Atlanta Braves II

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#7,151
#7,151
Dbake005 said:
Pretty easy devil's advocate stance... Multiple pitching changes are always exciting and keep fans engaged.
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I totally disagree with this. Multiple pitching changes are a big part of what's killing baseball. It's one of the main reasons baseball has become a game of two hours' worth of action stretched out to three and a half or four hours. There's nothing exciting about getting to see 7+ pitching changes.

The DH actually exacerbates this. Since managers know that they're never going to have to burn pitchers because their spot is coming up in the order, they end up making more in-inning changes, almost all of which are boring incremental lefty-righty matchup moves. Having the pitcher hit gives NL managers a much stronger incentive to make their pitching changes at the start of a new inning, when it doesn't add any additional delay. This is the main reason AL games take longer than NL games do.

I don't really have a philosophical objection to the DH. I just really don't like the kind of baseball that it leads to.
 
#7,153
#7,153
Well, I was being 110% completely sarcastic when I said multiple pitching changes are exciting and keep fans engaged... so there's that. It's possibly the number 1 thing that drawwwwsssss games outttttttt way too much.

And I really have no numbers on pitching changes in DH games mid inning vs. start of inning, etc etc. Get what you're saying, and the numbers might show that it is true.

The American League has a huge advantage in signing hitters with the DH. Maybe that gives the NL an advantage signing pitchers, no idea. But either way, it needs to be the same in both leagues, and I am totally fine with a DH all around.
 
#7,155
#7,155
Sitting at a game last year during a pitching change, my 9 year old asked "how come a guy warms up in the bullpen and only gets brought in when he's ready . . . . then comes in the game and we have to wait for him to warm up some more?". I didn't have a real good answer for that wasted 2 minutes.
 
#7,156
#7,156
GAVol said:
Sitting at a game last year during a pitching change, my 9 year old asked "how come a guy warms up in the bullpen and only gets brought in when he's ready . . . . then comes in the game and we have to wait for him to warm up some more?". I didn't have a real good answer for that wasted 2 minutes.
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Different mound, different foot holes, different landing point, different scenery, different catcher. I'm completely cool with a couple warm up tosses.
 
#7,157
#7,157
TBrown said:
Different mound, different foot holes, different landing point, different scenery, different catcher. I'm completely cool with a couple warm up tosses.
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As am I... It's really the whole process that takes forever. Manager slooooowly walks out. Makes small talk. Calls for reliever. Reliever walks in, cut to commercial, return.. etc. etc.

A few warm up tosses wouldn't take long at all. But the whole process does. I don't mind, cause I am a die hard fan. But I could see how some would.

I don't totally understand the football fans' total bashing of the amount of time it takes for a baseball game to finish, but hey, to each their own.

Being a football fan vs. being a baseball fan is just a completely different season/animal.
 
#7,158
#7,158
Dbake005 said:
Yeah, that.
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Sorry I missed the sarcasm. I spent all weekend sitting in a hospital room up in Knoxville and my brain is sort of fried.


GAVol said:
Sitting at a game last year during a pitching change, my 9 year old asked "how come a guy warms up in the bullpen and only gets brought in when he's ready . . . . then comes in the game and we have to wait for him to warm up some more?". I didn't have a real good answer for that wasted 2 minutes.
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I can't get my son (who is 7) interested in watching baseball at all. He thinks it's way too slow and it takes too long. Unfortunately, he is not wrong. Thirty seconds between pitches and four minutes between half innings and pitching changes is way too much. It's like when they used to take a SNL skit and stretched it into a full-length movie. There's not enough there to fill the time it takes up.

My son and his friends would rather watch televised soccer games than baseball. That should scare the hell out of MLB.
 
#7,160
#7,160
TBrown said:
Different mound, different foot holes, different landing point, different scenery, different catcher. I'm completely cool with a couple warm up tosses.
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I get that, but just cutting it down to 4 or 5 would lop 8-10 minutes off a game with a bunch of mid inning changes.
 
#7,161
#7,161
Vercingetorix said:
I can't get my son (who is 7) interested in watching baseball at all. He thinks it's way too slow and it takes too long. Unfortunately, he is not wrong. Thirty seconds between pitches and four minutes between half innings and pitching changes is way too much. It's like when they used to take a SNL skit and stretched it into a full-length movie. There's not enough there to fill the time it takes up.

My son and his friends would rather watch televised soccer games than baseball. That should scare the hell out of MLB.
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My son has a high functioning form of autism and one the things he's latched onto for some reason is baseball and I think it's precisely because there's so much time for analysis. Taking him to a game is like sitting next to Peter Gammons for 9 innings. I don't even need the jumbotron.
 
