to believe it isn’t increasing in proportion to the increased dollar amounts being… Read more »
There are plenty of examples where betting has influenced game outcomes.
My favorite was an obvious interception at the end of a Steelers game several years ago.
The interception was by the refs overturned on replay.
The ultimate result was that $120 million in bets swung back to the house in Vegas.
Nope, nothing to see here folks.
Although I never understood the prohibition on a player or coach betting on his team to win. The interests should be aligned, so what’s the issue?
Well, he may have also bet on the opposing team and perhaps with a larger wager.
As just one example, a coach may leave a pitcher in longer than he should or might play injured players. He might rest his overworked closer when he doesn’t have a bet down. Not nearly as blatant as betting against your team, but still altering strategy and outcomes.
In baseball, you’re trying to win 2 out of 3. Nobody goes undefeated. Sometimes, when you’re way behind in a game, as a manager you just accept the loss (from a strategy perspective), so as to save your bullpen for tomorrow. But if you bet on your team to win, then tomorrow doesn’t matter anymore. You might use your whole pitching staff in an effort to win your bet. And then none of them are any good tomorrow.
Also, you can’t get a little bit pregnant
What about the games on which you place the bet vs. games where you didn’t?
FWIW, combat sports tend to accept player betting.
Sports and gambling have always gone hand in hand. Gambling has always generated maybe 50% of the interest in sports. We were just naive about it before.
There’s no question that the way to make a sporting event much more exciting, instantly, is to put some cash on it. YMMV
You misspelled “much more nerve-wracking” 🙂
This is totally different than what gambling was in the past. Gamblers used to just bet on a team to win or lose with a point spread and the total points. Now they have all kinds of prop bets on different aspects of the game. You can bet the over/under individual stats for every player. Here is a story about Jontay Porter who was a marginal NBA player banned for life for fixing the bets on his individual stat line by faking injuries. A problem like this was easy to anticipate, yet the leagues and the gambling companies are too… Read more »
Yes. It was even something gentlemen did.
Gambling is for degenerates and weirdos. What normal person wants to lose their hard earned money gambling? Worse, who wants to lose their money in their own home gambling? At least with casinos and horse racing you had to get up and go out of your house to place your bet.
Like I always tell people, casinos are undoubtedly the experts at gambling, but they don’t gamble. Their take is statistically guaranteed. If they don’t gamble, that tells you it’s only for suckers.
Which is why they call it gaming. Gambling (except for a skill like poker) is for suckers.
As I stated, I’ve no problem with the act of gambling in and of itself. It’s just the pernicious method in which it is promoted and marketed from sites like FanDuel and such.
The subtle corrupting element is that widespread sports betting increases the demand for instant replay, which in turn, creates LONG delays at the worst possible moment i.e., right after a big play. By the time the replay official confirms the event actually happened, it no seems as exciting. That big exuberation-of-the-crowd moment is over.
I’d also argue that much of the meta-appeal of sport fandom is reminising missed calls from long, long ago e.g., the famous hand of god in soccer, the missed PI that cost your team the game, “he missed the tag,” tuck rule, Megatron rule, etc.
Excellent post. If I remember correctly, Gibson was dragging one leg because old football injuries had caught up with him. In today’s world. Gibson would never have even been up at the plate unfit to even trot the bases after his home run. He would’ve been spotted as a baseball star and never allowed to play football. We probably aren’t far from sports teams buying humans at 6-8 years old and owning them outright. They will be like startups. Buy a bunch of promise, treat them like ducks and control every aspect of their life (diet, exercise, thinking .. …),… Read more »
Sitting around watching rent-a-flesh that hates you is no way for a man to behave.
Even worse is to wear another man’s name on your back or put it on your wife and kids…Talk about being cuckish…
I don’t know what’s worse, a white man wearing a LeBoon James jersey or a puce-haired white woman covered in tats and tin acne.
The woman. Because there’s hope life will beat some sense into the man.
Pretty sure that European soccer teams have already acquired the rights to many prospects of grade school age, not sure how long ago that began.
Been around for along time.
And it is not just limited to Europe proper. Many clubs set up schools in other countries (EPL ones in particular seem to like Africa) and get them from an early age through their foreign academy. Another system involves the same concept with local clubs (popular in South America). A small local club gets a prospect, connections to bigger club, gets the kid in the bigger club academy, who then develops him and draws interest from bigger European clubs (Argentina, Brazil and Colombia being some of the biggest exporters).
Soviets did it with Olympic athletes. China still does.
A few years back Gillette had an ad of a father teaching his fake son (hormonally altered daughter) how to shave. Ugh.
No shit.
Excellent post zman
But my stats suggest you would get more likes if you included one extra joke
Best keep that in mind
I think every once in a while we should pull him and have Nick Fuentes or Vox Day come in for a post. Would really goose the numbers in the comments, and the traffic.
