[HN Gopher] MLB says Yankees' new "torpedo bats" are legal and l...
___________________________________________________________________
MLB says Yankees' new "torpedo bats" are legal and likely coming
Author : cf100clunk
Score : 171 points
Date : 2025-03-31 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thelibertyline.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thelibertyline.com)
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Good. Baseball isn't a serious spectator sport. It's only
| interesting to statisticians. Now there will be more work for
| them to do, adjusting for bat type in addition to stadium
| dimensions, rule changes, etc. to compare players across eras.
| And more HRs might make it a little more interesting to
| spectators as long as the OBP doesn't increase to prolong an
| already too long game.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| The statistical record might require a whole new set of
| asterisks for Torpedo-using batters.
| d35007 wrote:
| > Good. Baseball isn't a serious spectator sport. It's only
| interesting to statisticians
|
| What makes a spectator sport "serious"?
|
| The average MLB game had almost 30,000 spectators in the 2024
| season[1]. That's a lot of statisticians.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2024/10/01/mlb-
| atten...
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| You can put a basketball game on anywhere in the world, and
| people will watch it, even if they haven't watched basketball
| before. People only watch baseball out of tradition. MLB
| didn't even have a play clock until 2023, letting batters
| step out of the box at whim and create even longer periods
| with no action.
| paulcole wrote:
| > You can put a basketball game on anywhere in the world,
| and people will watch it, even if they haven't watched
| basketball before
|
| What the heck is this confident assertion based on?
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| From showing basketball to people who haven't watched a
| basketball game before.
| paulcole wrote:
| Just checkin'
| parineum wrote:
| But what if I have watched basketball and I don't watch
| it. Basketball is a boring game until there's 5 minutes
| left.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Uhh basketball has plenty of issues, like 6 timeouts in
| the last two minutes, way to many 3s, traveling
| everywhere that make it hard to watch.
| 98codes wrote:
| Source: Trust me bro
| abfan1127 wrote:
| baseball is a very complex game. That's what makes it so great
| to spectate. The footwork, the defensive organization, the
| dynamics between pitchers and hitters. Its expansive. There's
| so much to learn about, there's so many opportunities for
| unique play.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Baseball is a different spectator sport. You don't have to pay
| attention to it 90% of the time. If you're looking for a game
| to pay attention to constantly, then yeah baseball's not ideal.
| But if you're looking for a game to put on in the background,
| or go to a ballpark and have a picnic, then baseball's the
| perfect sport. Also, regarding your last sentence, the new
| pitch clock rules in 2023 have helped a lot, bringing average
| game time from ~3 hours to ~2.5 hours, which seems like a small
| difference but has helped a surprising amount
| vessenes wrote:
| I like to say that baseball goes perfectly with radio: it can
| be enjoyed as a low bitrate entertainment.
|
| That said there's actually a fair amount going on during any
| one play; who's warming up in the pen? Where are fielders
| shifting to? What's the lead off look like? television and
| radio both edit most of this out to focus on the pitcher or
| the hitter, which I think makes baseball less interesting to
| watch or listen to than to attend. Of course you might want
| to bring some extra entertainment to the park, just in case
| nemo44x wrote:
| My favorite thread here. In essence making the case for
| baseball in that you don't have to pay attention and it's
| even better when you can't see it, only hear about it. But
| it's all true. Having a game on the radio outside with a
| group of friends having a good time not really paying it
| too much mind and then everyone alert during a moment of
| built up tension and release is what summers are all about.
| wifipunk wrote:
| Matching their franchise record for HRs in a game in only 4
| innings is wild!
| ronnier wrote:
| Note that Aaron Judge hit 3 of those home runs (including a
| grand slam) and he did not use a torpedo bat.
| blankx32 wrote:
| Also note that Judge is a machine
| daedrdev wrote:
| This 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.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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 Chisholm for almost 2
| decades to make contact at the tip of the bat instead of closer
| to their hands. But the solution turned out to be adjusting the
| bat and not the swing. Fascinating.
|
| I can sit in my office and deliberate on the location of
| buttons and indicators on the screen and come up with the
| objectively best arrangement per ISA 101 high-performance HMI
| standards, but if operators keep making messes because their
| intuition about that system is wrong, maybe I should just
| change the way the machine operates to match.
| szvsw wrote:
| The biomechanics involved are insane. You are hitting a
| baseball-sized object (ha) moving at 90+ mph with massive
| break, often very late and over two axes, with something a
| couple of inches in diameter, and need to make decisions and
| react and adjust your swing path in a handful of
| milliseconds. And that's just to make contact, let alone good
| contact, let alone contact that can find a patch of grass.
|
| It's the single hardest skill in competitive team sports in
| my opinion.
|
| > Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is?
| It's 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay?
| There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks. That
| means if you get just one extra flare a week - just one - a
| gorp... you get a groundball, you get a groundball with
| eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a
| week... and you're in Yankee Stadium.
|
| (Crash Davis)
| daedrdev wrote:
| Basically, these guys have such fine tuned biomechanics for
| hitting a baseball with just a few hundred milliseconds to
| decide wether to swing and where to swing, that trying to
| change their approach to hit further down the bat might ruin
| their hitting if they mess up. Far easier to shift the sweet
| spot.
|
| Its not that they just need to get closer to the ball, their
| estimation if where a ball will strike their bat is slightly
| off.
| anonymars wrote:
| I wish I could find it--I think it was on the Uber
| engineering blog--but I remember reading a post in which they
| talked about choosing a less "optimal"/"efficient"
| implementation in order to better cater to the available
| hiring pool: it's cheaper and easier to throw more money at
| hardware, than conjure up the necessary engineering talent
|
| That resonated with me as I turned back around and gazed at
| the elegant, efficient, and inscrutable-and-difficult-to-
| debug Reactive-Extensions-based backend I was working on.
| Maybe Task<List<T>> would have been "better" after all
| jjmarr wrote:
| It makes more sense if you consider the baseball player as a
| multimillion-dollar factory that cannot be brought down for
| maintenance.
| elgenie wrote:
| 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.
| dagw wrote:
| _By moving the sweet spot to where they are hitting the ball,
| they might gain some power_
|
| Could we end up with custom bats for each player designed
| around where they tend to hit the ball?
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Why not? I'd assume similar things are already done in other
| sports like tennis, golf, hockey, ...
| basisword wrote:
| Should be easy with the analytics baseball has and could
| easily level up everyone making it fair. It would be
| interesting to see how they judge younger players though as
| they come through and inevitably can't afford custom bats (or
| can't afford new ones every time they adjust their mechanics)
| or don't have the analytics to make them valuable.
| daedrdev wrote:
| guys already pick bats based on their height, it seems
| entirely reasonable everyone will do this. There probably is
| an optimal point to have that sweet spot at though so most
| hitters will probably try and stick close to it.
| codexb wrote:
| I'm genuinely surprised this hasn't been done before now.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The granny free throw and the belly putter are both better
| tools, but they are uncool. We can add the torpedo bat to that
| list.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Belly putting is anchoring to belly? That's not legal.
| soared wrote:
| It was legal, until bad putters became very good at
| putting!
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| TIL. The new version of this is the "armlock putter" where
| you anchor to your arm instead of to your belly.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Ya, it's one of those simple design improvements that seem
| obvious once you see it, but clearly wasn't obvious because it
| took so long for someone to think of it.
| Larrikin wrote:
| He never said why it's bad, just that players he thinks suck
| should continue to suck and he doesn't like that they don't suck
| anymore.
|
| He briefly alluded to a valid point but went no where with it
| about how it may affect little league and college with less
| money, but that is completely separate from MLB teams using
| millions of dollars for custom bats.
| basisword wrote:
| >> He never said why it's bad, just that players he thinks suck
| should continue to suck and he doesn't like that they don't
| suck anymore.
|
| Bad players should continue to suck unless they put in the
| effort to be better. If you're a batter and can't hit the ball
| with the right part of the bat (especially experienced guys
| like Chilsolm) you're simply bad at your job. This is like
| getting a crappy NBA player and putting some Flubber on his
| shoes[1]. In all sport the tools are going to push performance
| a certain amount of but this feels beyond the limit for me.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119137/
| pests wrote:
| > If you're a batter and can't hit the ball with the right
| part of the bat
|
| But that is what they are doing? The bat is within size and
| volume limits. Many bats come in slightly odd shapes or
| weight distributions. Is it because this is "optimized" that
| it's bad?
