Michael Lewis says Moneyball made baseball more boring

Simple solution. Kill the 3-pointer.

 

Widen the court and move the three-pointer even farther out.

 

And lose those courtside chair seats the high rollers sit in for thousands per game? Not gonna happen.

 

My proposed solution is to make the 3 point a horizontal line from where it is above the top of the key. No more side or corner 3s

 

That's the thing. The pitchers have become so filthy it necessitates maximizing your chances of hitting a homer. If the pitchers of 1963 were pitching today, some of them would probably be dead from liners right back at them.

 

I don't have time to look it up right now, but I think that's similar to a proposal that's been bandied about. Not so much a horizontal line, but eliminating the corner 3 and having the 3-point arc extend to the sideline.

 

My idea few years ago was to make it like slow-pitch softball with homers: Limit the number of made 3s you're allowed a game. 4, 6, 8, whatever number works. (Sidenote: Once played on a slowpitch team that got no-hit. Humiliating, yes, but came with an asterisk as we had a Class A player who competed on top teams nationally who was playing with us--he had zero working hamstrings at that point in his life--who couldn't do anything but hit homers. And this was a zero-homer-limit tournament. So his dingers were outs.)

 

If you think 3s are boring, you’re not watching the same game I am.

 

Those guys would be in their 80s. Hell, they're mostly dead now.

 

I think that the published work of Bill James in the 80's was what really started the analytical movement, especially after James got hired by the Red Sox, and they won the World Series. Moneyball exposed the concepts to a much wider audience but the changes were already taking place because the analytical people basically got it right.

 

There's plenty of movement. What needs to change is plate approach. Putting the ball in play, by some teams anyway, is still discouraged over swinging for the fences.

There's an element of truth to this, but batting averages hung in the 250s until 2018 when they began to plummet. That coincides with shifts, rampant staff days and "openers".

Combined with three true outcomes? It sunk offense apart from home runs which are being hit a higher clip than the steroid era. The five highest home runs per game seasons were in the last five years, peaking at 1.39 in 2019. This year is down in comparison (1.13), but would still be top 10 all-time.

I'm glad some teams are starting to zag instead of zig to employ a running game, but until plate approach changes, it will only go so far.

Edit: Balls In Play rate for 2024 is top five worst in history at 24.35 per game. The highest in my lifetime of watching baseball was in 1979 when it was at 28.75. The number hasn't been above 30 since 1948.

 

It seems to me a HBP is a borderline fourth true outcome, the way batters crowd the plate with their body armor.