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The end of the juiced ball era?
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Post by James Dunne on Sept 3, 2019 10:55:12 GMT -5
Remember how stupid baseball was in Lancaster? The entire PCL had a higher SLG than Lancaster this year, and this was the year in which the PCL lost Colorado Springs.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Sept 3, 2019 12:07:25 GMT -5
Reno, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, El Paso, Salt Lake City,... those are all launching pads. Add to that the rocket-propelled balls and there you have it.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 3, 2019 12:22:11 GMT -5
Remember how stupid baseball was in Lancaster? The entire PCL had a higher SLG than Lancaster this year, and this was the year in which the PCL lost Colorado Springs. Where does screwing up the player development pipeline for half the league fit into Rob Manfred's brilliant conspiracy to make baseball more popular by ruining it?
Everyone loves conspiracy theories, but this is so obviously just poor stewardship of the game. Major League Baseball doesn't have adequate control of it's equipment, and they're the last ones to figure that out and/or care about it.
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Post by jimed14 on Sept 3, 2019 12:26:03 GMT -5
Remember how stupid baseball was in Lancaster? The entire PCL had a higher SLG than Lancaster this year, and this was the year in which the PCL lost Colorado Springs. Where does screwing up the player development pipeline for half the league fit into Rob Manfred's brilliant conspiracy to make baseball more popular by ruining it?
Everyone loves conspiracy theories, but this is so obviously just poor stewardship of the game. Major League Baseball doesn't have adequate control of it's equipment, and they're the last ones to figure that out and/or care about it. That MLB bought Rawlings right before the ball became juiced beyond belief does not stir any thoughts of conspiracy to you? Saying the word conspiracy doesn't make it untrue. Jeffery Epstein being a billionaire pedophile was a conspiracy theory a few years ago. Is it really that hard to believe that they wouldn't be playing dumb and doing nothing about the ball if home runs were down 50%?
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 3, 2019 13:05:18 GMT -5
Where does screwing up the player development pipeline for half the league fit into Rob Manfred's brilliant conspiracy to make baseball more popular by ruining it?
Everyone loves conspiracy theories, but this is so obviously just poor stewardship of the game. Major League Baseball doesn't have adequate control of it's equipment, and they're the last ones to figure that out and/or care about it. That MLB bought Rawlings right before the ball became juiced beyond belief does not stir any thoughts of conspiracy to you? Saying the word conspiracy doesn't make it untrue. Jeffery Epstein being a billionaire pedophile was a conspiracy theory a few years ago. Is it really that hard to believe that they wouldn't be playing dumb and doing nothing about the ball if home runs were down 50%? "You can't prove it's not true" is the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to proving that something is true.
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Post by James Dunne on Sept 3, 2019 13:25:46 GMT -5
If it was a conspiracy instead of incompetence, why roll the ball out in Triple-A to tell on themselves? Are they trying to cover up a conspiracy with strangely unclear intentions by pretending to be morons?
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Post by jimed14 on Sept 3, 2019 13:44:43 GMT -5
If it was a conspiracy instead of incompetence, why roll the ball out in Triple-A to tell on themselves? Are they trying to cover up a conspiracy with strangely unclear intentions by pretending to be morons? The only question is whether it's intentional, not that it's happening. It's clearly happening. It clearly started immediately after Manfred was hired and Rawlings was purchased by MLB. To say it's a conspiracy that it's intentional is ignoring the most severe circumstantial evidence that is possible to ignore. And we're not in a court of a law. I don't think MLB gives a damn who complains about it or is even trying to hide it.
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Post by jimed14 on Sept 3, 2019 13:46:42 GMT -5
That MLB bought Rawlings right before the ball became juiced beyond belief does not stir any thoughts of conspiracy to you? Saying the word conspiracy doesn't make it untrue. Jeffery Epstein being a billionaire pedophile was a conspiracy theory a few years ago. Is it really that hard to believe that they wouldn't be playing dumb and doing nothing about the ball if home runs were down 50%? "You can't prove it's not true" is the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to proving that something is true. It's just as ridiculous as saying that everything that gets labeled a conspiracy is false because conspiracy theory is a dirty phrase invented by the CIA after JFK was assassinated to discredit everything but the government's official story.
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Post by jimed14 on Sept 3, 2019 13:52:46 GMT -5
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cdj
Veteran
Posts: 13,873
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Post by cdj on Sept 3, 2019 14:16:10 GMT -5
I think it’s pretty obvious what they’ve done and I don’t think they care that people know. 2 decades ago they saw that dingers put asses in the seats. They’re trying to recreate that as the average viewing age increases and popularity decreases
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 3, 2019 14:28:07 GMT -5
"You can't prove it's not true" is the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to proving that something is true. It's just as ridiculous as saying that everything that gets labeled a conspiracy is false because conspiracy theory is a dirty phrase invented by the CIA after JFK was assassinated to discredit everything but the government's official story. Ah, ok.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Sept 3, 2019 14:49:48 GMT -5
My own opinion is that the sort of testing you'd need to do - hundreds, perhaps thousands of batted balls in a semi-naturai setting - just isn't part of the equation. The physics of a flying object with a complex composite construction isn't simple at all. Changing just a few of the variables could lead to exactly the sort of SNAFU we've been witnessing. No doubt MLB thought it a great idea to take hold of the process themselves for whatever reason, likely with at least some financial return in mind. I think the owners have been hit upside their collective heads with the 2-by-4 of unintended consequences. The whole episode transcends foolish and marches right into stupid territory.