| basisword wrote:
| It feels like one of those things where even though it's
| within the limits of the rules, it just shows they need to
| tighten the rules. The end result is everyone having their
| own customised bat and it's just a big waste of time.
| Better to tighten up the rules. If I had my way there would
| be one legal bat that everyone had to use. Sport should be
| about the athlete, not the tool.
| percentcer wrote:
| Should everyone wear the same size shoes?
| daedrdev wrote:
| I thought little league and college use metal bats since they
| are cheaper so there won't be any effect.
| recursive wrote:
| Oh no! Baseball might get slightly interesting! Quick! Ban the
| heretics!
| vessenes wrote:
| Adding yet another thing for neurodivergent fans of baseball to
| argue over is fun! That said, some of this must be statistical
| anomaly. Let's give it at least a few hundred at-bats per player
| using it.
|
| If you look at an exhibit of bats over time, you will see that
| size, weight, width and shape have all varied quite a bit between
| players even if on the same team and era, and this makes me
| skeptical that some new shape is really going to invalidate every
| baseball stadium's length and field overnight. If it does, MLB
| _will_ outlaw it. See aluminum bats for example.
|
| I'm not saying MIT physicists can't help hitters with going deep,
| I bet they can. But given the tools at their disposal - bat shape
| in this case - I'm skeptical that they are going to create a new
| era of hitting for all. I guess we'll see soon.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| > Let's give it at least a few hundred at-bats per player using
| it.
|
| Indeed, and lets also test against other ''new'' bat designs
| and materials i.e. graphene, carbon fibre, etc. so that we can
| hopefully ban them pre-emptively if they show improvements that
| are statistically above the latest trends in human effort and
| talent.
| krustyburger wrote:
| Contrary to the implication of the comment you're replying
| to, MLB has always mandated bats be made of solid wood.
| Aluminum bats have never been allowed and have never been
| used. Bats made of other materials like the ones you mention
| would also not be allowed. This new "torpedo" bat is made of
| solid wood, just in a new shape.
| vessenes wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. https://www.reddit.com/r/base
| ball/comments/1freiuv/recalling... this April fool's video
| will give fun nostalgia. I guess the most accurate thing to
| say is that MLB at least thought about it for a second,
| long enough to get Jose Canseco to pretend it was
| happening.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| If only the Yankees get access to it (e.g. they patented it and
| won't let other teams use it) then I could see it as an unfair
| advantage. In most other areas of America life, though, this
| innovation would be allowed or even celebrated.
|
| I imagine it will go the way of the brilliant strategic
| innovation a few years back of shifting defenders heavily
| depending on the batter's statistical hitting patterns. It'll get
| banned because it makes the game more boring. If home runs happen
| all the time, they lose their excitement. I imagine it's quite
| expensive or impossible to shift the outfield walls back farther
| in most MLB stadiums.
|
| I actually would love more of a no holds barred evolutionary
| battle in the MLB [1] but I know it's not gonna happen.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/gTmLz9B8wls
| fishpen0 wrote:
| This has the potential to multiply the issues with Fenway and
| other older fields dramatically.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > If home runs happen all the time, they lose their excitement.
|
| TV ratings show otherwise - in every instance so far, HRs put
| butts in seats, and defense makes people change the channel. TV
| and ballpark analytics show this to be true. The common thought
| is that's why the league ignored abuse during the steroid era
| so much.
|
| edit - This is also the driving force behind multiple 'juiced
| ball' conspiracy theories.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Title of the url says it all: https://old.reddit.com/r/baseba
| ll/comments/1e5mwbs/mlb_home_...
|
| It's not about watching home runs; it's mostly about watching
| a competitive game.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| For sure, that makes a lot of intuitive sense. I was thinking
| that there's a sweet spot with HRs. If it gets too common
| then it may be less of a dopamine hit. Kinda like how the
| randomness of slot machines is fine-tuned to maximize
| addictive potential.
|
| However, one could argue the same thing about Curry and 3
| pointers. My original argument suggests that seeing someone
| makes loads more 3 pointers would be boring. Yet it was very
| exciting to see him smash through previously unthinkable
| records. On the other hand, that was not driven by
| technological change...
| philwelch wrote:
| 3 pointers are actually the opposite problem; they turn out
| to be more efficient but they make the game a lot more
| boring to watch.
| bsder wrote:
| > they make the game a lot more boring to watch.
|
| I disagree. Go watch some of the old games before 3
| pointers. Teams would pack the defense into the key and
| the game would get really boring. It was also _brutal_
| --driving to the bucket on a packed defense like that
| would get you mugged.
|
| 3 pointers force defenses to move outward. Illegal
| defense penalties also helped.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I disagree, and I've been watching basketball for 40
| years. Basketball with positions was more fun to watch
| and objectively more popular amongst the viewing audience
| than this current dreck with positionless basketball and
| basically no travelling rules. Defenders are afraid to
| play defense and offensive players can just step back
| without a dribble to create separation. It's a terrible,
| boring product to watch because it's reduced the best
| athletes on the planet to standing around waiting for an
| open look at a 3. They don't need to get rid of 3s, but
| they need to modify what they are for. They're supposed
| to be a bonus shot, not the fundamental aspect of
| offenses. Eliminating the mid range is bad for the sport.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| While home runs are exciting, there are limits to that. For
| several years the MLB has been dealing with "three true
| outcomes", where a large percentage of at bats end in either
| a strikeout, walk, or home run.
|
| While this can be exciting for individual at bats, it becomes
| pretty boring if it's too common. This is because it
| invalidates every role except the pitcher and batter, and
| removes a lot of strategy from the game. While this may be
| fine if you only watch the occasional game, it can get really
| dull if you watch a lot of games every season.
|
| Home runs are a lot of fun! One of the things that makes
| baseball exciting is that every pitch has the potential to
| result in a home run. This adds a lot of tension to the game,
| and helps keep things engaging. But when home runs become too
| prevalent, it eliminates other fun aspects of baseball, and
| makes the game one dimensional and dull.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I believe the opposite to that era is the "Dead-ball era"
| over a hundred years ago.
|
| > During the dead-ball era, baseball was much more of a
| strategy-driven game, using a style of play now known as
| small ball or inside baseball. It relied much more on plays
| such as stolen bases and hit-and-run than on home runs.
|
| This was likely caused by reusing baseballs more, so it
| should be easy to recreate,
|
| > Before 1921, it was common for a baseball to be in play
| for over 100 pitches. Players used the same ball until it
| started to unravel. Early baseball leagues were very cost-
| conscious, so fans had to throw back balls that had been
| hit into the stands. The longer the ball was in play, the
| softer it became--and hitting a heavily used, softer ball
| for distance is much more difficult than hitting a new,
| harder one. The ball was also softer to begin with, making
| home runs less likely.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead-ball_era
| meroes wrote:
| I don't quite get what the difference is between now and
| when Sosa, Bonds, and McGuire were hitting homers, where
| apparently homers are monotonous. Are we pretending that
| wasn't peak baseball? I mean I find the whole infield
| outside of maybe a triple play more boring than all or
| nothing home run, intentional walk, and strikeout. There
| are no grand slams without base hits true, but without the
| home runs base hits are boring.
| duderific wrote:
| Close plays on the base paths are pretty exciting.
|
| > I mean I find the whole infield outside of maybe a
| triple play more boring than all or nothing home run,
| intentional walk, and strikeout.
|
| The problem is that the strikeout or walk is much more
| common than the home run.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| ... On reflection, reading this thread, I think this may
| be yet more of the "baseball is a radio sport" thing,
| which is also why it dominated before TV, when football
| started to take over.
|
| Descriptions of close plays are fun. Homers are flashy to
| watch and easy to understand. The latter may catch more
| casual-viewer eyeballs.
| barkerja wrote:
| Yes, because home runs still are not that regular of an
| occurrence. So they're still "special".
|
| But if they become a lot more commonplace, then the allure
| will depreciate over time.
| toast0 wrote:
| Or we could just let the robots play
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqB6rY94DCw&t=55s (and football
| too) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=818agkUTpqM&t=69s
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| If only the Yankees get access to this, the rest of the league
| will simply vote to outlaw it.
|
| You see something similar going on in football, right now, with
| a play known as the "tush push". It's not a particularly
| complex play, but for some reason the Philadelphia Eagles can
| pull it off astoundingly better than anyone else in the league.
| In response, several teams are petitioning rules to outlaw it.