Also, we NEED more Xirl Science Z. THAT’S why your stats are low.
Back when VD and Z were on reasonably good terms, Vox used to quote the Z blog and add commentary. That’s how I found Z in the first place. Guest posts or commentary on another blogger’s blog is a great way to promote each other.
I discovered Z through mentions in Derb articles on NRO all those years ago.
The last thing this blog needs is egomaniacs.
Well, AUTHORS who are egomaniacs.
Now Z’s COMMENTERS, well that’s different. 😏
Come to think of it, Half-price Heidegger has been pretty quiet of late.
Ha ha ha. Don’t talk about Compsci’s best buddy that way.
As always, the best way to get around the managerial class is to avoid them by going local. We have a college summer league team in my town. The manager is a local businessman. The players, who live with local families, are there mostly for fun and to keep up their skills. It’s old school baseball. College kids, some from the area, playing in front of people they see on the street and at the local restaurants.
Yes we have expanded outward so much that we have lost our souls the fix is to come back to local, local, local…
Exactly, avoid homogenized America; homodepot, walmart, etc.
If we’re lucky oligarchs and underlings will jump out tall buildings. It’s happened before.
Amen. I quit following baseball closely long ago with this being just part of the reason why. Earlier this season I saw the Giants pulled a pitcher after six innings who had 15 strikeouts because his pitch count was too high. Instead of letting him see if he could record a strikeout record, an accomplishment baseball fans used to geek out over, they took him out just like the computer said. The last time I watched part of a World Series game a couple of years ago, I think an Astros pitcher had a no hitter going through six innings… Read more »
If the manager didn’t do what the computer said to do and they lost it’s not like the club was going to fire the computer.
But what happens if the manager does what the computer says, even though it is obviously stupid, and it costs the team the game?
Still, I get your point. And this is where obscene money comes into the picture. Managing and coaching are now such lucrative professions that the managers and coaches are deathly afraid of losing their fabulous riches. Therefore, they think it’s safer to just follow a computer program, and if the results are horrendous, they’re not directly on the hook for them.
After Lincicome burned his arm out, the Giants will never let another pitcher exceed certain pitch count.
There is that. Pitchers get more years with fewer pitches. But sometimes that next pitch is the right call regardless.
At some point humanity is going to have to decide what’s more important living as a human or technological advancement? Seems like uncle Ted might have seen something in his CIA mind experiment that was true about man’s future.
With each passing day we become more like drones and cyborgs than human beings.
This was a great article, but it also made me a little depressed. I LOVED baseball more than I could express. Like everything else in our stinking, rotting corpse of a culture it was destroyed. I stopped following about 15 years ago. Football was harder for me to let go of. The last NFL season I followed was the 2019 season. It’s all been ruined now, and it’s just another platform to worship the cancer of the earth, sacred negros. Baseball is yet another beautiful thing created by Whites that has been destroyed by vibrants.
I couldn’t stand the NFL anymore when I noticed a big increase in “vibrant” celebrations on the field–chest pumping, “dancing,” etc. That stuff wasn’t tolerated when I was little.
Gotta love it when some gorilla makes a routine tackle and then starts doing an apparent mating dance with his team trailing by 49 points late in the fourth quarter. What is the IQ classification below idiot, I wonder.
Kamala Harris.
Average Murican
“When you get to the endzone, act like you’ve been there before.” – Vince Lombardi That was in the 60s. Only 65-70 years ago that was leadership. Now the nut-rubbing and spiking the ball after a three yard gain and constant self-aggrandizement. Thug culture is a disgrace. A bigger disgrace is that the descendants of Rome like Lombardi and the rest of our folk, lost our will to enforce a higher culture. Our task is to build it ourselves outside of the sub-plebian merchant drek. “Hey! Act like you’ve shot a buck before son.” Not that our folk are prone… Read more »
Speaking of the chest pumping, I think it was John Madden who said, “When you get in the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.”
I was 12 years old about 10 rows up between third and home with my Granny, who had had season tickets to Chavez Ravine since it opened, when Gibson hit his homerun. Just bragging.
I have given up on all pro sports. Used to be addicted. Now, fall Friday nights are a few guys choosing what high school comes to go watch. Sitting on metal bleachers and chatting with the player’s parents.
I’m not much of a professional sports guy, but I am interested in how people who used to make professional sports a big part of their lives came to reject it.
Did it happen gradually or was there a distinct episode when you just stopped watching?
