Kansas Crimson

pdub wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 11:05 am Not sure what the problem is, kids are getting paid, like a lot of you want.
The poor 16, 17 year olds out there, playing for free, being exploited.
'sides, education is worthless, it's all about the benjamins.

TraditionKU wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 11:42 am i do miss those concession stand nachos we used to get at HS ball games

pdub wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 11:41 am Beat you to it - but you really romanced it up.

ousdahl wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 2:00 pm So will their games still be on ESPN+ or do I otherwise have to go digging for some link to some site that only lobster would hang out at?

TDub wrote: ↑Sat Mar 20, 2021 8:25 am Mark Emmert is a tool bag

More on MLB’s anti-ball-doctoring campaign

Yesterday we talked about how Major League Baseball plans to scan pitchers’ spin rates to look for anomalies which may suggest that foreign substances are being used to give pitches a little extra somethin’ somethin’. Later in the day some more details about that whole plan emerged:

If a pitcher's "normal" spin rate, measured in revolutions per minute, increases significantly, the league may investigate whether the player is doctoring balls. Baseballs taken out of play -- both randomly and prioritized, if they exhibit signs of foreign substances -- will be inspected by a third-party lab, according to the memo. Balls will be tracked back to whomever was pitching when they were taken out of play.

Finally, game-day compliance officers will monitor dugouts, batting cages and bullpens for violations of the foreign substance rules while filing daily reports of their observations with the league office.

This seems . . . like a lot.

I get why they’re doing it, but practically speaking it seems like one of two things will happen here, and neither of them are all that great:

Thing 1: MLB will approach this the same way it’s approached a number of new enforcement initiatives in the past, such as pace-of-play violations, and it’ll be pretty toothless and opaque, with warning letters being written and not much else happening. If that happens no one will take the initiative seriously and enforcement of foreign substances rules will be undermined even further than it has been to date, and that’s saying something;

Thing 2: The initiative WILL be taken seriously and a small army of ball-inspectors and spin-rate checkers dinging pitchers and clubs will create a situation in which people are routinely firing cheating accusations at one another through the media, allegations of selective enforcement are leveled, and the very premise of one of the analytics on which the league is using to sell itself to smart fans — spin rate — is called into question as a means of measuring anything significant. In the end the league, the union, and players get bogged down in a new discipline/grievance process that overwhelms the sport.

I say it has to be one of these things because I believe the people in and around the game who say the majority of pitchers are using foreign substances, be it pine tar, sunscreen and rosin, or whatever other cocktails of sticky goo have been developed for the cause. That state of affairs matters.

It matters because when you have isolated, or easily detectible rule breaking afoot, a crackdown can be effective. In contrast, when you have a massive flouting of a rule, the nature of the rule-breaking is, by definition, a matter of deception, and the matter of detection is subjective, enforcement is either going to be ineffective, catching no one, or massively disruptive, catching the very many cheaters who are out there. I don’t think Major League Baseball’s creaky and bottleneck-addled discipline apparatus is prepared for that. It’s not like there’s a lab to which they can outsource this.

A better idea, I think, is some sort of legalization regime. The creation of some sort of common safe harbor that still allows pitchers who have come to rely on certain means of gripping and ripping baseballs to do so, but which presents an even playing field for them to do so. Everyone is allowed to use X, but not Y, and if you use Y — which would be pretty clear if you were looking for anything that is not-X — you’re in big trouble. Doing that would require the league to be pretty upfront with what it knows about what pitchers are doing now, however, and I don’t think it wants to do that even if it knows. That’s because, it would then have to admit that it’s been turning a blind eye at ball-doctoring for so long, and Major League Baseball doesn’t admit to such things, even if it’s pretty transparent.