401–410 of 432 posts
"you can’t just make a new bat and ruin over 100 years of baseball" If this jabroni was in charge of sports, there'd be no forward pass, no three-point line, no fosbury flop. Sports should be frozen in a specific moment of this guy's choosing. MLB batting averages have been on a steady, multi-decade decline as pitching quality and strategy has improved[1], so God forbid we do something to add some offense. [1] https:…
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Well, if we're limiting the rules of sports in any country based on what a European PM does...
The point is more that a different kind of person can be interested in something where it's not entertainment per se. There's a reason someone might prefer a sport over seeing a circus performance.
You’re arguing that others should not be allowed because you don’t like it.
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There’s a lot of debate in golf if the game had been spoiled at professional levels because of modern gear. Courses have been made longer to accommodate and it’s very likely there’s less reliance on skill today. All the optimizations are around speed today because with such huge faces and low MoIs guys won’t miss when swinging even harder. In fact you could argue golf should be more like baseball in that lower skille…
With golf, there are other dimensions course designers could use to make the pro game less about distance. Tighter fairways, faster greens, etc.
TPC Sawgrass is the closest to a perfect pro course (PGA National second I guess) since it was designed specifically for it. I think a course perfectly optimized for pro play would be very different from what most people would expect.
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There’s a lot of debate in golf if the game had been spoiled at professional levels because of modern gear. Courses have been made longer to accommodate and it’s very likely there’s less reliance on skill today. All the optimizations are around speed today because with such huge faces and low MoIs guys won’t miss when swinging even harder. In fact you could argue golf should be more like baseball in that lower skille…
There do exist traditionalist golf leagues that use classic club styles and balls that are way less flashy than the modern stuff. I briefly looked into it after playing Golf Story on the Switch, which features an area where you have to use a set of historical clubs (sometimes with different names from the modern versions!) and found such leagues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickory_golf
I 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…
I 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…
When you play, you can play with whatever equipment you want, with a like minded group of players. Keep the game as “pure” as you want or use “The Sure Thing” clubs from top golf. The changes only matter on TV and then specifically if you compare that product to years or decades back. MLB is an incredibly poor example of maintaining purity. the most sacred records in the game were totally shattered, repeatedly, with modern technology and pharmaceuticals all in order to increase TV viewership and no penalties at all. To pretend there is some preservation of purity they are keeping these guys out of the Hall of Fame for a while, but the teams didn’t have fines or lose wins or draft picks or even have any of these guys suspended when everyone knew they were cheating.
It’s this intersection between taking part and entertainment where this odd gatekeeping happens. I hated hydraulic disc brakes and EPS on race bikes, until I tried it, the stuff is great but for myself I still ride bikes without electronics and rim brakes sometimes. I pinch the barbs on my hooks when I fly fish, I know others don’t and probably catch fish that I don’t, but for me I pinch the barbs. Oddly, I find it acceptable to use completely modern lines and rods and can throw a fly way better than any angler could in years ago. I’ve been able to find more satisfaction competing against myself with my own criteria than worrying about the purity on tv.
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> Golf is essentially a single player game that you play against yourself. That is not at all how tournament/competitive golf works. And that's what sets the tone for the whole sport.
You don't have to let it set the tone for your golf.
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I don't disagree with any of this, I'm just saying that we know where this goes. It's just an arms races if you let it become one. If the pitching is getting too good, make it harder to pitch. >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 g…
>The American sports system doesn't allow this because there is no relegation system A few years ago a friend of mine from the UK made the observation that American Football would benefit greatly from a relegation system... every season I have the same reaction. By about the 4th week of the season, the NFL bifurcates into legitimate contenders and everybody else. You end up with Thursday nights and late season games…
In those few games where they sit starters, the backups absolutely want to do their best to get starting jobs, the games aren’t uncontested.
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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…
I know nothing of baseball. If pitching evolves faster than hitting, does that mean the response time of the hitter becomes shkrter? Can't you move the pitcher further away to give the hitter more time to respond?
https://static.odealo.com/uploads/auction_images//6441500406...
But in comparison these new bats look exactly like the old ones...
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There do exist traditionalist golf leagues that use classic club styles and balls that are way less flashy than the modern stuff. I briefly looked into it after playing Golf Story on the Switch, which features an area where you have to use a set of historical clubs (sometimes with different names from the modern versions!) and found such leagues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickory_golf
Indeed and I can see the appeal on old courses that were designed for a ground game that doesn’t exist in the modern aerial game. Especially if you have firm conditions like in Scotland.
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be a ton of courses really designed for shorter-distance games, which makes sense when most players are rocking space-age tech clubs, but does make getting involved in it challenging.