For me it started with all the stupid rule changes that destroyed tradition but would supposedly help the billionaire owners’ bottom lines: the aforementioned pitch clock; “ghost” base runners in extra innings; in football they basically made it illegal to play defense; the NBA never enforces elementary rules like traveling or double (sometimes triple, lol) dribbling; in NASCAR they chose to make early races less important by resetting points for “the Chase” in some bizarre attempt to introduce the “excitement” of “playoffs” to a sport that involves all competitors competing at the same time. Then all the rainbow crap. “Pride”… Read more »
And don’t even get me started about the biased officiating and obvious rigging that came about with the advent of big dollar tv deals and now even worse with legal gambling. You’re telling me every single NFL game is a one-score game through the fourth quarter, and nobody gets blown out anymore like they used to in every decade prior to the 2010s? Yeah, gtf outta here.
Great list.
I will only add that the NFL is implementing facial recognition in all 32 stadiums this coming season.
No Pride night for the Texas Rangers.
Grew up a hardcore Dallas Cowboys fan. Then, in the mid-90s, my gut finally recoiled after reading about yet another hoodlum on the team getting busted for this or that crime and owner Jerry Jones chiming in about how the franchise was going to work with poor La’Quay’vius to help him get his life together. Wasn’t long after that that I abondoned pro sports entirely.
For a young baseball fanatic the 1981 strike was like a punch in the stomach.
For me it was the year that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were destroying home run records while obviously juiced on ‘roids. The whole thing was so disrespectful of the old timers. A secondary factor was the Latin players (read; black guys who speak Spanish). They simply don’t know how to act in a dignified manner. The endless hot dogging as they run the bases, the high fives, low fives, dragging a foot as you round third base on your home run trot; it all disgusts me. Twelve pounds of hair popping out from under their helmets, with their skin… Read more »
The negrofication of the sport has to be mentioned. As the sport becomes whiter and whiter in the United States, the players act blacker and blacker, influenced by the Latin influx and the wider culture of today’s American youth. Seeing Little Leaguers chimp out on second base after having hit a double makes my blood boil. Almost all of them are white kids and have a father in their lives. Those fathers should have a very serious talk with their boys, impressing upon them that should they continue to act like a jungle bunny they’ll be in for a world… Read more »
I never was too much into it, but I did have a team I rooted for. One day, about 18 years ago, my buddy said to me, “What do you actually get if they win?” Completely threw a switch in my brain. I only casually turn on a game once in a blue moon now.
I’ll explain my journey away from sportsball with a story. My wife and I were at a party with neighbors on a weekend afternoon. We needed to leave at a certain time. As we arose to leave someone asked, “Are you going to the game?” I had to stop and think, what sports are in season now? Is there a local team that might be playing? I drew blanks. So I told him the truth: I stopped watching sports when I outgrew peer pressure. Two ladies immediately cast daggers at their husbands, one of them our host, and I knew… Read more »
I’ve given up on sports mainly because all the players and coaches I idolized are retired or dead.
I also don’t care for the artificial salary caps to create parity. Mainly because one of the teams I like had a dynasty and were unable to successfully transition to the cap implemented in their league.
I pitched for our university’s baseball team in the mid to late 90s and even then, we had very specific roles. I was our team’s primary long relief guy (common in college baseball) and an occasional weekday starter for our non-conference games. Every now and then, I’d come out of the pen to work an inning against a lefty-heavy lineup, but it was mostly three and four innings stints. Loved to vulture those wins from ineffective starters. The pro game is just too specialized and too stats heavy, an approach that has unfortunately filtered down to college as well. We… Read more »
If you want to be sad, talk to a dad whose son is in a travel league. They are talking to the kids about spin rate, exit velocity, swing angle and all of the other junk.
Travel sports has become a suburban plague of Biblical proportions. This horror should be the subject of an essay or even your podcast. The US devotes the GDP of Croatia to youth travel soccer and will never produce a Luka Modric.
I saw an interview with the father of Toronto Maple Leafs star Mitch Marner a few years ago. The father estimated that between Mitch and his brother, he had spent roughly half a million dollars on travel leagues as they grew up. Mitch wound up with a $10 million a year contract, but how many other fathers wind up with bupkis?
Players should pay attention to that sort of thing, or at least be instructed based on it. But drilling them on those numbers—making them conscious—does seem like a mistake. Good athletes rarely know exactly what they’re doing. Talent is unconscious correct action. Etc. It seems like it’s “modern” meta-stats, recent nerd inventions like VORP, significant-seeming sums of insignificant/unknown parts, that have had an uglifying effect on baseball’s product by taking the place of decision making and storytelling. But I don’t know baseball. I do remember a turn-of-the-century “moneyball” fad in pro basketball. A number like VORP seems to make sense… Read more »
I refused to let my sons play travel ball for baseball or soccer or join one of those AAU basketball teams run by “street agent” uncles that were funded by shoe companies and other parasites.
I knew neighbors in my former suburban enclave that spent thousands each year on travel baseball and soccer. They eschew vacations to spend weeks living in hotels in the vain hopes their child can get a college scholarship or even go pro in tournaments that no one cares or watches except for the families.
Sounds like rank greed to me.
Do they “need” the distractions, or do the people in charge of gameday atmosphere assume they need the distractions? In the before times, I don’t recall anybody demanding to have rap blasted into their ears loudly enough to make them bleed. And, in point of fact, as the distractions have increased, attendance has decreased. Some correlation there, but likely some causation, too.
Great article, Z, and it’s probably Exhibit B, on why I stopped watching team sports decades ago (Exhibit A being the astronomical salaries along with free agency that caused it, turning pro sports into a game of mercenaries instead of hometown heroes). I was a huge Cincinnati Reds fan growing up before there was cable in our small town and I listened to Reds games in my bedroom on WLW (The Big One) 700 AM nearly every night in the summers. My dad would listen to Atlanta Braves games in the living room. Between innings we would give each other… Read more »
Z has a very good change-up.
Haven’t watched a game since ‘93, my folks still watch the Yankees every night there’s a game. Dad never disappoints, I’ll call them up to check in on them (their in their 80’s) and as I’m speaking with mom I can hear dad yelling in the background, “Again with the f%cking commercials!”
Those early 70’s Baltimore Orioles teams were pretty awesome. One year they had four 20 game winning pitchers. You won’t see that again.
“No one watches any sporting event to see the stat guys show off their latest number crunching.” Baseball is the one sport where some of the fans actually do watch because of the obsessive number crunching. It has long been the most stat-driven game there is. By recently outlawing “the shift,” the folks running MLB have taken a fairly decisive measure to limit the negative effects of the fanatical number crunchers. The near-extinction of complete games has mainly developed as a result of needing to baby starting pitchers because those sons of bitches get paid so much that nobody wants… Read more »
I’m trying to dig up the Z-Man article from 1910 where he was decrying how batting average and the “box score” are ruining the hardball game…
Perfectionism is pernicious.
Great post today. Yes, humanity matters. And yes, we are opposed by technocrats that substitute spreadsheets for leadership. And yes, they will be the death of us if we do not stop them. And to do that, we must all become Kirk Gibson. Know what you will do when the fog of chaos has arrived. You have one job, one focus, one chance to make a difference. Make it count, and others will follow. One shot can start a stampede, and the technos have no answer for that. In matters of war, heart begets unrelenting persistence.
The thing that really ruined baseball was money.
Because now, baseball is about making money.
Not playing a game.
Not winning or losing.
Iow the Boeing syndrome; Boeing used to be about making airplanes
I ultimately stopped watching baseball when logos started appearing on the uniforms. I cannot stand New Era and Nike logos all over the uniforms. Logos are for f*gg*t European sportsball. Fun fact: the Yanks were the only baseball team that refused ANY makers logo on their vaunted uniform. Of course, in the past few years they now have ALL the logos and even some corporate thing on the sleeve.
Precise reason I quit the NFL years ago: too much politics.
Gee, ain’t capitalism grand?
It goes hand in hand with the financialization of everything else. I played baseball in high school. I found out I was good enough to make the team because my parents didn’t mind schlepping me to some Little League games and practices back when I was younger. They had no real objections to me playing, and as long as I could catch a ride to / from practice, they didn’t much care. Nowadays, of course, they’d probably be hauled up on child abuse charges. Because if your L’il Hurler is Good Enough to Make the Team ™, then he needs… Read more »
Similarly, the answer to what ails the modern world is to throw the managers off the roof of their offices and let people go back to figuring out how to live.
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your pamphlet.
“Baseball used to be a game run by men who wanted to put on a show for fans and build hometown pride.”
How can anyone take hometown pride in a team made up of people not from the hometown? “Our Africans are better than your Africans!!”
Is there a single MLB team that has a single hometown star on it?
It’s not the stats that ruined professional sport, it’s the money. It brings out the worst in people, and the more money there is, the worse the people involved. When I was a kid Tom Wilkinson was a football legend and lived down the street from us and we all worshipped him. The Edmonton Eskimos were a force to be reckoned with, and were a jewel in the crown of the city. Today they’re the Edmonton Elks… and the players are all black NFL throw aways that you wouldn’t want in your own neighborhood. I have better ways to spend… Read more »
I could write a dissertation on baseball. I was a Bill James reader in the early 1980s when he distributed his “Abstract” by mimeograph through the US mail. Baseball has not only been destroyed by the tinkering with rules, as Z Man outlines, but by the behavior and antics of the players. Until I was 18 or so and began to develop serious interests while in college, I followed the game obsessively. There’s not a cell in my body that had any ill will toward the sport until the last 10-15 years. Now it’s unwatchable; it is, as far as… Read more »
I never read Bill James books on baseball, not being very interested in baseball myself. But his true crime books are outstanding, especially The Man from the Train. That book impressed me
What a pathetically impoverished world of images and emptiness we now inhabit.
