Earlier 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…
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 f…
>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.
Again, I see this as the tail wagging the dog. It's easy to point to home runs as entertaining, but they a ultimately rather boring. For die hard fans, you want more hits that end up in play, with more strategy, and more opportunity for mistakes and drama. You're not going to get that from home run derbies.
Again, I know it's complicated, but ultimately, most sports organizations face an extremely complicated paradigm. It's fun to follow complicated sports where anything can happen, but it's hard to follow the same sports if you're not already into them. The way you solve this is to make the sports incredibly accessible so people visit games easily and cheaply as entertainment. The American sports system doesn't allow this because there is no relegation system, and so the fan bases are too large to allow the game to be accessible to most people. You end up making decisions that make television more watchable, and by making things "important" by "breaking records." This ultimately dilutes the game because it makes breaking records less relevant over time.
We've got to the point in golf where someone setting an all time PGA scoring record is basically a yawn-fest, because everyone knows they're not playing the same game.