| All it takes is enough teams to vote for banning this play and
| it's gone.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The have the rule where the team defending the field goal is
| not allowed to act like a "locomotive" to push thru and try
| to block the kick, which would almost certainly work because
| the edge blockers cannot just defend come inside to defend
| it.
|
| The tush push shouldn't be allowed because is almost
| impossible to defend, sort of an automatic 1 yarder once you
| get there. The snapping team always have advantage because
| they know the start timing and the defense always has to
| react a split second later.
| paleotrope wrote:
| In both cases why not?
|
| 1. Make the kicker kick from farther out in that case.
| Pretty simple change.
|
| 2. 1 yard is kind of nothing in this league now when the
| referees have so much leeway to change yardage. They get
| the spot wrong ALL the damn time now. So what if it's
| automatic for some teams. And so what if the offense has
| the advantage there. That's sport. Same thing in soccer on
| penalty kicks, the kicker has the advantage there knowing
| where he's going to kick.
| graywh wrote:
| the rule for FG/XP attempts is for the safety of the long
| snapper, not the kicker
| paleotrope wrote:
| Right, but if the kicker needs to move further back in
| response, the tactic doesn't work anymore so the snapper
| is safe as well.
| sbelskie wrote:
| Is almost impossible to defend when done by a particular
| team. No other team has managed the kind of sustained
| success with it that the Eagles have. If it was impossible
| to defend surely other teams would be using it too.
|
| Tom Brady also had similar success with the standard old QB
| sneak during his career and I don't recall attempts to ban
| that.
| adzm wrote:
| > the "tush push". It's not a particularly complex play, but
| for some reason the Philadelphia Eagles can pull it off
| astoundingly better than anyone else in the league
|
| I looked this up and am still unclear why only the Eagles
| seem to be able to perform this maneuver effectively, other
| than having an exceptionally strong person at the front?
| rhcom2 wrote:
| Three massive offensive linemen plus a very strong QB.
| 16bytes wrote:
| It's strength, size and technique of multiple people
| working together.
|
| You'd think it'd be easy to watch game footage and just
| replicate what the Eagles do, but other teams haven't been
| able to get the formula right.
|
| This is the reason that banning it is controversial. Why
| make it illegal when most teams can't make work well?
| trillic wrote:
| Their quarterback squatting 600 lbs doesn't hurts.
| 3vidence wrote:
| Also helps he is not exceptionally tall to keep a lower
| center of gravity.
|
| Josh Allen on the bills also tries this and is very
| strong but it's harder for him to get as low.
| basisword wrote:
| They've recruited the players necessary to pull it off
| effectively. That's not a simple thing to remedy for other
| teams.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Contrary to popular belief, it requires a fair bit of
| practice to get right, which is why you see hater GMs
| saying oh, yeah, it's so simple we could do it if we
| wanted, but then they try it in a game after one practice
| and it fails. The Eagles spent several years practicing it,
| so now they're that far behind.
| eszed wrote:
| They need to get some rugby coaches in to teach it.
| That's a super-basic rugby technique, which even I (as
| only a very casual rugby fan) can see most teams getting
| wrong.
| panzagl wrote:
| The Eagles did- one of their players has a rugby
| background.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| One additional wrinkle to the tush push is that it WAS
| illegal until the mid-2000s. Sort of like the 3 point line in
| basketball, it has taken many years for a team to take
| advantage of the new rule to its fullest extent.
|
| I think people generally take the perspective of "it used to
| be illegal, so it's reasonable to make it illegal again" in a
| way they don't when a team is just doing something new.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| It's like when people started to freak out about the "pitch
| clock" and how it was ruining baseball. The thing is, the
| pitch clock _always_ existed in the rulebook, it was just
| never enforced due to lack of technology and just generally
| never really being a problem.
|
| And then pitchers started taking 1 minute+ to throw a dang
| pitch and it was ruining the flow of the game. So they
| started enforcing it.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > You see something similar going on in football, right now,
| with a play known as the "tush push".
|
| As a European that just woke up from a nap, I was having a
| very hard time imagning a soccer move called "tush push" that
| was so successful it had to be outlawed...
| 16bytes wrote:
| We'll see if the analogy holds. Every team has the ability to
| use bats like this.
|
| If no other team sees an advantage from using torpedo bats,
| it would be a lot like the brotherly shove.
|
| But first we'll have to see if this is a passing fad. In
| baseball, pitchers evolve pretty quickly and usually lead the
| batter-pitcher arms race.
|
| I'm guessing it spread pretty quickly through the league and
| be used by a minority of hitters, and the advantage will
| flatten out. So a .210 hitter may hit .230. That is a big
| difference no doubt, but compare the game to when leading
| batters were hitting .330.
| zem wrote:
| how do you ban shifting defenders? i admittedly know nothing
| about baseball, but surely the team can dispatch its people
| wherever it likes within the legal zone for them to be at all.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Before the shift ban, there could be 3 players on one side of
| 2nd base. The rule now is that there have to be two fielders
| on either side on 2nd when the pitch is delivered.
| Essentially, they changed the legal zone
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| There are already other teams using these bats, and it seems
| like they will spread pretty quickly:
| https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6243085/2025/03/31/mlb-torp...
|
| I don't know why anyone would be upset about this, but baseball
| fans tend to be curmudgeons.
| perlgeek wrote:
| > If home runs happen all the time, they lose their excitement.
|
| So you're saying baseball gets more boring when people get
| better hitting the ball?
|
| Sounds like there's something fundamentally wrong with the
| sport.
| conductr wrote:
| So long as it's not a one sided advantage, the game will be
| fair and way more exciting. Even now, there's a huge
| difference in attending, and watching on TV, a game that is
| 1-0 going into the 9th inning versus a game that is 5-4 going
| into the 9th. Even though those are even matches at that
| point in the game, one of them feels painful the other has
| had some excitement. Good defense is not as exciting as
| productive offense.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| That doesn't follow at all.
|
| Imagine if, somehow, soccer players got really good at
| scoring goals from midfield, such that a very high proportion
| of goals were scored after just two touches. That's exciting
| or interesting for, like... one game, then it's worse than
| before.
|
| Are you there to watch people score goals, or to watch people
| play the game?
|
| If there's a home-run more at-bats than not, they get boring.
| You do want plenty of solid hits (but you also want strike-
| outs! And walks! And bunts! You want diversity!) but you
| don't want a lot of them to be homers.
|
| A home run is only exciting if it's uncommon, otherwise it's
| less interesting than most other things that can happen when
| the ball's hit into fair territory.
| 20wenty wrote:
| If it gives any unfair advantage at all, the Astros will figure
| out a way to use them ASAP.
|
| ([1,2] For those that don't get the snide reference to
| cheating.)
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/astros-cheating.html
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Astros_sign_stealing_s...
| fasthands9 wrote:
| Aluminum bats are better than wooden bats. You need arbitrary
| rules on technology for sporting equipment.
|
| I have no strong feelings on these bats, but there are concerns
| other than just fairness from one team to the next.
| jparishy wrote:
| 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 off subsequent swings.
|
| If the few players who are using this bat tend to hit that spot
| naturally, it makes a lot of sense to modify the bat to
| accommodate it, within the rules like they've done here. Hitting
| is super, super difficult especially today with how far we're
| pushing pitchers. Love seeing them try to innovate.
|
| Plus, reminder, most of the team isn't using it. Judge clobbered
| the ball that day with his normal bat. Brewer's pitching is
| injured, and the starter that day was a Yankee last year and the
| team is intimately familiar with his game.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| If every player ends up with a bat custom tailored to their
| swing this will get very interesting.
| papercrane wrote:
| It could get even more wild. I could imagine batters having
| custom profiles for different pitchers. E.g. one bat for when
| hitting against someone who throws 100MPH four seam
| fastballs, and another when facing someone who throws 90 MPH
| cutters.
| abirch wrote:
| I'm fine with it as long as they don't change bats in
| between pitches.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I'm picturing a caddy standing off to the side of the
| batter with a bag full of bats, sizing up the last pitch
| and say "May I suggest the pine with the conical twist
| sir?"
| maccard wrote:
| That's air golf at that point
| hnburnsy wrote:
| A caddy? How about an instant 3D printer\CNC machine?
| bluGill wrote:
| They are not fast enough and there is no reason to think
| machining ever will be.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| If you find yourself in Louisville, Kentucky, you can see
| how they make bats at the factory. At least 20 years ago,
| it was already pretty automated. They put the blanks on a
| copy lathe and turn out bats from a template.