It is surreal.
At least we still have nature till it turns to glass..
Nah fuck it I’m not lettin the bastards get me down.
Gonna go to my neighbours glove in hand and chuck it around
For me the tragedy of sports is that the human condition won’t even allow for a wholesome, simple endeavor like competition of human athleticism without some form of corruption. Between performance enhancing drugs and gambling I can’t even watch a non consequential form of entertainment without someone cheating. Nothing is beyond corruption with people and it’s sad
Truly the number crunchers and the bean counters have engineered a quiet coup over the decades. Statistics and other allied tools (such as Monte Carlo simulations and mathematical modeling) have taken on a life of their own, like a medieval golem, and now govern large swathes of human behavior. This has been at the expense of other older modes of human apprehension, which had a greater amount of time-tested wisdom.
One of the big changes since I was a kid is the de-Americanization of the game. Major League rosters are now loaded with Latin Americans and a sprinkling of Koreans and Japanese. I’m guessing it’s much cheaper to sign kids from poor Latin American countries than to develop American talent. The Japanese professional leagues have a cap on the number of foreigners on a team’s roster.
Anything But Whitey–that is the golden rule.
Although MLB is still much whiter than NFL or NBA and a lot less black than back in the 20th century after Jackie Robinson.
I get the distinct sense that nominally white sports–baseball, hockey, golf, tennis–are deeply ashamed of their whitenss and would like nothing more than for the BEIDs to vanish and for the negroes to take their place. A microcosm of the Power Structure’s demographic wish for AINO.
I can’t watch any more. Some statistician decided that every hitter should swing for the fences every at bat. No more small-ball stuff – singles hitters like Boggs and Carew, no hit-and-runs, bunts, few steals…
The strike zone now is about half of what it should be, so teams burn through pitchers at an unsustainable rate – while I get frustrated and watch golf instead.
I’ve been enjoying LIV golf lately.
I’m intrigued by the allegations that professional golf is a money laundering operation. Since there’s no way the Saudis, or whomever, are making a profit on LIV, not even close. The purse size for the players at PGA events also brings this into question in my mind. Are they really bringing in that much $ from the John Deere Classic? That aside, golf is one of the few sports that retains some nervous tension.
I think “rare” art work might be a better tactic for laundering money. In any event the Saudi’s have a river of money to spend on whatever amuses them. You don’t particularly have to be smart to be rich if you live on top of an ocean of oil.
Don’t worry, the transhumanists have a plan for this too. People will be born specialized or receive their specialization mRNA shots soon after birth. That will make them not only great at their future menial jobs, but also content with their lot. For the 2 or 3 billion who will comprise humanity by 2100, this will be the only reality that ever existed.
Okay.
I am not okay with this. Anyway, I know my comment is a bit out there, but you would be surprised how much the transhumanist ideology has been infiltrating universities over the past decade or so. The Covid fiasco was the first large scale test of automated data-driven control of society. Transhumanists were involved with that and with the vaxx business.
Long ago I was hopeful about the benefits of future tech, but at this point it’s clear that the changes brought by new tech tools accrue chiefly to the evil side of the ledger. Sure, its fun to make your machines do stuff by talking to them instead of pushing buttons, but having them rat you out to Big Brother isn’t a good trade. As in sport, so too in all else. Those with power use technology against the rest of us, enlarging the power gap between and causing immiseration. Uncle Ted may have been wrong in how he used… Read more »
On that train, all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young
Sometimes even a NYC Jew can smell a rat.
This hyper-quantification occurs in football, too. Hence, head coaches and offensive coordinators no longer make game-management decisions. Instead, they defer to computer programs crammed with all the latest statistics. And the results, largely because they don’t take into account current game conditions and how the respective teams, position groups and players are performing, are often farcical. We sometimes see teams go for it on 4th-and-3 at their own 25-yard line with the score tied and seven minutes remining in the first quarter. Anybody with any intuitive knowledge of the game knows this is idiotic, but they do it anyway, and… Read more »
Idk, I think it’s a mixed bag. They banned the shift, which is a stats based way to put all the defenders on one side of the field because if the hitter makes contact it’s going to go to that side of the field. By banning the shift, they neutered the stats guys. And frankly it was obscene watch hitters peacock at the plate with all manner of rituals. A pitch would the thrown, and the hitter would step out of the box for 20 seconds and readjust all his batting gloves. Then, repeat this after every gd pitch. The… Read more »
I think the shift only worked because they were stats obsessed. In the old days, hitters would have just dragged bunts down the line until it went away.
Yes, this was a circular problem. When HRs became the holy grail, players never learned to bunt. Then when the shift came in, no one could beat it, so they tried to hit the ball even harder. Kind of like our elections, where the more the other side cheats, the more we are told to vote harder.
