WTF!

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/1873 ... nal-dugout

Rozner won't like this. He says real fans don't care about game length. He also told me that I should be ok with World Series Game being played past 11:00 on a week night. He knows it all.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I like this twitter response :

https://twitter.com/search?q=intentional+walk

Yes it's official. We are now a bonafide country of pussies.

What was your favorite intentional walk? Light 'em up Chicago!

This guy gets it. Great rule change.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Mine was when Tom Veryzer hit a ball 3 intentional walk pitch from Ed Lynch back up the middle.

That shit's not even on YouTube, can't have been that great.

Should be the manager grabbing his crotch with both hands. Two balls per hand.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

This robs us of the unintentional comedy when a guy can't throw 4 balls out of the zone to the catcher, or he throws one too close and the hitter slaps it into the corner for a double.

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1926-1931-1934-1942-1944-1946-1964-1967-1982-2006-2011

Like the article says, this would hardly ever impact a game, but why not? Sure there was always a chance of a passed ball or some idiot swinging for a strike, but I don't ever remember that happening in at least a couple of decades of following the game.

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"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas

Good start.

Next:
1) Institute a pitch clock next.
2) Limit pitcher visits.

Does Travis Wood still have to trot out to Left Field and stand there until the signal is given?

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It happens a few times every year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or0jeAoyVVI

There's also the "fake intentional walk" which will now be extinct:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g90IW7SqTnw

And of course stepping across the plate and taking a swing at it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6YzVvtxoaY

This is an idiotic rule change. If they want to speed up the game, this should be about number 627 on their list.

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True. Eliminate the 8th and 9th innings.

I'm pretty much ready to go to the bar by the 7th and then we don't have to deal with the reliever conga line.

Good change.

Not a huge timer saver by itself, but count is as one of many upcoming rule tweaks and the game will be moving along at a much crisper pace.

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Team Cutler.

How much time does that really remove from a given game? Virtually none. You might shave 10-15 minutes total over an entire season.

Why not eliminate the home-run trot around the bases while they're at it?

What the hell is with people that buy a ticket or sit down in their chair to watch baseball and can't wait to go do something else?

This crap has all the actual impact of "give the Governor a 'harumph'."

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

There were 932 intentional walks in all of MLB last year. With 30 teams playing roughly 162 games a year (there were 4 teams last year with only 161, hence "roughly"), that makes for 2430 actual games played in a season, give or take a few. That results in an average of .38 intentional walks per game. If we assume that an intentional walk takes 1 minute (it probably doesn't, but this simplifies the math), that is an expected reduction of .38 minutes, or about 23 seconds per game, for a total of 55,890 seconds over a season, or about 15.5 hours. To put that into perspective, the average MLB game length is 2 hours and 56 minutes, or 2.93 hours, that makes for a season's worth of games running about 7200 hours. Cutting 15.5 hours is a reduction of total run-time of 0.2%.

Based on MLB seemingly taking rules from 12" softball (runner on 2nd in extras and no pitch IBBs), they could take on another softball one of not having to run the bases after a homer. Hitters would be reduced to the bat flip and strutting back to the dugout for showmanship.

Way to shit up a nice thread.

Fucking maths.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuzBzASzOR4

Here's Kyle Schwarber walking up to 'Thuggish Ruggish Bone'. Depending on when you start the clock, you'll see that it takes anywhere from 35 to 39 seconds for him to approach the plate and get ready to see the first pitch--I timed it up until the pitcher broke his set position, and got 37 seconds. For the sake of argument, let's assume that most batter walk-ups take about that long, and for the ease of math let's be incredibly favorable and say the average is 30 seconds (from an out in a progressing inning until the first pitch of the next plate appearance).

There were 184,580 plate appearances in 2016 by all MLB teams, most of which required a "walk-up". If we don't count the 43,420 PA's to lead off an inning last year (they require a "walk-up" still, but that is rolled into the warmup of the inning itself, so let's again be generous and not count that time), we have 141,160 instances of a player needing to make his way from the dugout to the plate after an out. If the average of that time is 30 seconds, that means 2016 featured 4,234,800 seconds (1176 hours, roughly) of "walk-up" time. That accounts for 16.3% of the total time we would expect an MLB season to take up (7200 hours, based on a 2 hours, 56 minutes average runtime per game).

If the MLB were to reduce that "walk-up" time by just 40%--from 30 to 18 seconds--we could expect the average game time to be reduced by almost 10%, from 2 hours, 56 minutes to 2 hours, 38 minutes, substantially closer to the vaunted "two and a half hour" mark. Now let's consider that the original "walk-up" average of 30 seconds was chosen for ease of computation, and given the evidence it is incredibly likely that the real amount of time an average player spends walking up to the plate and getting set between outs is closer to 40 seconds than it is 30, a 40% reduction in that time becomes all the more powerful, likely getting the average game time well below 2.5 hours. This is all without limiting mound visits, pitching changes, or instituting a pitch-clock league-wide, the MLB could reduce game length by 10% simply by asking (making) batters to get to the plate a little faster.

Let's look at the 4 major sports:

NHL: It flows the best. They drop the puck quickly after stoppages. Only two tv time outs per period. Only one time out per team per game. The end of the game does not take materially longer than other parts of the game even as the drama is amped up. I think I have this worked out properly- it's about 40 minutes per period and 18 minutes for each intermission for a combined time of about 2.5 hours per game.

NBA: The NBA finishes its games in a fairly predictable time period. My main complaint is that there are way too many stoppages at the end of games due to free throws and each team having a lot of time-outs. It completely loses its flow exactly when the game matters most. It is a huge turn off. You can't really get rid of the free throws and would probably have to move to a higher level penalty (bonus system) to discourage fouls at the end of the game. At a minimum, you need to significantly reduce time outs.

NFL: Way too many commercial breaks. These games need to be done in under three hours. Play is broken up too much with tv timeouts.

MLB: Goff said it best- it is not necessarily the total time it takes to complete the game, but rather all the dead time during the game. For instance the number of pitching changes that slow down play. I'd love to see baseball game average 2.5 hours because that means you are cutting down on all the dead time as noted by JLN.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

So:

1. Reduce walk-up time from the on-deck circle to the batters box to 20 seconds unless there is a pinch hitter or pinch runner.
2. Eliminate commercial break for the 2nd and 3rd pitching change in each half inning, have announcers do a live read or two instead. Come in, throw your damn warm-up pitches, and let's go already.

Please do something about the damn "oh shit, we have to check for a replay - somebody call Hank White in the press box and have him look at the video." The video guy makes the decision, he gets 5 seconds from the end of the play, and he presses a button that makes the video board light up.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal