I think the media is attributing too much to the bats. I was at the Yankees game, and the wind was blowing straight out and hard. Many of the home runs I saw hit would have been fly outs on a day with more normal wind.
MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
251–260 of 432 posts
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#252I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan) Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws o…
I play golf. I write about golf. I genuinely love golf. Over the last 50 years, we have slowly broken the game of golf by allowing incremental technological advancements -- just like this -- that make it easier to do something that is hard, that is making it easier to hit the sweet spot. I am sending a grave warning to baseball fans here from the future that you will arrive at by following this road. Golf used to be…
Why not invent say "Field Golf" or "Lolz Golf" or whatever you fancy calling it? Set the rules and equipment to around your ideal time. Get some mates together to give it a go and refine it.
I think the toughest part will be equipment - golf bats cost a fair bit to make but perhaps a price limit might help fix that. You could define club classes akin to how sailing has standard class boats. You could even require that participants make their own for an added twist. I'd keep the current standard balls for now.
Why stop at the bats and balls? What about the format? You could do three holes with a very short shot clock and go straight to the 19th for a bladder wrecking session involving a golf themed drinking game. Instead of running in a Triathlon, do nine holes after the swim and before cycling to the finish. You could replace the cycle phase with knocking a polo ball from a pony along the course to the finish. The swim could be ... yes ... underwater croquet!
Could be a lot of fun even if it never takes off - and that is what any past time ought to be.
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is so silly. I would love to watch a sport where all the athletes are on cutting edge, dangerously experimental PEDs and all the equipment is engineered to the very limits of nature. We draw oddly arbitrary lines what is and isn’t ok in sports.
> dangerously experimental PEDs Brazilian jiu-jitsu /submission grappling is like this right now The biggest events don't test. That's adcc and ibjjf tournaments only test the winners of black and belt and they can skip the testing somehow Personally I think it's bad for the sport and hobby. Downstream effects where it normalizes ped use for hobbyist tournaments and delusional parents have their kids on steroids and…
why do you think they're on dangerously experimental PEDs as opposed to the standard PED profile in combat sports?
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#254> Unfortunately, the MLB reviewed the torpedo bats after the game and somehow had zero issues with them?
"Unfortunately, the MLB reviewed the torpedo bats after the game and somehow had zero issues with them", isn't a question; adding a question mark just makes me read you with an obnoxious up-tone.
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#255I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan) Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws o…
I play golf. I write about golf. I genuinely love golf. Over the last 50 years, we have slowly broken the game of golf by allowing incremental technological advancements -- just like this -- that make it easier to do something that is hard, that is making it easier to hit the sweet spot. I am sending a grave warning to baseball fans here from the future that you will arrive at by following this road. Golf used to be…
There’s some consensus though that currently, pitching has evolved much faster than batting due to advances like Trackman and deeper understanding of the relationship between biomechanics, pitch tunneling, spinrate/flight path/movement, and so on. In conjunction with that has been a shift towards “TTO” (three true outcomes - HR/BB/K) on the offensive side, which is a statistically motivated perspective that batting for average is suboptimal. In short, you would rather have a lower BA and a higher home run rate even if it means a higher K rate, since home runs (and 2Bs) are so significantly more valuable than singles, and fly outs are also much more valuable than ground outs (or really, less bad) due to the opportunities for sac flies and the risk of double plays. TTO tho is also partly a response to the elevated pitching capabilities - velocity and spin.
This is all just to say that batters are falling behind and there’s an argument that it hurts the on-field product from an entertainment perspective since balls in play are what we ultimately watch for - if torpedo bats make it more likely that players can bat for higher averages by barreling up the ball more consistently, it will be good for the game.
Other alternative proposals include lowering the mound (famously done in the 60s), adjusting the ball (eg lower seams, which makes it harder for pitchers to generate spin and makes the same spin rates less effective), and so on.
One good (bad?) thing is that to some extent pitchers are starting to reach a biomechanical wall, evidenced by the greatly increased rates of Tommy John surgery, though that is partly also an effect of better surgical techniques and recovery times.
Point is - it’s complicated.
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
baseball is an arms race though. In golf the ball is on a tee. In baseball, the pitchers get better every year, and throw faster every year. There's innovation happening on both ends.