The peacocking is an underappreciated reason for game length. That is the reason for the pitch clock. I stopped watching baseball about 10 years ago, and I remember actually laughing while watching both the pitcher and hitter doing their goofy rain dances while Vin Scully was telling some story, waiting for the action to continue. If I wanted to watch grown men dance away the evil spirits, I’d have lived with the Sioux.
The shift is comically easy to beat. All you need to do is lay down a bunt or lazy ground ball the other way — two activities that used to be trivially basic for any professional hitter. That’s why we had baseball for over a century without the shift and it is only a very recent phenomenon!
The fact that the response to modern players lacking basic competency is to try to change the rulebook is, I think, a very accurate metaphor for the clown world we currently live in.
I was always a baseball fan and player, I played in a 18 to 30 hardball league when I was 30 against kids in college on baseball scholarships, a few triple A guys , but mostly old men ( in their late twenties) who were looking for one more go round before the softball beer drinking days were all you could swing. About 12 years ago I bought a subscription to MLB.com and quickly found out that the team who played in the stadium 5 miles from my house were blocked out. I started following the team that was 120… Read more »
“poor fit for the modern American with their low IQ’s and high time preference,”
i doubt that IQ has much to do with it since the game is increasingly popular in low IQ Latin America and High IQ Asian countries.
Other reasons seem more likely
Baseball is popular where anime is popular: Japan, America, and La Hispanoesfera. One of the great spurious correlations. Neither is big in Brazil, so not even “Japan is really a Portuguese colony” can help us.
But— Enlightenment, every rational man knows, is an epiphenomenon of graph templates. Accidents of history are a low-class conspiracy theory.
Calculate! Divide magical girls with cat ears by Caribbean descendants of slavery not classified as black! The blue line is pardo IQ over time and the red line is the change in how “gay-presenting” cartoon vampires are!
Great analogy between today’s baseball and managerial world the rest of us live in. It’s kind of like how sterile the Olympics are – virtually none of the athletes are amateurs, in the sense they have a day job and work their sport on the side – they’re all pros so who cares – I know I don’t. As for baseball, I gave up long ago largely because of the length of the games and the annoying subbing in and out. Probably the last bunch of games I watched was when the Cubs finally won the series for the 2nd… Read more »
That said, basketball is becoming whiter. Football, however, is becoming darker.
Amen.
Great post! Another problem with the modern game is the much higher percentage of at bats that end in a strikeout, walk or home run. The game used to have a lot more motion, as more balls were put into play, and players would steal and try to advance runners. Yes, more HR/BB/Ks give teams a statistical advantage, but they add to the time when everyone is just standing around. The statistical advantages do nothing to make the game more entertaining, since wins and losses are a zero sum game (i.e., all the teams wins and losses added together will… Read more »
The thing about this is 1988 was a “modern” time in every respect of the term. Yet, we did not have all this managerial BS we have now. In fact, there has been little technological advance in the past 35 year except for semiconductors and computation. Throw in large flat panel displays and that’s it. No bio-engineering (that works, mRNA “vaccines don’t count), no nanotechnology, no L-5 space colonies, no nothing. And women were prettier in 1988 than they are today.
After Gibson hits his home run, Dodger Stadium begins rocking to the sounds of… Gangsta rap? A Mariachi band? Nope, a simple organ, that people didn’t have to scream over to be heard.
Technology insures an unmitigated host of unintended and negative consequences. On the macro long run, it makes people weaker and stupider. A sober look at the facts cannot deny that. Don’t get me wrong, I want indoor plumbing and (some) medicine and am way too domesticated to hunt buffalo on horseback. But a certain point of technology, it is a curse no matter how helpful it is in the moment.
Technology = fire.
Human teeth and digestion have evolved to the point where we have to cook meat in order to optimally digest/ metabolize animal protein without our teeth wearing out.
As to baseball, we can always use the bat as a club. Beats using our fists.
The A’s still haven’t won another World Series. That mediocrity warranted a Brad Pitt movie. Hooray for mediocrity.
PS did I hear the A’s are moving to Las Vegas? Lol perfect, just perfect.
The A’s were pretty good for the time, but it would be difficult to keep such a team together in the era of free agency. The movie you refer to, “Moneyball” with Brad Pitt is a good explanation of what Z-man discusses. I recommend it.
They were competitive at the margins, but they lacked the IT to win a championship. Imo, analytics are good for giving you the extra little things, but the big things that win championships are beyond its scope.
A lot of things about society have become about nibbling at the margins, as if you don’t need substance in the first place. The fad can’t pass soon enough, if you ask me.
What team are you talking about, and when?