|
| Sanding and finishing are subsequent steps.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I mean that's part of baseball as chess (or poker),
| right? The batter swaps to the fastball bat,
| communicating that they expect a fastball. The pitcher
| knows, from the coach's extensive scouting, and swaps to
| the curve. But actually, the batter knows he struggles
| with that kind of fastball and was hoping to bait the
| curveball, which he's more confident swinging against,
| and is happy to use a slightly suboptimized bat.
| 91bananas wrote:
| FWIW they already for the most part do have bats tailored to
| what they like to feel in their swings as far as where weight
| is, where the barrel begins, what shape it is, what the
| grip/knob feels like. I can't say how much data goes in to
| deciding what is used vs what they like to feel, this feels
| like more of a renaissance in attempting to use data
| somewhere else than brilliance in design.
|
| My intuition tells me this whole thing is stupid and a fad,
| sure you might get slightly more mass behind the ball on
| perfectly barreled swings, but you get so few of those on the
| year already, were they already home runs of XBH on the old
| bat? And what are we losing on mishits with the skinny end of
| barrel, since after all hitting is more than just perfect
| swings caught in the right spot. Seems like more of a push
| towards feast or famine, 3 outcome baseball, which I
| personally just ain't a fan of.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| The placebo effect is absolutely a thing. Players still get
| in trouble for corking bats even though it's been proven to
| have no effect (or a negative one) on hitting.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That would be an interesting Show HN. A camera(s) setup
| with something like OpenCV and some ML processing to
| analyze a batter's swing, find their best bat shape, then
| use some sort of automated lathe to cut their bat based on
| the findings. Lather, rinse, repeat until you've iterated
| through to the "perfect" bat for that hitter.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| It wouldn't take long to have a tight selection of bats
| for every player to try and based on each swing, the
| system can predict the best bat.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah, but that's not a very HN way of doing it though.
| Bring in the AI, then add some crypto, and the code must
| be written in Rust. If there's a UI, then Next/React must
| be used to re-write the existing HTML/CSS only version,
| because that's just not even trying. Oh, and it needs to
| be done over a weekend
| relwin wrote:
| You would increase bat speed (of your swing) by moving mass
| from the end towards your hands. Notice most regular bats
| have an "ice cream" scoop on the end, lightening it
| slightly.
| jorvi wrote:
| Every sport hits this sort of threshold where they ban
| optimization. Swimming did it with 'sharkskin' suits and long
| distance running with Nike's Alphafly and Vaporfly shoes.
|
| Maybe that's where advanced baseball bats will end up
| eventually.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| > dangerously experimental PEDs
|
| Would you be willing to be the guinea pig?
| next_xibalba wrote:
| No more than I'm willing to drive a race car 200+ mph
| (i.e. formula 1) nor step in a boxing ring and accumulate
| a bunch of micro-concussions. But I'll happily tune in
| for the many that would be willing to do it if the money
| was right.
|
| Why in the world would this have any bearing on the
| conversation? What point are you trying to make?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why would you ask someone reading HN that question?
| That's like asking a 'roided up athlete if they wanted to
| rewrite grep in Rust. Ask the athlete if they'd be
| willing to take PEDs if it would be allowed.
| triceratops wrote:
| You only need one athlete that's willing to. The others
| will have no choice after that.
|
| It's no different than asking if workers should be
| allowed to work without PPE.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If workers want to work without PPE, then let them. Just
| ensure that they sign releases acknowledging that the PPE
| was made available to them and they chose of their own
| volition to not use it, and that by doing so they release
| everyone from any liability about what happens to them
| from not using the PPE.
| triceratops wrote:
| It's a slippery slope from there to "the children yearn
| for the mines".
| munificent wrote:
| Foreman: "You want to work today, or go home and tell
| your family you're broke? No? Then sign the fucking form.
| We don't pay for PPE here."
| liamwire wrote:
| Your comments go to show either a concerning lack of
| thought towards second-order effects, or a disturbing
| lack of empathy towards your fellow humans.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If everyone else is using PPE, but you choose not to wear
| PPE, there's no empathy to be given. You may think the
| need for PPE is a hoax, but that's not anyone else's
| problem if there's a direct repercussion for your
| actions.
|
| The problem was not offered as your sibling comment as a
| forced decision. Some people choose to juice, others do
| not. That same logic applied to if you want to do it,
| here's the waiver to acknowledge it was your decision. I
| can feel sorry for someone's family for being related to
| a dunce, but no empathy is required on my part for the
| dunce.
| nine_k wrote:
| That would be a great show, but hardly a fair
| competition.
|
| The spirit of fair competition (and thus ordering teams
| according to some predefined metric) is very important to
| most sports.
| burkaman wrote:
| https://www.enhanced.com/
| zappb wrote:
| Formula 1 is supposed to be like that except without the
| drugs. It's a competition for both the racers and the
| manufacturers.
| lesuorac wrote:
| It's not though.
|
| F1 introduced a cost cap to stop the top manufactures
| from being able to test and develop everything they want
| to.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| It's never been the same without the cigarette & booze
| sponsors.
| bluGill wrote:
| Cost caps are about how you can cheat. You still develop
| and test everything you want in the lab. Those that turn
| out useful get told to the F1 team.
| dagw wrote:
| There's also a huge list of rules about things you're not
| allowed to do to make your car faster. F1 is quite far
| from simply building the fastest car, it's building the
| fastest car that adheres to this long list of 'arbitrary'
| rules and regulations.
| pinko wrote:
| Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAdG-iTilWU
| demosthanos wrote:
| The line isn't purely arbitrary, it's a reflection of the
| reality of what most people expect from sports: we want
| them to be a contest of human skill on the part of the
| athlete, not just the amount of money someone is willing
| to spend on the team. We also want underdogs to have a
| chance, which is very hard without some sort of limits.
|
| You could probably accomplish something similar by
| strictly capping spending per team to force people to do
| real engineering and optimize their play accordingly, but
| the result would be a very different sport that would
| appeal to a very different (and probably much smaller)
| audience. Formula One and Robot Wars come to mind.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| On the discussion at hand, is there reason to believe
| this new bat shape will be too expensive for other teams
| to copy?
| demosthanos wrote:
| I don't know enough to know, but my guess would be no. I
| was thinking of the swimsuit bans--my understanding is
| that the banned swimsuits are extremely expensive and
| wear out extremely quickly.
| facile3232 wrote:
| > we want them to be a contest of human skill on the part
| of the athlete, not just the amount of money someone is
| willing to spend on the team
|
| This is simply not reflected very well in how
| professional sports are structured. If this were really a
| priority teams wouldn't be privately owned. It has
| extremely negative effects on each sport, easily dwarfing
| the influence of performance enhancing drugs.
|
| Anyway, I would absolutely love to see what the human
| body is capable of. To me, hearing a ban of performance
| enhancing drugs is a guarantee of a more boring and less
| competitive game. I understand the impetus of protecting
| children, but we're already buying and selling humans.
| How good of an influence was this to begin with?
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Can you say more about the impact of private ownership? I
| don't watch sports at all, so this is news to me -- what
| are the negative effects? Is it just you get teams with
| massive funding and others with none?
| facile3232 wrote:
| Yea, and to be fair the leagues try to compensate for
| this with varying degrees of success by regulating how
| much you can spend, subsidizing poorer teams, etc.
|
| But ultimately you run into issues like the colorado
| rockies where the owner just views it like an
| entertainment venue and basically refuses to invest in
| the team in any rational way. The entire model of
| competiton-through-investment doesn't make as much sense
| once you realize you can place butts in seats without a
| competent team to root for.
|
| (And personally, i think it makes a lot of sense for the
| team to own itself, or a state to own a team, or
| something like that. I think the Green Bay Packers have a
| setup like this.)
|
| It's also not possibly to divvy players rarely--sometimes
| you run into people who are truly extraordinary, and
| exorbitant salaries can help balance this, to debatable
| efficacy.
|
| Edit: yup,
| https://www.packers.com/community/shareholders. Kind of
| an orthogonal issue to disproportionate spending of
| teams, though.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| If I'm understanding correctly, not only do you get teams
| with massive resources, but also teams treated kind of
| like clowns to entertain their owner? That really is a
| crazy situation, lol.