If the pitchers are getting too good, just make it harder to pitch. Don't make it easier to hit better pitches. Golf is also an arms race too. Look at the lengths of golf courses over the last 50 years. It's comical. It used to be 6000 yards was a championship course... now it's over 8000. They used to put bunkers in front of greens to make them more challenging, but the equipment evolve to maximize height, and stop…
There are discussions about lowering the seams (harder to generate spin and makes the same spin rates less aerodynamically effective) as well as lowering the mound.
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I play golf. I write about golf. I genuinely love golf. Over the last 50 years, we have slowly broken the game of golf by allowing incremental technological advancements -- just like this -- that make it easier to do something that is hard, that is making it easier to hit the sweet spot. I am sending a grave warning to baseball fans here from the future that you will arrive at by following this road. Golf used to be…
Why not invent say "Field Golf" or "Lolz Golf" or whatever you fancy calling it? Set the rules and equipment to around your ideal time. Get some mates together to give it a go and refine it. I think the toughest part will be equipment - golf bats cost a fair bit to make but perhaps a price limit might help fix that. You could define club classes akin to how sailing has standard class boats. You could even require tha…
There are plenty of associations who do this: https://worldhickoryopen.com/
I still play with my grandfather's persimmon clubs about 25% of the time.
It's just a coordination problem... but once the dominant professional association the game changes forever, because the vast majority of people just want to emulate the pros, because they grew up dreaming of becoming pro.
Golf is finally trying to do something about this with rolling back the golf ball so that it will have diminishing returns with more power, but the real damage was done in the early 80s by allowing hollow clubs to make the sweet spot bigger, which lead to it becoming absolutely huge in the 90s.
Again, once you go down this road, you'll wake up in 20 years wondering what happened.
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#258This seems to most help with guys who were hitting the ball most often not at the sweet spot. By moving the sweet spot to where they are hitting the ball, they might gain some power. A bat needs to be round, a solid piece of wood, less than a certain length and less than a certain diameter. The actual shape is not defined.
It's interesting to me, who is not a baseball player but a software engineer, that even at the level of professional sports the solution is not to just train the athletes to swing the ideal bat "correctly" but to redesign the bat to be sub-optimal but such that when the players use it "wrong" the right thing happens. The physicists and swing coaches and trainers and teammates have probably been telling Volpe and Chis…
Volpe and Chisholm have honed and fine-tuned their swings over 20 years to produce results good enough to vault them into the top few hundred in the world at that particular craft.
They have a lot riding on that existing swing. Pro baseball is an unforgiving endeavor in which small edges add up over the course of a six month season, and the rewards for skill follow a power law distribution such that being just a bit better has millions of dollars attached to it, but becoming just a bit worse can also mean losing millions of dollars.
Changing swing path to get contact on a slightly different portion of the bat on a particular kind of pitch, possibly when looking for another pitch, perhaps just in particular counts, requires a lot of offseason work and carries no guarantees. The risk is similar to a from-scratch rewrite where the old code is thrown away; a very large portion of the time the resulting hitter ends up unplayable in the majors.
Tweaking the bat shape, on the other hand, is a micro-optimization akin to a bug fix whose rollout is behind a feature flag: undoing it is as easy at pulling a different bat from the rack.
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#259I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan) Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws o…
I play golf. I write about golf. I genuinely love golf. Over the last 50 years, we have slowly broken the game of golf by allowing incremental technological advancements -- just like this -- that make it easier to do something that is hard, that is making it easier to hit the sweet spot. I am sending a grave warning to baseball fans here from the future that you will arrive at by following this road. Golf used to be…
The data show the only things that have had an impact on golf are the golf ball and speed training. And we’re rolling back the golf ball.
Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
#260I've always wondered what the technological development of F1 would look like in other sports. This feels pretty close.
It's actually fairly common. Other sibling comments have a lot of examples, but one I'd like to focus on is the swimsuit arms race in competitive swimming. It really got started with Speedo's LZR Racer suit at the 2008 Olympics, where 98% of swimming medals were won by someone wearing one of these suits. However, there were serious issues with cost and accessibility. These suits cost a lot of money to develop and man…
I don't understand how $550 a suit is an exorbitant cost.
You're paying coaches, nutritionists, doctors, managers, etc. What's an extra $550 every now and then?
Sure, maybe a less-well off swimmer can't afford to train with the suit in every practice swim like a wealthy team/swimmer can - but that wealthy team/swimmer already has advantages in everything else.