Absolutely correct. Same with the 'Stros scandal. If teams suspected something was going on (and they did) than change the signs every inning (or however often you have to). Teams have been doing this for YEARS in baseball. As much as people might hate it it's part of the game and always will be.
I feel a little bad for Cabrera and think Kruk and the commentator’s comments are in bad taste. You can tell he didn’t mean to hit either player. Mistakes happen. I totally get why Girardi is mad at the warnings but I think the unps made the right decision. No reason to get in a bean ball off when it’s clearly a mistake. The game was tied and the pitcher lost a few pitches. It’s a dangerous game, everyone know that. No need to berate him or call for his demotion, it could happen to any major leaguer. Just move on.
Schildt said after the game that Cabrera was shook up after he hit Harper, and he would have pulled him from the game...but he had to leave him in to face 3 batters.
Maybe, but pitcher rotation is definitely a weird thing to witness as someone who's never watched baseball before.
In most sports, you have your main starting guys who come to play every game, with baseball pitching that's obviously different, it's not like Altuve who you see every game, your best pitcher only plays a fraction of the games I'm sure it's a duh thing to you, but to me it's odd.
The human body is really not meant to do what baseball pitchers do, our shoulder and elbow joints are actually meant to function like softball pitchers, throwing underhand. They have to have rest or they'd just break down.
100%, it looks absolutely grueling. But if you had less games, more gaps in between games, could have a higher percentage of high-quality pitchers.
That's what the postseason is for. Also, there's a ton of randomness and variance in baseball, no matter if you're playing twice a week or twice a day, that's what the long season filters out. It's taken 100+ years, but they've pretty much figured out from HS on up how often a guy should pitch, and how much. It's a game of repetition and routine, moreso than any other team sport (but it's really an individual sport in a team construct), and the more, say, a batter sits, the worse off he is. Also again...good luck getting anyone - owners/players/fans - to agree to any sort of substantial reduction in games.
I'm just talking out my ass man I have no right to critique a sport I don't watch lol I have a thing with fetishizing efficiency, I think the NBA should only be 58 games
Don't apologize. Others will hopefully chime in as well, I'd be curious to know various opinions. There's been talk of shortening the season back to 154 games or so, btw. I just hope they go back to the pre-covid postseason format. I do love that the NBA has now discovered the concept of managing their loads.
It’s a really fun debate. I like the longer season because it forces a team approach. Attrition wears down every team, limiting the ability of a team to sign or draft a few superstars and ride them through to a championship. There is a strong premium on building out a full team, running a good minor league system, having a supportive clubhouse where everyone is “ready to go,” etc. And in a sport with such low and clustered success percentages - a really good batter gets on base 4 out of 10 times and a really bad one 3 out of 10, and the best team ever by record won 70% of the time vs 88% in basketball or 100% in football - you really do have to play a lot of games to ensure the best team wins the regular season at least. It’s the equivalent to a long, slow poker cash game vs a tourney with rapidly increasing blinds. The latter is more fun and efficient to get to A winner, but the best player isn’t likely to win. (MLB playoffs are the tournament style, and the blind structure has gone up rapidly in recent years!) The long season also makes the sport a more relaxing follow. No game matters all that much, so the drama is still dramatic but not all encompassing. In a game of inches with so much luck sprinkled in, that is important ... I can barely stand to watch the postseason given the stress on every pitch. If the regular season were like that too, I’d have a heart attack. It’s also just a beautiful background to summer. Almost every day there is a game to watch if you want, listen to in the background if you want, or just check in afterwards to see who won or how Tucker got robbed this time. It’s a familiar and comforting rhythm. but your point is still fair if you prefer quicker outcomes or to see the very best players every game. That’s how the playoffs work, so you can just check in there ... the good news is the Astros will almost certainly still be playing!
A baseball fan could also ask you why can't an NBA team play everyday, with one or two off days every 2 weeks? You are correct. The NBA is too long. It doesn't take 82 games to figure out who the best of the best is. They literally came up with 82 games based on simply having 12 teams, 6 in each conference, and they play their conference opponents 8 times and their non-conference ones 7 times. That was it... nothing to do with TV, competing with football/baseball, arena availability, etc. Meanwhile, baseball has to be long. Too much variance. We've all seen what can happen in a short series. And as you've noted, all teams can't use the same pitchers everyday. They also can play that many games because other than the pitcher, these guys CAN play everyday. Unlike football/basketball.
I like the long season with a lot of games. Keeps ticket prices down, ensures there’s a game to watch almost every night, and reduces the influence of luck on the outcome of the season as a whole. But I do understand why a new observer would find it odd or off putting that the best pitchers only play every 5 games. I have wondered for years why the game didn’t evolve differently to having pitchers throw less innings but more frequently. I assume Buck is right, that the people making those decisions figured out that 150 innings over 25 appearances is more ideal than 150 innings over 80 appearances. Although it would not shock me if 10 years from now most teams had 3-man starting rotations with a cap of 60 pitches or 1 time through the lineup for each pitcher.
The pitcher pool is deeper now. Teams now have the option of using 4-5 guys to pitch the last 4-5 innings that might be better than the starter third time through the order. In the past, teams did not have 4-5 guys in the bullpen that would be better than the starter third time through the order. The 5-man rotation was developed because it got the 5 best pitchers enough rest that it wasn't worth pitching a drastically worst 6th starter back then to get another day of rest for the better pitchers. After decades of following what was best decades ago, teams are evaluating if that is still the best thing to do. It is hard to change as pitchers are conditioned to how things were. Pitching 100 pitches is damaging to an arm, and requires rest. Teams have this figured out for starters. Reliever future performance is often unpredictable. I suspect this is because teams still don't have a good idea of how to determine when an arm needs rest for sporadic use. Basically, the guys with genetically resilient arms that have luck survive relief. Others, falter. Bryan Abreu appears to be the guy this year who's arm is being offered up to the baseball gods by the Astros.
If I were in a baseball front office I would want to know how many pitches a player can throw every other game without increasing injury risk. That’s one aspect that is surprising to me, that they haven’t tested it in the minors to the point of having a pretty set limit of pitches for the various intervals. Just seems like havin that predictability would have a lot of value.