|
| It almost sounds like corporate ownership could help with
| this, something like shareholders owning the team, and
| then the management is obligated to do what's best for
| the shareholders (and somehow that should be to win). It
| seems like part of the problem might also be:
|
| - sports teams make money by selling tickets and
| merchandise
|
| - teams sell tickets and merchandise by being
| entertaining, which may or may not involve winning
| mjevans wrote:
| I wouldn't mind custom _diets_ (of normal food) and
| custom fabricated swim gear... provided the teams all had
| access to the same training tools before hand.
|
| Custom drugs seem like a step too far IMO. As far as the
| suits go that's to level out body shapes as an issue.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| But it wouldn't be fun. It wouldn't be a good sport to
| participate. It would just be blood entertainment for the
| viewers.
|
| Sports should be for those doing them, and then if people
| end up caring and commercial competitions end up viable,
| then that's a bonus but we shouldn't design them for
| entertainment of the audience.
|
| Customization of equipment should always be fine unless
| it increases injury risk or completely destroys the game.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Professional sports are all about entertaining the fans.
| If they can live a gladiator's life and ask "are you not
| entertained" and want to die in the lions den, then might
| as well let them.
|
| Amateur sports like colleges or olympics could continue
| to have the traditional rules to keep things
| "competitive", but might as well let the pro-sports just
| go full tilt.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| If it's really about entertainment, then it has no
| appeal. Then you end up with professional wrestling.
| Professional sports are interesting because there's
| something fundamental, something challenging where
| someone's skill can shine.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > If it's really about entertainment, then it has no
| appeal. Then you end up with professional wrestling.
|
| Do you not see the contradiction here? Professional
| wrestling is huge. It has very loyal fans. The fans pay
| for pay-per-view and live event sales. They buy merch.
| Nobody attends a WWE event expecting Greco-Roman style
| wrestling. They all know exactly what they are getting.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Only among certain kinds of people. But a European PM
| doesn't go watch professional wrestling, but if his
| country is doing well enough in association football and
| there's nothing incredibly important going on he will go
| to the match.
|
| This is because winning in this game is seen as an
| achievement, and a natural and reasonable achievement--
| after all, there are many world records that nobody cares
| about.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I suspect you've never known anyone who participates in
| the elite levels of popular sports. They are very rarely
| having fun.
|
| All the major sports alter their rules every year to
| increase their entertainment value. Here is a short, non-
| exhaustive list off the top of my head: NBA flopping
| penalties, NBA player resting policy, MLB base stealing
| rule changes, MLB free base runners, MLB pitch clocks,
| NFL changing overtime rules almost every year, NFL
| challenges and reviews, etc.
|
| There is nothing wrong with not having much knowledge of
| sports, but it might be worth reconsidering your strident
| opinions if that's the case.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| I've actually even played sports against ex-elite players
| in the sports they were once among the best in the world
| in, although it was pretty obvious I had no chance. I've
| also played other sports with friends who were
| professional ice hockey players and professional
| association football players. I think what characterizes
| them is that they once at a time really hated losing, and
| you can question whether that is 'having fun' but I do
| think they were having fun at one point too.
|
| But I agree that sports at the elite level aren't about
| health. It's not unusual to be doing things that at least
| risk injury.
|
| I think these kinds of rule changes are destructive
| though. They certainly are in tennis.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I mean, the "arbitrary" lines are what makes a sport what
| it is. The reason that you can't pick up the ball and run
| with it in football (soccer) isn't because they
| arbitrarily banned this "optimization" after some
| brilliant coach invented it.
| mb7733 wrote:
| Part of the problem is that it trickles down and affects
| sport at lower levels. I was an age group swimmer (ages
| 10-18) when those suits came out. I can't remember
| exactly but it at least 10x'd the minimal equipment
| budget for the season. The suits were not only much more
| expensive but they wore out after a small number of
| races.
|
| Suddenly a line was draw between have- and have-nots
| based on whose parents could and would buy this stuff.
| (My club, like many, practiced in a small municipal pool
| and it was very budget friendly. The fancy suits would be
| a large fraction of the annual cost to a family.)
|
| In my opinion banning the suits was great for the sport
| at the age-group level, and thus the sport in general.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Which is so silly. I would love to watch a sport where
| all the athletes are on cutting edge, dangerously
| experimental PEDs
|
| It's called worker safety.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > 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 try. The best don't win neccesarily,
| just who handles the drugs the best
| umbra07 wrote:
| why do you think they're on _dangerously experimental_
| PEDs as opposed to the standard PED profile in combat
| sports?
| dagw wrote:
| _all the athletes are on cutting edge, dangerously
| experimental PEDs_
|
| The problem here is of course that you probably won't get
| the best athletes in the world to sign up for that. So
| you'd be watching desperate and quite mediocre athletes
| who feel they have literally no other option in life.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| >where they ban optimization
|
| Always wondered why the NFL doesn't ban sticky gloves.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| They did ban "Stickum" back in 1981, a goopy adhesive
| players were dipping their hands/gloves in.
|
| https://s.hdnux.com/photos/56/66/25/12281186/4/960x0.webp
| nradov wrote:
| Nike Alphafly and Vaporfly shoes are still allowed in
| sanctioned races but there is a 40mm limit on sole
| thickness (stack height).
|
| https://www.therunningweek.com/post/carbon-plate-running-
| sho...
| dontTREATonme wrote:
| > _Brewer 's pitching is injured, and the starter that day was
| a Yankee last year and the team is intimately familiar with his
| game._
|
| Is this one of those situations where the Yankees are even
| still paying part of his salary?
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I don't know, but those situations exist and they might be
| more problematic than baseball is willing to admit. The
| pitcher may get more from the Yankees than the Brewers. So
| the pitcher may have more incentive to make sure the Yankees
| don't go bankrupt. Hmmm.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I genuinely can't understand the thought process of a Yankees
| fan. If it's just a tradition thing, then sure whatever. But
| someone who watches them play and goes "yeah that's my team" is
| just mindblowing. They'll have a batting lineup that costs more
| than the opponents entire field, knowing full well they are all
| just hired guns who will be gone the moment the contract is up,
| and then you watch them in the playoffs against regular teams
| and it's just visually hilarious at this point. Like watching a
| bunch of NFL linebackers playing teeball.
| techdmn wrote:
| Some people want to back a winner, and they don't really get
| too worked up about the details. Another example would be
| Ferrari in early 2000s in F1. Biggest budget, most skilled
| driver, all the dirty tricks at all levels (on-track,
| technical, political), plenty of fans.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _I genuinely can 't understand the thought process of a
| Yankees fan._
|
| There is very little free agency in American sports fandom.
| People are (for the most part) fans of the team local to
| where they grew up. (This kind of bums me out as someone
| raising kids in New England, which is not where I'm from, and
| so not whose teams I root for.)
| bluGill wrote:
| Backing the local team always makes the most sense. In NYC
| you can choose Mets or Yankees (though where you live in
| the city affects even that). Choosing a team from some
| other city means you see your team play much less often and
| only after much effort. Worse there are less people to talk
| about the game as nobody has seen your team play and you
| didn't see their team plan. (except when your team plans
| the local team)
| mjrpes wrote:
| > it really freaking hurts and throws off subsequent swings.
|
| Totally ignorant about baseball, but would wearing thick padded
| gloves help? Do major leaguers build up calluses to help?
| janalsncm wrote:
| Gloves help, calluses don't. It's also a lot worse in the
| cold.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The problem isn't friction from the grip (that can
| occasionally pop up), the issue is when you hit the wrong
| spot and the energy of the ball gets dumped entirely into
| your hands instead of evenly distributed through the bat.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is what padding gloves help with. Though I suspect
| thick padding causes less control of the bat and so overall
| isn't worth it.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| It just doesn't help that much to be worth the change in
| mechanics and the compromise on grip strength - too much
| energy, too quickly to effectively dissipate. I stopped
| playing competitively in my teens and I still remember
| how much that hurts.
| eszed wrote:
| Padded gloves do throw off your swing / bat "feel". You do
| now see a lot of guys wearing a little rubber donut thing on
| the thumb of their top hand. That helps a _lot_ with
| absorbing the vibration from a mis-hit. It still shivers your
| hands, but you don 't get the piercing pain focused right at
| the base of your thumb.
|
| [Edit] You do build up some _crazy_ calluses swinging a bat
| for hours upon hours of practice. They absolutely don 't
| help, like at all, when you strike a ball in on the handle of
| the bat. It always hurts.
| janalsncm wrote:
| To be fair, a pitching machine is pretty unnatural compared to
| a human pitcher (can't see when it's about to launch) and they
| are typically closer than 60 feet.