Here’s my A’s…
“After moving to Oakland in 1968, the A’s quickly turned things around. The highlight was their dominance in the early 1970s, where they won three consecutive World Series titles in 1972, 1973, and 1974. They consistently posted winning records throughout the decade, including a 101-60 record in 1971”
That record probably beats every other team except the Yanks. That was the era to which the movie “Moneyball” relates. I’ve not read the book, but suspect that’s the same team and era.
The A’s that the movie was based on. The playoff team on a budget, not the storied franchise (which should still be in Philly 😃 ) Early 2000s. Or maybe I’m all mixed up. Didn’t Pitt play Billy Beane?
1972 A’s roster: Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Bert Campaneris. Not a moneyball team,
Great names though. Rollie Fingers was also on that team.
Always liked Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky.
Playing wiffle ball with my friends back in the day, it was inevitable that someone would imitate the Mad Hungarian.
Great post Z. The nerds ruined baseball. It’s just that simple. The “three true outcomes” + the shift + specialization produced a quite frankly unwatchable sport. It’s telling that the team that bought most into this brand of baseball still ended up banging trash cans to try to get an edge. Also – the nerds also ruined baseball discussion. Go online to talk baseball and there will be some gamma who digs up some ultra obscure metric to AKSHULLY you. Nobody can actually just trust their eyes and have some fun with it. It’s beyond tedious. By the way the… Read more »
Who on earth watches sport nowadays? Sports, like everything else, has become bloated and corrupt. You are not watching what you think you are watching. Bloat and corruption is one of the surest characteristics of humanity. The Catholic church was an egregious example. The attempted fix, after centuries of war, was to go back to something more austere. In Juvenal’s third satire, a man who finds Rome crowded, full of foreigners and subject to the degenerate influence of women, homosexuals and the elite, seeks out a quieter life in the provinces. The older, simpler ways have always been best, Technology,… Read more »
The Orioles in that 1970 World Series played against Pete Rose who played in 159 games and had 649 At Bats.
Good username. You should use an apron.
hehe, but seriously the hbo special on Pete rose is a hoot. Now that guy is an entertainer!
I don’t think fans mind stat guys doing nerd things if it means their team is more likely to win the game. It’s more of a problem if you’re watching some random team you don’t care much about aside from the stars. Here’s the problem with reminiscing about the days of guys pitching 300+ innings and complaining that today’s pitchers are pansies. Baseball has been so optimized, the keys to unlocking maximum physical performance so exploited, that it takes a far more brutal toll on the body, hence the massive amount of injuries. This is also why the 2024 team… Read more »
“what needs to change to reduce injuries and keep star players on the field?”
pay middle class wages.
The problem that drains drama from baseball is not discontinuity of action but discontinuity in the cast of characters — namely the pitchers. It is now a given that your manager will methodically call on four or five pitchers in the game. The starter only shoulders responsibility for six innings, with three relievers lined up to protect the lead, or two or three clods lined up to mop up the loss. So it is rare that two good starters battle doggedly into the late innings with personal responsibility in the line. Would you write a play or movie where the… Read more »
The problem with Moneyball / Sabremetrics is that the map is not the terrain. There are so many externalities that cannot be measured or quantified on a spreadsheet that over-reliance upon it causes defeat instead of victory. The LA Dodgers are a poster child for that. Stuff that works out in the regular season Moneyball wise, mostly fail in the high pressure, only good teams playing playoffs. You can see that a lot — teams/managers who play the hot hands go much farther than the corporate moneyball people like Dave Roberts, a spreadsheet gofer for Andrew Friedman. James, it must… Read more »
As a hopeless, hapless – since my salad days – of the semi-pro baseball club on the south side of Chicago, at least this year I can take morbid interest in waiting to see if they can lose 130 games. There’s a stat for ya’
They’re so dumb, they couldn’t set a record for longest losing streak in MLB History the idiots! 😡
I’m hoping they lose badly enough to be under .200
BTW, they stink so bad 🫢 they are REDUCING ticket prices to get people back.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/mlb/white-sox-season-ticket-prices-to-be-reduced-for-2025-after-nightmarish-two-season-stretch/ar-AA1oPd9e?ocid=BingNewsVerp
Their season ticket renewal rates for next year must be atrocious.
A big reason to buy season tickets is you get guaranteed chance at all playoff tickets. They are so far from being playoff worthy that people are thinking they will just sit it out for a few years and watch at home.
Gibson’s homer in the 1988 World Series is also remembered because he literally lived out the closing scene of 1984’s The Natural, which is fondly remembered as an all-time great baseball and sports film.