#7,162
#7,162
They should limit the amount of times the catcher is allowed to go to the mound. I've watched games where catchers have gone out 3 or 4 times in an inning.
 
#7,163
#7,163
Dbake005 said:
As am I... It's really the whole process that takes forever. Manager slooooowly walks out. Makes small talk. Calls for reliever. Reliever walks in, cut to commercial, return.. etc. etc.

A few warm up tosses wouldn't take long at all. But the whole process does. I don't mind, cause I am a die hard fan. But I could see how some would.

I don't totally understand the football fans' total bashing of the amount of time it takes for a baseball game to finish, but hey, to each their own.

Being a football fan vs. being a baseball fan is just a completely different season/animal.
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It's clearly not the time. It takes about as long to play a college football game as it does a baseball game, and you don't hear anybody complaining about how long football games take.

The difference is how much action is packed into those three and half hours. In football, there's always something going on -- running, passing, tackling. There's 30 seconds between plays like in baseball, but you don't notice it as much because they're usually showing a replay of something semi-exciting that just happened. In baseball, the pitcher gets the ball back from the catcher and then just stands there for 30 seconds before he throws it. And since only 20 percent-ish of pitches actually get put in play, it works out that 80 percent of a baseball game is just camera shots of a pitcher's arse while he throws the ball back and forth to the catcher. You do this for three minutes and then the payoff is a groundball to short. It's easy to see why this is a hard sport to watch as a casual fan.

It doesn't have to be that way. For most of the 20th century, the games took two hours. Same amount of action, just compressed into almost half the time. It's not a coincidence that that's when baseball was the most popular sport in the country.
 
#7,164
#7,164
Yeah, there's also a big difference in 16 football games versus 162 baseball games, and just 'more' casual football fans than casual baseball fans, by far.
 
#7,165
#7,165
1. 15 second pitch limit with nobody on. Batter can't step out with nobody on.

2. Only two pitching changes per inning.

3. Three warmup tosses instead of eight.
 
#7,166
#7,166
Also, along with pitching changes, OBP is such a huge part of the game, and taking pitches is highly important. Back then, most guys just hit the ball.
 
#7,168
#7,168
zjcvols said:
1. 15 second pitch limit with nobody on. Batter can't step out with nobody on.

2. Only two pitching changes per inning.

3. Three warmup tosses instead of eight.
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None of these are practical.

The eight warmup throws aren't the problem. Commercials are the problem.
 
#7,169
#7,169
zjcvols said:
1. 15 second pitch limit with nobody on. Batter can't step out with nobody on.

2. Only two pitching changes per inning.

3. Three warmup tosses instead of eight.
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Pitching changes hurts the team making the change as well, so I do not agree with this at all. You might as well require all batters to be switch hitters so lefty-lefty righty-righty switches are not deemed advantageous.
 
#7,171
#7,171
TBrown said:
None of these are practical.

The eight warmup throws aren't the problem. Commercials are the problem.
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I can see two, but don't know how you can disagree with 1 and 3. College does 1, and it's fantastic.
 
#7,172
#7,172
zjcvols said:
Also, along with pitching changes, OBP is such a huge part of the game, and taking pitches is highly important. Back then, most guys just hit the ball.
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I was curious enough to look this up. The average AL team drew 499 walks last year, 567 walks in 1970, and 677 walks in 1950. I don't think that's it.

Most of it is the BS between pitches. I don't think you have to put a hard shot-clock style limit on it; you just tell umpires to 1) stop calling time when a batter steps out, and 2) start calling balls whenever a pitcher doesn't deliver the ball within a reasonable amount of time, with "reasonable" being 10-15 seconds with nobody on base and 20-25 seconds with runners on. You'd immediately cut 30-45 minutes off the average game time. Players would whine about it for two weeks and then everybody would get used to it and forget about it.
 
#7,173
#7,173
zjcvols said:
1. 15 second pitch limit with nobody on. Batter can't step out with nobody on.

2. Only two pitching changes per inning.

3. Three warmup tosses instead of eight.
Click to expand...

GAVol said:
I get that, but just cutting it down to 4 or 5 would lop 8-10 minutes off a game with a bunch of mid inning changes.
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New pitchers (and starters in the 1st) get 8 pitches when they first appear, but only 5 in subsequent innings.

Cutting this down further is a BAD idea. While catchers are intimately familiar with much of the staff, they still need a few pitches to see how a pitcher's stuff is working that day. A pitcher will not have the same velocity and movement every single outing; and while he may realize something is off in the pen, the guy calling the game and catching these pitches needs to get a feel for the pitcher's 'stuff'.
 
#7,174
#7,174
Prepare to panic.

Freddie Freeman hurt his knee during workouts this morning. Said he heard a pop. :shakehead:
 
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