|
| On the other hand, a real MLB pitcher is not just throwing
| fastballs down the middle.
| jparishy wrote:
| Very true. I dream to be able to hit off one of the fancy
| ones the players have at the facilities
| to11mtm wrote:
| NGL that sounds like a fun concept...
|
| How cheap could one prototype a 'programmable' pitch
| machine that can handle the scenarios one would want to
| practice against?
| bena wrote:
| You can just be shitty and get the same experience. My wife and
| I went to a batting cage once and tried to hit some balls.
|
| There is a marked difference between hitting it in the sweet
| spot and not.
| to11mtm wrote:
| Baseball being the only 'pro' sport I'll go and watch...
|
| I think it's an interesting mixup.
|
| From a marketing standpoint;
|
| - If certain batters have their 'ridge' in a specific
| spot/range, it adds marketability. e.x. 'This is the bat
| ????[0] uses'.
|
| - OTOH the first danger with this is that most folks don't have
| the same stature/etc as the hitter in question, so it doesn't
| mean much.
|
| - Lots of fan dollars to be made here though.
|
| From a Game Standpoint:
|
| - It vaguely detracts from accessibility; if this goes full,
| that means that 'pros' get a sort of custom bat that other
| leagues don't get, and from my view that impacts how folks are
| viewed.
|
| - It's also a challenge of 'doing well with a good standard' vs
| 'doing well with a custom thing that happens to fit regs'. I
| suppose examples of other sports having similar (where a
| 'custom' item per player that fits regs, is legal for the sport
| and provides clear benefit) would make me feel a little better
| about this, maybe.
|
| The Weird/offball:
|
| - Saw a youtube video recently claiming some
| countries/municipalites have specific laws about not being
| allowed to carry a bat unless there was a glove and/or ball
| also involved in the process, would these also fall into it? (I
| said it was weird/offball, no I don't live in such a region
| [1], just morbid curiosity.)
|
| [0] - It's been a minute since I've looked at Tigers stats who
| the hell are these folks and no wonder my family doesn't talk
| about baseball anymore
|
| [1] - Per [0] I can at best tell funny stories about DPD and
| potato launchers I designed and had to explain to the police
| and non-authorized users and how same precinct gave specific
| advice as to "if we had to use a firearm in a home invasion,
| here is how we treat as self defense".
| reactordev wrote:
| Let's also not forget that a pitch machine will deliver
| consistent throws where a player won't. It's 10x harder to hit
| a real moving 90mph fastball than a straight dinner plate, if
| you can even manage the plate.
|
| The bat will add probably 0.2-0.5% longer bombs statistically
| but it's still a skill of the player at bat that makes the
| difference.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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 a finesse game with moments of power. Now
| everyone is swinging out of their shoes on every shot, and the
| strategy of the game has reached Nash equilibrium where you
| basically want to hit the ball as hard as you can at every
| opportunity, despite any strategic element on the course.
|
| Professional baseball is always what I point to when I talk
| about what we've lost. You don't need the most optimized
| equipment to enjoy the game, in fact, ultimately, _you don 't
| even want it_. Just use simply, standardized equipment, accept
| the limitations of that equipment, and enjoy a simple game,
| where strategy can be used to overcome the limitations of
| equipment. The best thing that the MLB ever did was reject
| aluminum bats.
| DabbyDabberson wrote:
| 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.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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 the ball on a dime. It's completely
| convoluted, because we just keep letting technology
| overcome every obstacle, but players don't like the
| obstacles, _but you 're not supposed to like the
| obstacles_. So we let the tech overcome those obstacles,
| and then we build new, more difficult obstacles, and it's a
| never ending process of legalizing more tech, and then
| building more obstacles. And it continues until the game is
| unrecognizable from what it was a half century earlier.
| szvsw wrote:
| 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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.
| szvsw wrote:
| 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.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| dcrazy wrote:
| 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.
| scoofy wrote:
| >The data show
|
| It's the clubs and everyone knows it but nobody wants to
| admit it because the club manufacturers are the money
| behind the game.
|
| You give a pro a persimmon driver and 70's blades and it
| doesn't matter if they're hitting a modern ball or the pre-
| pro v's from the 90s... you can't hit it out of your shoes
| because you won't be able to hit the sweet spot.
|
| Yes, the ball is a problem, but it's not _the_ problem.
| _The_ problem is exactly that we 've allowed the sweet spot
| to become too big, which has led to the end of the finesse
| aspect of the game.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Everything you described about golf has already happened in
| MLB.
|
| Babe Ruth's wood bat was 44 oz.
|
| Today's wood bat in MLB are ~33 oz.
|
| The bat Babe Ruth had to use was so heavy _he literally had
| to swing the bat different_ than how players can swing the
| bat today.
|
| There's a short video on this here:
| https://youtu.be/P_uiHUJg7zs
|
| ---
|
| https://www.justbats.com/blog/post/babe-ruths-
| bat/#:~:text=B...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_bat
| Luc wrote:
| Cool but this article is AI slop. It's borderline unreadable,
| though I guess it looks great to Google.
| floatrock wrote:
| I caught on when I realized the same sentence was being written
| for the fifth time.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| OP here, and I also hate AI slop so I had a bit of a bad
| feeling about it at first, but then felt that the payload was
| more important than the packaging. Submitting ''pure''
| content to HN is getting increasingly difficult.
| inerte wrote:
| I actually don't think this article is AI slop but instead a
| text length minimum so Google thinks there's enough content
| there. Now, I _could_ be an AI wrote it with this rule in
| mind, but the repetition feels more like the author said what
| they wanted to say and had to meet a word count quota, so
| they kept saying the same thing. At least this style of
| article has existed for many years before AI slop was even
| possible.
| otras wrote:
| Change we can see is better than change behind the scenes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juiced_ball_theory,
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/juiced-baseballs
| josefresco wrote:
| This morning on the radio, I heard this opinion (paraphrasing):
| "Misses become tips, tips become slices, slices become hits..."
| islewis wrote:
| I've always wondered what the technological development of F1
| would look like in other sports. This feels pretty close.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| When the National Hockey League allowed synthetic sticks
| (aluminum, carbon fibre) in the late 1980s there was a quick
| uptake as players began to learn how to get greater puck
| velocities over the old wooden ones. The cost to the game is
| the phenomena of the exploding stick, which happens far more
| often than with the old lumber ones and can directly affect the
| outcome of the game as the dejected player skates away from a
| missed opportunity.
| jdsully wrote:
| They actually try to just block without the stick until the
| play ends and it looks rather silly. I've also seen them dive
| and punch the puck which doesn't seem like it should be legal
| but the rules seem to be limited to prohibiting grabbing the
| puck.
| toast0 wrote:
| The rules for hand pass are:
|
| > Rule 79 - Hand Pass > 79.1 Hand Pass - A player shall be
| permitted to stop or "bat" a puck in the air with his open
| hand, or push it along the ice with his hand, and the play
| shall not be stopped unless, in the opinion of the on-ice
| officials, he has directed the puck to a teammate, or has
| allowed his team to gain an advantage, and subsequently
| possession and control of the puck is obtained by a player
| of the offending team, either directly or deflected off any
| player or official. For violations related to "closing his
| hand on the puck", refer to Rule 67 - Handling Puck.
|
| > 79.2 Defending Zone - Play will not be stopped for any
| hand pass by players in their own defending zone. The
| location of the puck when contacted by either the player
| making the hand pass or the player receiving the hand pass
| shall determine the zone it is in.
|
| From the 2023-2024 rulebook [1], because it came up first
| in search. I don't think hand pass rules have changed.
| Basically, if your stick breaks when defending, you can go
| ahead and use your body to play and fling the puck to your
| teammates as appropriate (but not out of the defensive
| zone). OTOH, if your stick breaks when you're in the
| offensive zone, you better skate to the bench and either
| grab another stick or change out. Sometimes you'll see
| another player give their stick to the player with the
| broken stick and then go change.
|
| [1] https://media.nhl.com/site/asset/public/ext/2023-24/202
| 3-24R...
| floatrock wrote:
| There are stories like this in marathon running shoes
| (something like 3D printed to the athlete's exact gait and
| basically last just a single race) and swimming (the michael
| phelps olympics dolphin suit).
|
| I'm sure cycling and golf have been doing things like this
| since forever.
