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Major League Baseball is about to make a major rule change, altering how intentional walks are handed out. Instead of a pitcher throwing four pitches out of the strike zone, the walk will be awarded by a signal from the dugout, ESPN reported Tuesday night.
The network said the league and its union have agreed to the change, which will take effect this season. MLB has been trying to make its games shorter. However, The Wall Street Journal said last week that the change would save an average of 14 seconds per game.
Fans are not happy about the change, with many pointing out that botched intentional walks have led to game-changing moments.
Wikipedia: Intentional base on balls.
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Major League Baseball Plans to Get Rid of Intentional Walks
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For recreational use only.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:17AM
Ahem...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_baseball_in_Japan [wikipedia.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday February 25 2017, @09:30PM
To be fair, Japan is a really, really odd country and not at all like any other country in the world. You're talking about a country where their idea of a game show is to have regular people running around elaborate obstacle courses and risking severe injury. I won't even go into how weird the porn is there.
But overall, worldwide, baseball is simply not a very popular sport. The only place it has any real popularity is the US, Japan as you pointed out, and Cuba, and maybe one or two other Caribbean islands. And even in the US it's in decline, with most of its fans being retirement aged; basketball and American football are the popular sports here now. In the rest of the world, soccer (association football) is generally the most popular. Hockey is the most popular in nearby Canada.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday February 25 2017, @10:51PM
A few stats:
http://chartsbin.com/view/33104 [chartsbin.com]
(India? cricket?!)
http://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/sports/baseball.htm [topendsports.com]
(apparently using Google searches as a proxy)
Baseball is certainly an acquired taste, perhaps in part because it's a cerebral game -- sort of chess with warm bodies, often described as a "game of inches" not just for how by design it has so many close plays. Probably the next closest that way is sumo, where the preliminary psyching is the real match and the action is just how you keep score. (Perhaps not coincidentally, also primarily Japanese.) But we no longer teach that patience to our youth; now it's all about instant gratification and the fun of the moment, and they just can't understand the appeal of a game built on precision and restraint.
A lot of what used to be warm-body fandoms have wandered off to the internet and computer gaming world, but I'd hazard that declining MLB attendance has a great deal more to do with ticket prices -- as little as 30 years ago you could get decent season tickets for a hundred bucks. Now that'll buy you a bare handful of nosebleed-seats. And the changes made in the name of improving attendance by making every team more "competitive" have done the opposite; when anyone can win it all, there's far less reason to care. Meanwhile, community college games are still packed.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.