another great wainwright start wasted by the cardinals. they're averaging 2 runs a game in his starts this year - I guess he's their version of jacob degrom. bases loaded 0 outs in the 7th inning (?) and they don't score with the heart of the line up up. nice job losers.

Yep. I'm surprised more teams don't do it in close games. Today the Cardinals with bases loaded 0 out could've made use of it.

Sometimes its hard to score runs. Happens to everyone. And it is sad, and awful, when it happens to you.

Not that it mattered, but bad baserunning cost STL a run imo. Runners on 1st and 2nd and Wainwright was showing bunt. 3b comes charging in and nobody covering 3rd and for some reason the runner on 2b wasn't astute enough to pick that up. That's high school stuff right there. Completely unacceptable.

I am not arguing that openers and bullpen games lead to blowouts or are bad strategy.

If you go to a major league game in the modern era, you are quite likely to see a pitch thrown 98 mph at some point. I'm not sure why you think it is so much more fun for kids in the stands to see someone throwing 98 mph than 92 mph. You essentially are arguing that fans prefer to see strikeouts than balls in play, so long as the pitcher is throwing hard. That is not at all obvious to me.

In any case, there is a countervailing consideration. More than any other sport, fan interest in baseball is driven by statistics. Kids who collect baseball cards love statistics. Adults who do traditional fantasy baseball and daily fantasy baseball also love stats.

Openers, bullpen games, and the erosion of the traditional starting pitcher are terrible for people who love stats. You can't ask teams to shun openers and bullpen games if modern analytics suggest that they are effective. But if you change the rules as I suggested, you can preserve the role of the starting pitcher.

MLB hates kids, that's pretty obvious when they continue to shut down and sue Little Leagues that use MLB logos that aren't purchased from an MLB distributor.

If you like statistics, why would you dislike the erosion of the starting pitcher? The fact that maybe no pitcher will ever pitch 150 pitches in a game or win 300 games again has already eroded the position severely.

Now that teams are often using their closer in high leverage situations in the 7th or 8th, 40-60 saves a year might also be rare.

Matchups mean all but a team's ace in the NL might only throw 5 innings. Wainwright basically got a standing ovation for bunting in the 7th.

I love numbers, and if anything, an opener is a new stat to analyze.

Sadly I think it's the worst marketed sport. A few years back I was going to pay for the MLB package. They blacked out Blue Jays games for all of Canada, plus the Boston Red Sox even though neither is within 2000km of me. I got a refund, and back to pirating the games I went.

I don't know what to say. I really, really disagree with you. I am not arguing for a return to the 1930s. I am arguing for a rule that does little more than prevent future erosion. Analyzing the the effectiveness of bullpen games vs. traditional starting pitcher games might be interesting to me. But more casual fans follow the statistics of individual players.

There is a reason why middle reliever is the most anonymous position in baseball. Jonathan Losaiga and Yusmeiro Petit aren't exactly household names.

They also crack down on people sharing highlights on social media which is really dumb.

They flag every one of Jomboy's videos on MLB and get the cash for it. Apparently he tried to dispute it on Fair Use claims, and YouTube ofc sided with the ones with the team of lawyers.

Nobody outside of baseball even really knows who Mike Trout, Yelich, DeGrom are, so name recognition is not something that's really changed.

Middle relievers are also generally your worst pitchers. You have starters, then your setup/closers, then middle relievers.

Wayne Gretzky set records in the NHL that will never be touched. Then, defense alignments changed, now teams no longer have 3-4 players finishing with 100 points and 5 guys with 30+ goals. It doesn't devalue anything when the league leader scores 51 goals instead of 86.

I imagine early on in baseball there were guys who didn't like the games transition from pitching to homeruns. The times change.

This is clearly false.

I picked two very good ones precisely to counter this point.

I'm not exactly a traditionalist. I'm the guy arguing for a bunch of rule changes.

Here is another rule change. If a pitcher is deemed to have thrown at a hitter, it is an automatic ejection and a 10-game suspension. If you leave the bench or come running in from the bullpen, it's an automatic 10-game suspension. If you charge the mound, it is an automatic 10-game suspension.

There should be zero tolerance for things like what happened between Acuna and the Marlins a few years ago.

Intentionally throwing at hitters should be viewed as a flagrantly dirty play, no different than deliberately undercutting a basketball player or deliberately diving at a quarterback's knees.

You're not lying
MLB sent a cease and desist letter to my baseball league for using MLB team names and logos

I agree with most of this but I think they should let guys fight like hckey one on one

If a pitcher throws at someone's head (and that pitcher usually doesn't even have to bat) and the guy charges the mound let them go at it

The entire both bullpens running in (often side by side) stuff is just total nonsense

The sanctity of historical stats is not a reason to force rule changes on a game. Nobody hits 30 triples in a season anymore, nobody throws 480 innings in a season, nobody throws 40 complete games in a season, nobody bats .440, and nobody steals 100+ bases. Cy Young and Chief Wilson and probably Rickey Henderson will likely hold records forever. Likewise some old records were made to be crushed, like how Babe Ruth crushed the home run record. By your logic they should've done something to stop him from making the old records obsolete.