| soared wrote:
| There are videos on YouTube of people using banned golf clubs
| that are super interesting - sand wedges with big holes in
| the club head so they slice through the sand, or comically
| large driver heads.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Golf actually adopted tech that probably ought to have been
| banned. Namely the modern ball and driver going from balata
| and persimmon. Pros went from driving it 260 yards to 325
| sometimes longer and entire courses had to be redesigned as
| they would just trivially drive over fairway hazards and
| rough. Golf became a bomb and wedge game ever since as they
| can't make certain historic courses terribly longer.
|
| They are exploring the idea of rolling back the ball but
| the implications of that are endless.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Golf should rate gear differently for different levels of
| play. Most golfers need these improvements as it makes
| recreational golf more enjoyable. But it makes the game
| too easy for professionals. Gear rated for their
| tournaments would be better I think. But there's a rub.
|
| Players like to endorse gear because people want to play
| what the best players play. They think it will make them
| better. So it's hard to endorse gear you aren't playing
| with.
|
| Theres also data that suggests longer hitting guys will
| be more dominant with a rollback. I don't know but I
| guess the nerds figured out how to optimize golf and it's
| all about distance. The days of precession and artistry
| may be gone. I'm not sure how to defend against bomb and
| gouge and not sure if we should.
| soared wrote:
| A similar feel is pro cycling and the UCI. Cycling is much
| cheaper to innovate and test, so the UCI is constantly and
| aggressively banning new things. Unfortunately consumer bikes
| generally follow the UCI trends so we miss out on improvements,
| but the sport retains its "purity". Very important though - the
| fastest approach in a Tour de France stage would be a carbon
| fiber recumbent for the flat sections, then switching to a
| super light (not aero) bike for large climbs, then switching to
| a heavier and super aero bike for descents.
|
| Other easy tech that was banned is seats with a lip on the
| back, so you could push your butt up against it to drive more
| power. And the "puppy paws" handlebar position - more aero but
| banned outside of time trials.
| tmiku wrote:
| I find the road cycling arms race really fascinating too,
| especially for tech focused on measurement rather than
| performance. See the 2021 ban on diabetic-style glucose
| monitors during races [1], the recent restriction of carbon
| monoxide-based hemoglobin testing [2,3], and the possible
| upcoming ban on breath sensors during races [4].
|
| [1] https://www.bikeradar.com/news/uci-bans-supersapiens [2]
| https://www.uci.org/pressrelease/the-uci-bans-repeated-
| inhal... [3] https://www.bicycling.com/news/a61677020/carbon-
| monoxide-reb... [4] https://archive.ph/XMrVg
| gadders wrote:
| The Aluminium Cricket bat was controversial in the 70's:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComBathttps://en.wikipedia.org...
|
| I guess other (banned) examples would be the LZR swim suits
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer) and the Nike Vaporfly
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Vaporfly_and_Tokyo_2020_O..
| .)
|
| I think I am also right in saying that you can buy a road bike
| that is better than the ones permitted in the Tour de France.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| > I think I am also right in saying that you can buy a road
| bike that is better than the ones permitted in the Tour de
| France.
|
| Recumbent bikes have been banned since 1934[0]! Remarkable
| machines. I'd love to ride one in a civilized location one
| day.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recumbent_bicycle
| soared wrote:
| A very small number of teams aren't well funded, have
| sponsorship issues, or whatever else and actually run less
| than top end components. I don't recall who but there were
| bikes at either TDF or vuelta maybe last year with group sets
| which you could've just gone to the store and bought better
| ones.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| 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 manufacture,
| which was passed on to the swim teams. The LZR Racer could cost
| $550 per suit, with each suit only lasting a handful of races
| before requiring replacement. This gave a huge advantage to
| wealthy teams and swimmers with good sponsorship deals, and
| talented swimmers without a lot of financial resources were
| left in the dust.
|
| Then there's the basic question of "what skills do we want to
| measure and reward in this sport?" With swimming, it got to the
| point where races were won not in the pool, but in the R&D
| department of swimwear companies. The swimming organizing
| bodies felt that swimming competitions should be focused on the
| athletic ability of individual swimmers instead, so advanced
| swimsuits were banned.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I like F1 a lot, and part of that is the
| cool cutting-edge technology the teams develop. But for most
| sports, heavy technological development doesn't lead to more
| exciting competition, it just adds barriers to entry.
| parineum wrote:
| > 98% of swimming medals were won by someone wearing one of
| these suits.
|
| > This gave a huge advantage to ... teams and swimmers with
| ... sponsorship deals
|
| Is the former caused by the latter or caused by performance
| enhancement?
|
| Speedo sponsoring all likely medal winners into their new
| product seems like a reasonable explanation. Given that I've
| never heard of another brand, I assume speedo has a fairly
| large budget for sponsorships. I don't know anything at all
| about swimming though, just wanted to throw that out there.
| umbra07 wrote:
| 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.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| Ready for games at Fenway to be 90% HRs
| koolba wrote:
| Reminds me of the late 90s with Sosa and McGuire.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| When talent wasn't enough.
| koolba wrote:
| Did it really take 125+ years for someone to realize the bat does
| not need to evenly taper? This seems like some seriously low
| lying fruit.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| its less about even taper and more about moving weight/center
| of mass around. Youth bats have been doing that for quite a
| while. Camwood bats is a great example of moving weight around.
| In their case, its a training bat.
| koolba wrote:
| Can you take it a step further with uneven wood density?
|
| Like growing the tree with part of the branch under
| compression.
| sib wrote:
| Oh, I like this. Feels like something you'd see in NPB with
| teams recruiting Bonsai masters to grow bats.
| papercrane wrote:
| Different bat profiles have been around forever, and many
| players have their own custom profiles that they like.
|
| I think the key innovation that enabled this new profile is the
| accuracy and quality of data being collected.
|
| Edit: Here's an article talking about some of the bat tracking
| technology that MLB has deployed in recent years:
| https://technology.mlblogs.com/introducing-statcast-2023-hig...
| ycombinete wrote:
| This is how modern cricket bats are designed, with the bulk of
| the wood located in the "sweet spot".
|
| In fact they have undergone a similar evolution. You can see that
| in the variations history on the Wikipedia page [0], as well as
| the photo of the old bats versus modern ones [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_bat#Variations
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_bat#/media/File%3AHi...
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| Sports advancements like this are super cool. This reminds me of
| how Dick Fosbury changed the high jump in 1968.
|
| It was nice of them to reveal this early in the season--I would
| have loved to see the drama if they revealed it during the
| postseason so other teams didn't have time to catch up.
| wedn3sday wrote:
| This article is a great example of why baseball is such an
| incredibly boring sport.
| nullbyte wrote:
| From the title I was expecting genetically modified Bats that
| could fly out and retrieve foul balls
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Since golf has had all sorts of changes in clubs over the years
| and baseball hadn't, I had assumed the only reason this hadn't
| been done years ago is because the rules were very prescriptive.
| 98codes wrote:
| I'm sure there have been bat changes all along the way, and if
| the Yankees hadn't scored 20 runs that day we wouldn't be
| reading about this either.
| pigbearpig wrote:
| Two players used the bats. I'm not a Yankees fan, but all these
| articles are making it seem like the bats are the reason. That
| does not explain why the rest of the lineup went off. Perhaps
| poor pitching is the better explanation. Too much is being made
| of these bats.
|
| Also, golf club technology basically does the same thing.
| Everything is about making a bigger sweet spot. Oversize drivers
| and irons didn't seem to ruin the game.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| > Two players used the bats
|
| I'm not convinced how much of the offensive onslaught was due
| to the bats either, but all of the sources I've heard/read have
| indicated that 5 players in the Yankees starting lineup have
| been using the bats:
|
| https://apnews.com/article/torpedo-bats-yankees-6ac6c797ea93...
|
| https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/article/which-mlb-players-are-u...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| My baseball head friends think the yankees stole signs for this
| game.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Professional golf just rolled-back the ball they play with
| because distance is a problem.
|
| Drivers have COR and volume limits, etc. Professionals are
| dropping blades and playing game improvement irons. Dropping 2i
| and playing 7w
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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 skilled players and amateurs use large metal clubs
| whereas pros use small wooden clubs.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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
| benmathes wrote:
| With golf, there are other dimensions course designers could
| use to make the pro game less about distance. Tighter
| fairways, faster greens, etc.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| It would be fun to see how far you could hit a baseball or golf
| ball if you could make the bat/club out of any material. Or how
| fast someone could swim if you could wear anything (like those
| suits that were banned from the olympics) and things like that.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| My first thought is that there must be something very wrong about
| this. They have moved the skill of hitting from the player to the
| "skill" of the bat. I am surprised MLB allowed it. I don't see it
| too far different than corking the bat.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Pretty typical for pro sports especially golf or swimming. The
| batmaker is probably pleased all the competitive amateurs are
| going to replace the bat in the closet with the premium bat
| shape and I'm sure they worked closely with MLB officials on
| this. No one polices this type of collusion.
