All Activity

The idea would be to discourage the spin race by making it practically impossible to spin the ball as we see now. I might even say that spin rates have gotten so high that there must be pitchers who are overtly trying to break the record for highest-spin rate, just for the recognition.

If being critical of Israel, and not co-signing onto the resolution flatly equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is itself anti-Semitic, then the Republican campaign to set the bar at "you can be either pro-Israel or anti-Semitic, choose one" has been wildly successful.

this is an interesting thought experiment. You have two effects to consider for two balls otherwise with equal size and weight but different spin moments, The first is that the ball with more spin moment will require more energy from the hand to impart a given revolution rate - more moment would mean less spin imparted *if* it is true that the rotational energy supplied by the hand is at saturation/max - I have no idea if it is or not. So now you look at the second effect, which is that the ball with higher moment will lose rotation more slowly in transit for an identical amount of surface drag (since the balls are otherwise the same), and thus will still be spinning faster, and still breaking more, out to 60' 6" ft. So one key is how much does the spind decay in transit with the current ball? Is it a significant % where a change could make a difference; and another possible key is whether a pitcher can spin a harder to spin ball just as fast at release or not, and if not how much less? (i.e. is the spin moment of the ball a limiting factor in the pitcher's ability to spin it or are other factors more significant) And then of course you have whole second set of questions as to what effect trying to spin a harder to spin ball has on arm health. Does the extra resistance protect the arm more or the extra stress applied damage it more? Highly multivariate system.

I am enraged by Trump. I am not enraged by Chas's line of logic.

i understand all that and its not something i expect to happen. however, its been that way for a long time and parties have broken up before. its possible they could break up again. iran is fracturing republicans and anti-semitism is fracturing democrats as we speak. the social media revolution could still have as of yet unforseen consequences. we shall see.

I hope we dont see the level of violence that occurred with the neck shot last game.

Well, I’m quite possibly enraged enough to cover your “non-enragement”, and at least that of 100 more.

A Chad Ford sighting. Haven't seen/heard much from him since he was accused of retroactively changing his mock drafts years after the draft.

I don't think the goal has been so much to shorten the game as it is to speed the game up. The pitch clock, which I think has made the game better, would still be effect. If the added hits, increase the length of the gsame by a few minutes without slowing down the game, I don't think that would be a problem.

Everyone who bought one deserved to lose their money.

That might be countered by fewer pitches per at bat, which I believe is a worthy goal.

Then how about changing the ball to limit spin? Lowering the seams would probably do that. They could also consider changing the surface of the ball from leather to some synthetic, and maybe even include microtexturing to the ball, to produce more symmetric boundary-layer separation that suppresses seam-shifted wake effects. Maybe another way to skin that cat would be to redistribute internal mass outward toward the cover of the ball, to increase rotational inertia without changing total mass. One last way, which is probably the most radical, is increase the size of the ball itself, maybe by a quarter inch and a quarter ounce. But even without that, if you put all three of others together, you could probably reduce max spin by 500 or more RPM, with the effect of reducing strikeout rates, increase balls in play, and tilting the advantage away from flame-throwers and toward command pitchers. If they coupled this set of changes with true robot umpiring on every pitch, which would force pitchers to have to come into the a hitter's zone to get strikes at some point, I bet they could move the K/9 rate from mid-eights to mid-sixes or less overnight. Counterpoint: MLB Marketing and Players would both hate this.

I am not enraged. I am just not impressed by anything he does. He is competent at bull**** and self promotion and manipulating people, especially ignorant and weak people.

A likely secondary effect of making the ball more hittable would be undoing at least some of the gains made in shortening the game.

No, "being unhinged" and "knowing what you're doing" are not mutually exclusive by necessity. "Unhinged" typically means acting wildly, unpredictably, or outside social norms, e.g., impulsive rants, bold risks, or chaotic energy. "Knowing what you're doing" implies competence, awareness, and deliberate control over your actions. Trump exhibits both. You're going to focus on the "competence" part. Trump is not anything like competent when it comes to managing the economy, for example. A president absolutely should be competent when it comes to managing the economy. On that, we can agree. The breakdown occurs when we contemplate the difference between "should be" and "is". I would counter that managing the economy is not even his goal. Trump does not care about the economy. He cares about his own aggrandizement, control of others, and personal enrichment. He is very competent when it comes achieving those goals, and the economy is merely a tool in the service of those goals. This line of logic may enrage you. Certainly defensible. I don't like it, either. But just because he is incompetent in something that is traditionally important for presidents but that he cares hardly a whit about, it does not follow that he must by definition be incompetent in everything else, and in every way imaginable. Trump is unhinged. Trump also knows exactly what he is doing. It's simply bad luck that that which he knows exactly what he's doing is in an area that doesn't help the American people, or the rest of the world.

The thing is, even if overcome that and you do restructure the game so that globally, a team would be more successful (and know it) over a season because it would have a clear improvement in injury experience that would be greater than the value of more K's to the staff, will the pitchers themselves still *always* see it in their *immediate* best interests to strike guys out if they can and damn the risk to themselves? Thus for instance even go to private coaches if their team decided not to do pitch maximizing work with its staff (just as an extreme theoretical example...). So maybe to continue along where this reasoning leads, you have not only make contact less damaging, maybe you have to make strike-outs much harder to achieve - at least against a larger % of the batter population, so you'd be where the game was when you had to pitch to a Stan Musial and you knew you were wasting your time trying to K him - all you could do was try to keep him off balance enough so he didn't barrel it up well. Two possibilities come to my mind in this direction: moving the mound back to give hitters more time to see pitches; and lowering the stitches to reduce achievable break. Pitchers would have rely more on change of speed and location sequencing to keep guys of balance for barrels as opposed to 'here it is you can't hit it' swing and miss.

That would be nice, but the presidential electoral setup all but forbids this from happening. Setting aside structural barriers such as ballot access restrictions, the U.S. uses a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post election system, where once a presidential candidate beats all their opponents by at least a single vote within a state, they are awarded 100% of all the votes in that state that ultimately matter. This discourages voters who might otherwise be inclined to vote for a third party from doing so because of the concept of wasting the vote on someone who's destined to lose (something that also happens, BTW, when your major party presidential candidate loses your state anyway.) There's also the general tendency of countries that have single-member districts, instead of proportional representation, to emerge as two-party countries. Both the US and UK are emblematic of that. If we truly want more than two strong parties, we would probably need to move from a winner-take-all system to a proportional representation system, at minimum. Almost none of us here will ever live to see that happen.

Right after Canada, Cuba, Greenland..... Grandpa needs a long nap in his underground "Balltoom"

Never does his homework. An underling also failed for adding in his notes who the coach was...

Or maybe some of us decided we can't afford to properly raise another human or two. Or realized that we weren't properly wired...or something.

A reporter asked Trump if he's concerned about the Hantavirus. Really? Why don't they ask him if he learned anything from Covid? Between Trump and that wacko RFK, if there was another covid, we're all doomed.

The masses are asses as a professor of mine once said.

That said, this would be a challenge because strikeouts for pitchers are as important to them (not to mention as marketable to the business) as home runs are for hitters. It's all about burnishing the personal brand. You don't get featured on Quick Pitch for inducing ground balls to second for an out.

Isn't the whole point of the reflecting pool to reflect the Washington monument? As above, so below?

It’s such a waste. This team could easily be the East champion with a competent coach making decisions on rotations and playing time.