Submarine pitchers and knuckleball pitchers also seem to be extinct or getting there. This loss of diversity saddens me a bit. But if those pitchers aren't effective they have no place on the field. If there are any in MLB now I'm unaware of them, and I do hope at some point some of these player types have success again, but not by changing the rules of the game to suit them.

Having said that, there might be a time in future when changing certain statistics could make sense, to better evaluate the game. W/L are a controversial stat, but there is an issue, that starting pitchers have to throw 5 innings to get a win. This likely needs to change, as pretty soon starters even pitching 5 innings when they are effective might become a rarity. Just like how the statistic for saves was created, it had no relevance historically in baseball, so a new stat was created.

But these changes in the game are natural, the game should be allowed to change. Some people in 1912 (or whatever year) thought the curveball shouldn't be allowed. That's silly. Just as not allowing openers or the shift is silly. Or not allowing a player to swing on 3-0.

Sometimes parts of the game become out of balance, and thus certain changes can be effective. The mound was modified. The fences could be moved back. The grass could be longer or shorter. Etc. Perhaps in this era of not enough balls being put in play, some different rules on batting equipment could be considered, such as allowing slightly larger bat barrels. But not allowing a new effective strategies to be used is akin to not allowing the curveball, the evolution of the game due to people thinking of more effective ways to play is a good and interesting thing, and stifling this is backwards.

And honestly I love stats as much as anyone. I don't even really watch baseball anymore, haven't for many years (other than a few playoff games some years, and a few highlights per week), but I follow the stats religiously and have since I was a small child.

Carnivore,

I don't care about sanctity for sanctity's sake. I'm perfectly fine with the game changing in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to challenge Cy Young for most wins in a career. The elimination of hopelessly stupid stats is also fine with me. Thank god no one tracks game-winning RBIs any more.

My point is that it is good for fan interest to be able to compare pitchers of today to the pitchers of ten or twenty years ago. Stats are a part of that. And preserving the concept of a starting pitcher is part of that also. I am virtually certain that turning every pitching staff into a faceless troupe of one to three inning pitchers would be bad for fan interest.

Various changes have been made over the years in an effort to maintain fan interest. The AL adopted the DH in 1973 because there was a perception that fans didn't enjoy watching pitchers try to hit. Just last year, the major leagues introduced the three batter minimum rule. Left-handed relievers being brought in solely to face one or two left-handed hitters was an effective innovation. But it wasn't much fun for fans.

Having a pitcher come in to only face one batter slows the game down excessively.

There will still be pitchers who pitch longer than others. 50 years ago, that meant 300 innings, 25 years ago, that meant 250 innings, now it means 190 innings.

That trend may continue, but I doubt it'll ever get lower than 150 innings for decent long guys (if they stop being starters).

I’m with you about the throwing at players. If fighting is a crime in normal society, why should it make sense for athletes to fight? It’s more dangerous because they’re big strong guys with no fighting ability. The donnybrooks from the 60s and 70s in baseball and hockey were just dudes.

Regarding name recognition: Christian Yelich has under 200k followers on Twitter. Connor McDavid has nearly double that for hockey. Shane Bieber has 36k!

Mike Trout has 2.5 mil, which seems like a lot until you realize guys like LeBron have almost 50.

Why don’t they just come in ready to face a guy? The bullpens in the mlb are pristine. It’s not like they were just throwing on flat ground or one of those crappy portable pitching mounds. That’s like 2 minutes saved already.

There’s already no way you can compare pitchers from 20 years ago. They threw 260-300 innings, 28/33 CG, eras higher because they went through the other 4/5 times a game. Now you get maybe 5-10 pitchers max that’ll throw 200.

A pitcher nowadays going 6, facing the order 2/3 times max can’t be compared. It’s the same if you tried comparing guys from the 60s to guys from the 20s.

This is false. In 2001 (twenty years ago), no pitcher threw more than 8 complete games, and only three pitchers threw more than 5 complete games. No pitcher threw 260 innings, much less 300. Only two pitchers threw more than 240 innings. Randy Johnson led all SP with a 2.48 ERA. That's probably where Gerrit Cole will end up this year.

The year 2000 wasn't much different. The league leader than year in complete games was David Wells with nine and the leader in IP was Jon Lieber with 251. Pedro led SP with a 1.74 ERA. I would bet a fair amount of money that no SP will do as well this year.

CGs and IPs were higher twenty years ago than they are today, to be sure, but they were nowhere close to what you said.

Sometimes just because it would be better to do something doesn't mean you should. I hate RBBC and I hate this opener stuff too. I want to root for 1 stud RB, and I want to root for stud pitchers. I would actually prefer my favorite teams to lose if they had players I wanted to root for versus my team winning and having no star players to root for.

Almost every situation where the sport has gotten more efficient, I personally think it has ruined the star appeal. NBA did it with 12 man rotations, and having guys barely play 30 minutes, NFL did it with running backs, and now MLB is trying to do it with pitchers.

Rococo, you keep saying things are clearly false with no supporting facts.

In 2004, 42 pitchers threw 200 innings. In 2019, 15.

That’s 64% lower.

I was more thinking of the 70s and 80s with those IP stats.
The point still stands.

LOL. I explicitly said that CG and IP were lower today than they were twenty years ago. You were the one who said people were throwing 260-300 innings and 28-33 complete games twenty years ago.