| mikeocool wrote:
| Interesting outcome of Saturday's game -- most of the Yankee's
| runs came as a result of their 9 homers, and they let up 9 runs
| -- which, defensively, is not great. The Brewers scored an
| average 4.78 runs per game in 2024.
|
| Kinda suggests the Yankees aren't all great at playing baseball,
| except for hitting home runs, but that's all that really matters.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| The defense in that game was pretty bad. Five of the nine
| Brewers runs scored due to errors, and it was five separate
| errors. The game yesterday went much better, defensively.
| metalman wrote:
| Love this! I helped make wooden oars, that were used by
| competitors in international rowing competitions, that had blades
| designed by someone at MIT, back in the day, on a computer(golley
| gee), but we made them by hand, and as they were, only wood, they
| were legal for use, and all the champions used them. we also made
| oars for "bostan bay bantry boat rigs" that won while crewed by
| inner city kids, we cheated a bit, and snuck some carbon fibre in
| but nobody even knew what that was, 18' oars, 2 kids to each, 16
| oars per boat, plus the tiller. ash for the majors was sometimes
| sourced from granpa's farm in Pa, which he was proud of, take me
| into the woods to.show how strait they were, and how the deer had
| et, everything down to the dirt. next up, would be expoloring how
| a little texture from a poorly finnished bat, might add a little
| energy transfer to the ball
| vessenes wrote:
| Rowing family here : what's the current state of the art in
| oars?
| adregan wrote:
| Baseball is the king of misleading small samples. It's usually
| best not to jump to any conclusions as the article does so early
| in the season (ban them! After 3 games?!). There is a lot of
| randomness in the data.
|
| And if the season proves that these bats are indeed juicier than
| others? Probably MLB will let it lie. Offense is down enough
| already and all of the recent rules changes are intended to
| support offense.
| basisword wrote:
| Have they been using them in spring training? That's still
| early but a much better sample size if so.
| adregan wrote:
| Spring training at bats aren't equivalent--hitters and
| pitchers aren't approaching an at bat as they do in the
| regular season. But it's no matter as we're going to need to
| see _a lot_ more plate appearances before the stats would be
| reliable indicators. Fangraphs[0] has a good guide to sample
| size. Slugging, for example, isn't stable until 320 at bats.
| We'll check back in mid July or so.
|
| Also, we haven't given pitchers a chance to adapt. Perhaps
| pitching outside (now a thinner part of the bat) will take
| the force out of the hit leading to softer contact.
|
| 0: https://library.fangraphs.com/principles/sample-size/
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| The higher pitch velocity made something like this inevitable.
| Remember when a pitcher who threw 95 was a big deal?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Cool. Make it open-source for the rest of the league.
|
| Otherwise this is just more proof that Yankees fans are the same
| kind of people who would cheer when the casino wins another slot
| machine pull.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| Love this comment.
| jjulius wrote:
| My father-in-law has openly admitted that the reason they're
| his favorite team is because they have the most money.
| Verbatim.
| 98codes wrote:
| Remind him that he needs to turn in his interlocking NY for
| an interlocking LA.
| 98codes wrote:
| The concept is out there -- different players would have
| different tendencies that would require slightly different
| adjustments.
|
| This will make the team owners either do their own analysis, or
| come up with yet more excuses to hide the fact that while they
| could afford it, they won't.
| treis wrote:
| Open source what exactly? It's a piece of wood turned on a
| lathe. Not an atom bomb
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Hard to imagine whatever advantage this is affording won't be
| nullified by pitchers within a season. The arms race is getting
| insane.
| smeej wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but if I worked for a school as close to
| Fenway as MIT, I sure wouldn't risk putting my name on custom
| bats for the Yankees!
| lbotos wrote:
| Im glad this landed here so I can ask:
|
| Physics nerds, would a "larger contact area" give the baseball
| more velocity?
|
| I've been speculating that moving the mass lower effectively
| increases bat speed because its a "shorter bat", but all of the
| commentary is acting like the larger barrel is "more power".
|
| I'd expect larger barrel increases odds of contact, not increased
| power transfer?
|
| (But I also think of a car with bike diameter wheels and that
| could obviously change the power transfer)
| acc_297 wrote:
| Some are saying it's about the center of mass being closer to
| the point of contact
|
| I'm not an expert but I think it has more to too with reducing
| vibrations along the bat and increasing the efficiency of
| energy transfer
|
| Again not an expert
| janalsncm wrote:
| You are transferring rotational energy to the ball. Rotational
| energy is proportional to square of angular velocity. It is
| only linearly proportional to moment of inertia. So bat speed
| is more important than weight, all things considered.
|
| From what I can tell this is more about making it easier to
| make solid contact. Even if it lowers the moment of inertia,
| it's more important that the ball goes on a decent trajectory
| rather than e.g. directly into the ground. A bigger radius
| means the ball will be exit closer to the plane of the swing.
| whycome wrote:
| Are we entering the F1 stage of baseball and other sports? I bet
| there's room for optimization with gloves and shoes and uniforms.
| I'm surprised teams haven't made use of mobile recovery units
| when visiting away teams (instead of hotels). And there's still
| gotta be ways to work around fatigue related to travel and time
| zone changes. I'm still surprised how basic and limited home team
| locker rooms can be. There are probably cool tech and
| social/psych solutions.
| janalsncm wrote:
| They've been Moneyballing the game for a while with analytics
| to the point that the MLB had to ban certain defensive
| techniques. (Analytics says he always hits it there, so put a
| bunch of defensive players there.)
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > I bet there's room for optimization with gloves
|
| Maybe so, but the demand is just not there with so many play
| ending up as home runs or strikeouts.
| Affric wrote:
| Definitely already begun.
|
| Players diets, sleep schedules, low altitude flights...
| currymj wrote:
| if it leads to more home runs i'm against it.
|
| if it leads to more solid hits and plays in the infield, i'm for
| it.
|
| unclear which one, i look forward to finding out more.
| m463 wrote:
| given the rules (solid wood, max 2.61" and 42")...
|
| I wonder if they couldn't have non-round profiles. Might be able
| to steer the ball, like a golf driver or add spin like some sort
| of racket.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| From the rulebook [0]:
|
| > The bat shall be a smooth, _round_ stick not more than 2.61
| inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42
| inches in length. The bat shall be one piece of solid wood.
|
| [0] https://mktg.mlbstatic.com/mlb/official-
| information/2025-off...
| rsync wrote:
| My son - a baseball player - saw these in use this past week and
| noted:
|
| " That was dumb... They should have saved them for the
| playoffs..."
|
| ... and I can't help but agree.
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| You'd have to make the playoffs first
| janalsncm wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_World_Series
| plondon514 wrote:
| Boone can't even cheat well
| colordrops wrote:
| Hasn't equipment been evolving since the beginning of the game?
| Why would this be out of line with that?
| trhway wrote:
| Sounds like those hammer head tennis rackets. Strange that it
| didn't happen decades ago. And nothing wrong with such innovation
| just making game more fast and powerful.
|
| The typical baseball bat's balance - very different from say a
| sword's - has always felt wrong to me, and i've just chalked it
| up to my not being a baseball player and thus not understanding.
| The new shape seems to improve the balance toward the centuries
| established for swords, etc.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Here is what I have learned from people who religiously follow
| various kind of sports which intersect with technology:
|
| A new tech will be allowed to stand if everyone can take
| advantage of it equally AND it does not make the sport too
| boring.
|
| Gotta get that ad and sponsor money.
| benmathes wrote:
| I suspect this may result in more pitches away to these batters
| so they have to make contact on the narrower end of the bat.
|
| I.e. it's a move that may well have a counter move.
| xxpor wrote:
| Folks will start to use longer bats then and crowd the plate.
| Of course that'll be countered with more inside pitching.
| bgschulman31 wrote:
| 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.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > 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.
| Affric wrote:
| The wonderful thing about human language is that often context
| implies meaning. It's more than the words on the page.
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