I remember the NY Mets and their first World Series championship—yep, that old. In that day the manager broke the team up into two. One day one team would play, the next the other team would play. Caused an uproar at the time. (Aside: I actually lived in the neighborhood and went to grade school with Wes Westrum’s (Mets manager) daughter.) But what I really remember was the sense of community their run at the World Series brought to a city as jaded as NYC always was. You could go to a lunchtime diner and in would walk a Black… Read more »
I also remember the ’69 Mets (the Mets’ first, and one of only two in their entire history, World Series championship team). They were managed by Gil Hodges, not Wes Westrum. Hodges used a lot of left-right platooning on that team – i.e., left-handed hitters against opposing right-handed pitchers, and vice versa – (e.g., Ed Kranepool (l) and Donn Clendenon (r) at first base; Al Weis (s) and Ken Boswell (l) at second base; Wayne Garrett (l) and Ed Charles (r) at third base; Art Shamsky (l) and Ron Swoboda (r) in right field), but he certainly didn’t “br[eak] the… Read more »
Didn’t say the 69 Mets were managed by Wes Westrum, only that I went to school with daughter and knew him. Was a surprise to me when he took over, but that was after Hodges to be sure. Your memory might be better than mine, on the splitting of the team, but it was often discussed by commentators and sure seemed more often than the days facing the infrequent leftie pitcher, but that might be my memory of the series and playoffs.
My grandfather was a huge Cincinnati Reds fan, watching the games in the 1930s and the 1940s. I wonder what watching a game back in those days would be like compared to today. Not a baseball fan because of how long and boring it is.
I hate the modern game but am somewhat of a baseball historian. Back in the late 1800s baseball was considered really freaking quick…like have you got two hours to spare, madam, while we watch the ball game conveniently next to the beer garden? Then we can spend the next three hours watching boats go by on the river? Games were regularly 2 hours or less until sometime in the 1960s or 1970s when TV started edging into the sport. It was a slow process, but by the 1990s or so baseball was being extended to 3 hours plus due to… Read more »
What’s also hilarious is they keep changing the rules to increase offense while simultaneously trying to shorten the length of games. Hello! Do you not know your sport and that it has no clock, and that games can only end after 27 outs? I wish the people in the league office had the same brains as the stat nerds.
Football is nearly unwatchable.
You have to pay attention for 3 to 4 hours for a mere 15 minutes of action.
Life is too short!
If you were at a game, there wouldn’t have been all the distractions of today. And back then most people had to rely on radio, but kids and old men alike were often glued to that radio set when their team was playing, and working guys would be too on weekends and after night games were introduced. There were some very colorful announcers, plus no-bull veteran players who knew what they were talking about. I don’t mean to be too much of an old fogey, but another thing I couldn’t stand about more recent announcers is their non-stop jabbering. A… Read more »
One of the two biographies I’ve ever read was on Ty Cobb. One amusing anecdote in the book about Cobb and that era of baseball was his psychological demoralizing of the opposing team. It is written, he would prominently be seen “sharpening” his shoe spikes with a file before the game began. 🙂
The best baseball books I’ve read are The Glory of Their Times and Baseball When the Grass Was Real, covering the 1890’s through the 1930’s and early 40’s. It’s all interviews with players of those days, with the occasional umpire, etc., and Cobb comes up a lot! Lots of very enjoyable stories, and colorful characters. One of my favorites to read about was Rube Waddell.
I’ve read Glory of Their Times. It’s very good. I would recommend it to young men, as much of the book is about standing up for yourself and to other assholes.
The stuff about Cobb is interesting. They don’t seem to like him – they think he was an angry nut, and RACIST even for that time. They respect his game but he comes off as a bit sad, in his personal life.
Waddell is something else. But that kind of eccentric has been gone for 100 years.
Good points. Waddell would never be tolerated by that managerial/expert/credentials system that we have today. Yet they’ll put up with a lot of “inner-city” behavior. And those old-timers weren’t very welcoming to rookies, in large part, were they? You had to fight for your spot. Some rough shenanigans on the field too sometimes. And yeah, Cobb had some prickly attitudes, for sure, and lived a lonely life as you suggested. I believe I also read, though, that he did a lot of good things for people quietly, maybe after he retired, and on behalf of whites and blacks. Helping needy… Read more »
Cobb also lived a temperate life and took care of his health, in contrast to the morally suspect, hard-living Babe Ruth.
Cobb was a stern, yet devoted family man. He was intelligent enough to parlay his baseball earnings into even greater business wealth after baseball.
Obviously Cobb’s humble life style and small-ball play style did not fit into the zeitgeist of the 1910s and Roaring ’20s.
Let’s be honest, the Georgia Peach/Detroit Tiger was pretty fortunate to be in a position to buy stock in both Coca-Cola and General Motors just before they became world-bestriding monsters.
Bah gum, I shore do miss ol Ty. They don’t make ’em like that, anymore.
I also suspect they use the breaks to choke opponent players in the psychological sense. Being interrupted in your concentration can ruin your game for the day.
Psychology has always been a major part of sports. But excessively speculating in it plus excessive commercialization can ruin it