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Post by pedrofanforever45 on Sept 26, 2019 2:03:45 GMT -5
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 26, 2019 7:28:28 GMT -5
War is peace, slavery is freedom, and Manfred definitely hasn't been playing dumb about changes to the ball that everyone could see for the past three and a half seasons.
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Post by sarasoxer on Sept 26, 2019 8:21:03 GMT -5
I'm from a different era eating hot dogs, drinking Coke and believing in the holiness of mom's apple pie, and that may have implanted a naivete, but I don't see a conspiracy behind every bush. The ball will be corrected next year for the good of the game as we've come to know it and as the stewards well know. Too many homers make a cheap pinball mockery and will contribute to declining, not increasing, attendance.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 26, 2019 9:00:44 GMT -5
I'm from a different era eating hot dogs, drinking Coke and believing in the holiness of mom's apple pie, and that may have implanted a naivete, but I don't see a conspiracy behind every bush. The ball will be corrected next year for the good of the game as we've come to know it and as the stewards well know. Too many homers make a cheap pinball mockery and will contribute to declining, not increasing, attendance. 1. I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's a league that's done a lousy job maintaining the consistency of its equipment, has consistently lied to us about it, and has not even felt it necessary to come up with convincing lies. 2. Without the bouncy funball, run scoring is going to collapse. Just because the ball doesn't fly as well doesn't mean that we're going to revert back to 1980s strikeout rates. You want those, you're going to have to bring back 1980s pitchers as well. Hitters have gone to an all-or-nothing strategy because you can't chain singles against modern pitching. Too much velo, too many exploding breaking balls. If you take the air out of the ball, you're going to have to do something like shrinking the zone or moving the mound, because otherwise you're going to be left with a home run derby that's lacking in home runs.
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Post by James Dunne on Sept 26, 2019 9:11:52 GMT -5
I do think a pitch clock will help slide that back quite a bit. Pitchers are able to throw harder now because they take a longer rest between every pitch, allowing them to ramp up. This seems particularly true of relievers, who are so reliant on velocity. Having to work faster is going to make them have to pace themselves differently. Beyond that I think you'll have to tackle that problem when you get to it. The three-batter minimum is going to make a difference as well. With the 2014 ball, homers aren't going to return all the way back down to '80's levels either. It's never going to be that game again, and that's fine, but it feels particularly out of balance right now.
Like, you're not going to run out a squad like the 1992 Red Sox again, with no-hit/good field types like Luis Rivera and Tony Pena (exacerbated by bad years from Wade Boggs and Jody Reed and Mike Greenwell) that slugs .347 as a team. Like, the 1988 Padres had 106 sacrifice bunts! 62 of them were by non-pitchers! In 1989 Tony Gwynn won a batting title and had 11 sacrifice bunts. Can you imagine Jose Altuve sacrifice bunting ELEVEN times in the modern game?
EDIT: Decided to go down the rabbit hole: The San Diego Padres lost the NL West by three games and went 3-7 in games which Tony Gwynn had a sacrifice bunt. He had two in a 2-1 13-inning loss to the Reds on the day they were eliminated. I don't like homerball, but that would drive me much more crazy.
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Post by ancientsoxfogey on Sept 26, 2019 9:15:14 GMT -5
The interesting thing is that we aren't having any notably freakish individual home run years, like we did in the juiced-body era. We just got our first 50 home run player in the past week, and we're probably going to have only one more. It isn't that the best HR hitters are back in the stratosphere hitting home runs. It's that everyone and his cousin is hitting 30, and everyone, his cousin, his blind uncle and his dead grandmother is hitting 20.
Which sort of supports fenway's contention that everybody is going all or nothing to counteract more dominant pitching, and the juiced ball is enough so that lots of guys can hit more than the occasional HR.
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Post by sarasoxer on Sept 26, 2019 9:18:31 GMT -5
To Fenway's post above that I should have copied...
Oh heck I'm not thinking that strikeouts will recede to the 1980s level. Chicks dig the long ball and long balls mean more player money. Pitchers are bigger, stronger, faster. Some combination of factors will result in huge strikeout numbers. We are encroaching on an all or nothing game tho...a bit like little league.
I don't know that baseball lied about the ball tho. I think that it was at a loss as well and circled the wagons when attacks came.
