Sammy Sofa

I'd like to think this is all the result of some maniac who is just screaming about how big a fan of California he is.

This is where I'm at; I never thought I'd be so burnt out on baseball just a few years of the Cubs winning the WS, but horsefeathers, I'm all for shaking it up. There's no going back with these sorts of changes, so just go all in, you cowards. Make it horsefeathering weird and interesting to offset the owners and front offices that have made it an overly analytical, penny-pinching slog.

No, baseball games ARE significantly longer, and it's mostly due to delays caused by pitching bull horsefeathers. I remember seeing several breakdowns comparing games from within the last 10 years to games from the 90's and 80's, and the commercial time difference was minimal. The biggest difference, by far, in terms of something they could actually (and pretty easily) do something about was the time taken by pitchers between pitches and batters. It often added something like an extra 20 minutes or more per game. Unleash the horsefeathering pitch clock. There’s no doubt games have gotten longer and pitch clock would make them faster to some degree, but does that matter/affect anything like viewership or games being more watchable? Is there some large group of people out there if games, on average, go down 6-20 min are suddenly going to start watching games or attending them in meaningful numbers? I don’t know the answer and would interested to see what info they have that it would matter or not matter. NFL games are long as horsefeathers and there’s literally 30-40 seconds of downtime before any action, baseball inherently is going to have down time between action and no action. MLB game length doesn’t really matter to me. A pitch clock could also bring injury risk in, potentially, obviously a study would have to be done. But forcing guys to throw when they aren’t ready or like in a 20+ inning within a set amount of time could have health/fatigue affects. In regards to the last part....tough horsefeathers. If a pitch clock is the difference between a pitcher staying healthy or not, then he's just not cut out to be a professional pitcher. As for the rest: it's just part of the larger problem of how baseball has had a long simmering problem of being terrible at attracting new fans, and just being a viable form of entertainment in the current landscape. If it was something someone was coming up with now it would be laughed out of every room, and rightly so. The games are too long and too slow, they eat up WAY too much programming time (which has lead to it being walled off via a TOTALLY SUSTAINABLE bubble of what essentially amounts to premium cable channels to watch the horsefeathering games; great model to hitch your wagon to, guys), there's way too horsefeathering many of them, the game itself has next to no bankable/recognizable faces or personalities, there's too many teams and too many of them are run like strip mall businesses that are willing to settle for cheap mediocrity in the hopes they stumble into penny-pinching competitive season or two each decade, and the action is too brief and goes through too many prolonged periods where it's dominated by pitching, which just exacerbates almost all of these issues to an unbearable degree. Comparing it to football is a non-starter: I despise football, but acting like they're comparable in terms of watchability and player recognition is laughable. Football is infinitely easier to market, watch, follow, blah-blah-blah. I'd take baseball a million times over football, but the bottom line is that's almost actively designed at this point to not draw in new fans. And I don't know what the answer is. Stuff like adding the DH or lowering the mound or shortening the season or expanding the playoffs or, IMO, all good ideas, but they're Band-Aids on a head wound. Baseball, as it stands, is not designed for long term sustainability (at its current level) with the way we (and especially younger audiences) consume media and sports.

No, baseball games ARE significantly longer, and it's mostly due to delays caused by pitching bull horsefeathers. I remember seeing several breakdowns comparing games from within the last 10 years to games from the 90's and 80's, and the commercial time difference was minimal. The biggest difference, by far, in terms of something they could actually (and pretty easily) do something about was the time taken by pitchers between pitches and batters. It often added something like an extra 20 minutes or more per game. Unleash the horsefeathering pitch clock. I’m down with a pitch clock. But announcers were bitching about slow pitching back in the 90’s And it's just gotten even slower since.

They’re mostly too long to people who don’t actually like baseball. It’s like saying that soccer games are too low scoring; that’s part of the game. The only REAL way to shorten games would be fewer commercial breaks, but that’s never going to happen No, baseball games ARE significantly longer, and it's mostly due to delays caused by pitching bull horsefeathers. I remember seeing several breakdowns comparing games from within the last 10 years to games from the 90's and 80's, and the commercial time difference was minimal. The biggest difference, by far, in terms of something they could actually (and pretty easily) do something about was the time taken by pitchers between pitches and batters. It often added something like an extra 20 minutes or more per game. Unleash the horsefeathering pitch clock.

Baseball games being too horsefeathering long is definitely a problem, but this isn't really a fix for that. But it's fine whatever...until they get a horsefeathering pitch clock, they won't actually fix horsefeathers.

The minimal effort is greatly appreciated.

RIP this dude's pro football career.

The Cubs' FO trying to make their Monster Teams work every year:

Basically 85% of any given population is the projected ideal percentage to be able to hit, with some degree of confidence, a version of herd immunity thanks to vaccination. So be that business, school, town, state, county, country, etc., etc.; just think that 85% is the ideal. Though anything above 70% is pretty great, and once you get above 75% you're likely going to be set. 85% is the ballpark "magic number" to feel really good about things being about as close as you can get to totally under control without actually hitting 100%.

Doesn't bother me. I feel like it's kind of the ultimate kick to the dick to Theo and co.'s terrible offensive approach, which is what I yearn for at all times now as I slowly and uselessly creep towards death.

The shift is fine, and only seems terrible because the Cubs are the biggest mark-ass shift suckers around.

I thought we were applauding the "bats bats bats" drafting strategy since pitchers are hard to develop and are always hurt? Yeah, in terms of wasting resources to try and develop a bunch of homegrown starting pitchers; that was, rightly, very "horsefeathers pitchers." But their intention was never to essentially develop NO pitchers, starters or relievers, which is just barely what didn't happen.

Almost forgot how the Cubs managed to develop almost no pitchers of note for the better part of a decade. That sure kicked the legs out of everything.

Sure. As with the good stuff, it's a combo. There's plenty of bad luck, but there's also been plenty of bad decisions, too.

What happens if the Astros draft Bryant instead of Appel. The fact that the brain geniuses down in Houston passed on him is further evidence that this stuff is hard, no? Or, again, that so much of it comes down to luck. And that's not inherently a bad thing in and of itself. But it makes the, "these guys are fuggin' baseball GENIUSES," hype all the more hollow and frustrating when things go downhill so fast after years of sucking. Personally, I think it's more accurate to say it was a smart enough FO who got really lucky.

What happens if the Astros draft Bryant instead of Appel. No World Series...but I'm probably, bizarrely, still a big fan of baseball. Life is horsefeathering weird and dumb.