Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

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I always felt like baseball was intrinsically a better game than football insofar as "football has to constantly tweak the rules, which baseball's stay (mostly) the same." Whether that was ever true, or mattered, is mostly irrelevant for this.

Also, if baseball's not your game and you thought it was always boring, probably skip the rest of this post.

Now, I think both the application of analytics and the general development of human skills (100+ mph fastballs!) have necessitated tweaking the rules in some basic ways. I'm definitely not the first to note this -- MLB has a whole "competition committee" trying to make the games faster and better, so far without success AFAICT. I saw a postseason game this year that lasted 4 hours (for a 9-inning game).

The symptoms are well-known (long, boring games; batters either hit a homer or strike out or walk) and I don't need to list them all. But if you don't make the games faster and let the other 7 players on the defense get involved, nothing else is going to matter. Four hours when a game only took two just 60 years ago is not OK.

Rather than list all the possibilities, I'll just leave it at this: adult softball leagues have to finish the games in 90 minutes (for a 7-inning game). So how do they pull it off?

* The biggest rule change I can see adopting is foul balls. One foul after two strikes is all you get.

* They also start you at 1-1 count, but I think that one will never fly. There's something sacred about 3 strikes. Sorry.

MLB could make it 3 fouls, or 5, or some high number, and lower it over time. Who really enjoys watching a hitter foul off pitch after pitch? Hitters can pretty much do it all they want nowadays, which is what I meant by "the development of human skills." Eventually, if it's a strike you have to swing at it.

Besides wasting huge amounts of time, it makes for way too many pitching changes. MLB's already tried tweaks to reduce those, but they've had pretty much no effect.

Being conservative about the rules was fine for the last 150 years, but I really think those times are over.

> I always felt like baseball was intrinsically a better game than football insofar as "football has to constantly tweak the rules, which baseball's stay (mostly) the same."

Funny, I haven't seen all that much "tweaking"... They've changed the off-side rule a bit over the years, but that's about it, isn't it?

Oh, sorry, now I get it -- you weren't talking about football, but American Hand-Egg, right? :-D

There is a VAST difference between softball (big ball with relatively lower velocity) and baseball (smaller ball with faster velocity). To the point where they're almost not the same game.

Softball is about putting the hit to a particular spot on the field while in baseball hit control really isn't a thing as it's tough enough to nail the ball.

And why would you make fouls benefit the pitcher? Benefiting the hitter is always more exciting. If you really want to speed things up, make fouls benefit the hitter. 4 fouls and you get on base will add quite a bit to the scoring and make ties quite a bit less frequent. It would also make the pitchers have to put stuff where the batter can smack it also increasing score and decreasing likelihood of ties.

I think you are looking at it from the wrong point of view.

Playing baseball starts at a very young age - 4,5,6 years old. At that point the game is, more or less, a subset of the baseball rules. As a player gets older, they add more rules but aren't really modifying the existing ones that you've already learned. It's a really nice system.

At some point, softball branches off. The rules are generally parallel to each other so switching between the two is just a matter of calibrating your mindset and equipment.

You can say that there is a vast difference between them and be right. But you can also say that they are nearly the same and be right.

You're 100% right about this rule benefiting the pitcher. Parallel to this you have to do something to reduce his advantages. Famously, they lowered the mound to do this.

I'm curious how the 61-foot mound in the minor leagues is working out.

Softball is a bigger ball, yes. But it's not lower velocity, at least if you consider the relevant metric: time from pitcher to plate. Because softball also pitches a lot closer to the plate.

Not to be a pill but velocity (in physics and as-used in the preceding posts) is well-defined and includes both time and distance. So if reducing distance results in the same time then, indeed, the velocity must be lower.

If one is talking abstractly about the “velocity” of the game I suppose a point could be made about that.

I think he's thinking fast-pitch softball, where the ball does indeed get to the plate in a comparable time.

In slow-pitch, which I was talking about, it's no contest.

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