On Thursday January 15th the owner’s meetings were going on and they approved two things. For some reason I barley have heard much about it. I wanted to make sure everyone else did. They changed the rules so:
1) All postseason games will be played to their conclusion.
2) Head to head records will replace the coin flip in determining home field advantage for the tie-breaker game in division and wild card races.
Did everyone else know about these changes? Am I the only one who cares?
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8 comments:
rule change #1 is pointless
rule change #2 is good, but who cares
They need to amend the instant replay rule to at least include plays at the plate (and hopefully first base calls).
#2 is extremely important.
Look how it affected both the Rockies two years ago and the White Sox last years
I think it's retarded to say "baseball is a classic game so there should be no replay whatsoever. The Human Element!" Ridiculous. The human element sucks.
Why can't we take it a step further and use that box ESPN uses for balls and strikes instead of an ump?
Oh my god someone agrees with me about the espn box. Umpires are old and fat and drunk and cant umpire for shit.
the only problem is that if the strike zone actually becomes uniform and consistent and the players dont have to worry about umps calling pitches 8 inches of the plate strikes, offense in the big leagues would sky rocket to extreme levels. The players know the strike zone like the back of their hand, and if it is actually called correctly they would dominate. league average OPS may go up like 50 points if that ever happened. But it wont and never will
For no other reason than it puts too much emphasis on control and away from "deceptive stuff" do i want a subjective, but consistent strike zone. Call me old fashioned.
instant replay should, however, be used in all other possible capacities.
This old school way of thinking is WAAAAYYYY too outdated for the modern game. We have the technology to make things fair an accurate and uniform, like how anything competitive should be.
There's absolutely no reason pitchers can't adapt to deceptiveness with a uniform strike zone. I see no reason why those two become incompatible.
The overall goal is just to "GET IT RIGHT" (I dont know how many times I've heard that phrase from football guys) but it's true. If a pitch is within the strike zone, it's a strike. If the batter hits the first base bag just a split second before the 1B basemen gets to it, I wanna know. All I care is what's right, and technology helps with that.
Plus, I think a uniform strike zone will help 1) make consistent numbers for pitchers so it will be easier to differentiate which pitcher is better because more things are constant (Maddox, Glavine, and Smoltz absolutely benefited from umpires giving them more leeway and a slightly bigger strike zone in Atlanta thus slightly beefing up their numbers) and 2) it will help with pitchers who consistently "work the corners'. As a Sox fan, it gets frustrating watching Buerhle have different umps call different things on the same pitch in the same location. I've seen him get umps that call his corners correctly and give him leeway (which is awesome) and I've seen night where refs fuck him over (which suck). So, and this relates back to the beginning of this paragraph, this will give pitchers like Buerhle more consistency and a better reflection of his stuff.
It's been 100+ years since baseball's inception, it's time for a change; things can't stay the same for this long. It's just not natural.
Pitchers are not machines; they are human
The baseball rule book spells out exactly what a strike is, but most umpires like to create their own strike zone thinking the are unique when they are just fucking with the rules. Yes, humans are not perfect which is why they play the games, the rules can and should be perfect. When you add human errors and rule's errors they exponentially distort the game
wait, who ever said pitchers are machines? I don't understand where this argument comes from? My argument still applies to the human element of pitchers but that doesn't mean you can't use technology to judge the human activity of baseball players.
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