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Post by James Dunne on Sept 26, 2019 9:21:04 GMT -5
If you change the equipment instead of the players, doesn't it logically hold that the changes would be spread out across the more? As opposed to the (ambiguous) advantages of steroids, which would, it seems, be localized?
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Sept 26, 2019 9:25:50 GMT -5
I'm from a different era eating hot dogs, drinking Coke and believing in the holiness of mom's apple pie, and that may have implanted a naivete, but I don't see a conspiracy behind every bush. The ball will be corrected next year for the good of the game as we've come to know it and as the stewards well know. Too many homers make a cheap pinball mockery and will contribute to declining, not increasing, attendance. 1. I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's a league that's done a lousy job maintaining the consistency of its equipment, has consistently lied to us about it, and has not even felt it necessary to come up with convincing lies. 2. Without the bouncy funball, run scoring is going to collapse. Just because the ball doesn't fly as well doesn't mean that we're going to revert back to 1980s strikeout rates. You want those, you're going to have to bring back 1980s pitchers as well. Hitters have gone to an all-or-nothing strategy because you can't chain singles against modern pitching. Too much velo, too many exploding breaking balls. If you take the air out of the ball, you're going to have to do something like shrinking the zone or moving the mound, because otherwise you're going to be left with a home run derby that's lacking in home runs. Problem with a smaller strike zone would mean even more walks. Instead of a HR derby we might get a walk-a-thon instead. And I don't know that I'm in total agreement with the impossibility of having to string hits together to manufacture runs. I think eventually contact hitters might gain in value. Right now hitters are coming up through the minors thinking that they have to be HR or nothing. You don't want a .220 hitting league where if you don't hit a HR you can't score. Eventually it could revert back a little bit to the old fashioned contact hitters, guys selling out power to make better contact, as a way to combat high strikeout rates. Speed and bunts could creep back into the game - actual baseball, instead of the three true outcomes as the only way to maximize offense. I would suppose that could take awhile though, as it might be the next generation of players, where the hit tool is truly valued above all others. Frankly I hated the way the Sox' offense functioned this year versus last season. I liked that the Sox had more contributors this year rather than the top heavy situation they had last year, but beyond the annoying lack of clutch hits this season, I missed that the Red Sox had more than one way to score last year. This year it was basically HR or nothing as a method of scoring, which it was for most teams. Last year's team ran the bases aggressively and toward the mid to second half of the year, smartly. They stole bases. They used singles to score runners from 2b or 3b with 2 outs rather than hoping to launch one and strike out. They hit the sacrifice flies and got the ground out to score runners from 3b with less than 2 outs.
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Post by jimed14 on Sept 26, 2019 10:56:27 GMT -5
If the ball changes, offense wouldn't collapse forever. It would just alter the game and strategies over time. The launch angle revolution would end, defense would become important again. Ground ball pitchers would return. Maybe the counteraction would be umpires stop calling the high strikes. Back in the 80s, anything above the waist was a ball.
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Post by jimed14 on Sept 26, 2019 11:36:48 GMT -5
I'm from a different era eating hot dogs, drinking Coke and believing in the holiness of mom's apple pie, and that may have implanted a naivete, but I don't see a conspiracy behind every bush. The ball will be corrected next year for the good of the game as we've come to know it and as the stewards well know. Too many homers make a cheap pinball mockery and will contribute to declining, not increasing, attendance. 1. I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's a league that's done a lousy job maintaining the consistency of its equipment, has consistently lied to us about it, and has not even felt it necessary to come up with convincing lies. Why do you think the ball is not consistently juiced? Because of all of the evidence showing that it is? Home runs increased 57% in AAA in one year just switching to the MLB ball. If it were an issue of consistency, home runs would increase and fall, not just increase into the stratosphere without ever falling. What the league is lying about is that it's not an issue of consistency. It's an issue of MLB juicing the ball way too much and they now have to step it back.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 26, 2019 11:43:42 GMT -5
The interesting thing is that we aren't having any notably freakish individual home run years, like we did in the juiced-body era. We just got our first 50 home run player in the past week, and we're probably going to have only one more. It isn't that the best HR hitters are back in the stratosphere hitting home runs. It's that everyone and his cousin is hitting 30, and everyone, his cousin, his blind uncle and his dead grandmother is hitting 20. Which sort of supports fenway's contention that everybody is going all or nothing to counteract more dominant pitching, and the juiced ball is enough so that lots of guys can hit more than the occasional HR. This came up before and without rehashing my whole post, I went back and looked at all the pitchers that Bonds hit home runs off in 2001... and I came to the conclusion that Mike Trout would hit about 85 off those clowns. It's astounding how much of the league's pitching used to be guys who had blown out their arms six years prior and hung around forever as junkballing back end guys. I get the theory that you saw more deviance from the mean by certain players back then because some guys were using and some weren't, but... that's obviously still the case now, right?
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Post by incandenza on Sept 26, 2019 16:55:28 GMT -5
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