Michael Lewis says Moneyball made baseball more boring

One way to get rid of tanking is to make non-playoff teams play out a sort of loser’s bracket tournament to determine draft order.

It admittedly wouldn’t work well in football and it would be wonky in baseball (18 teams miss the playoffs) without weighting the bracket, but it could work in the NBA and NHL.

Doesn’t need to be elaborate. One game, winner-take-all. The worst teams get byes where applicable, but you have to win your way to the No. 1 pick and so on.

 

It's not that tanking never works, or that it doesn't work in general, but I think there's a sort of "smartest guy in the room" contrarianism that people -- management and fans wrapped up in -- "in order to be the best, first we must be the worst."

Tanking becomes not a necessary step in the process of building a good team, but an end in itself. You frequently see and hear talk about average to mediocre teams, "they're too good to tank yet."

Implying, wait a season or so, then we can REALLY suck, won't that be great??

 

Which may make the Mazeroski game the greatest all time --- for a fan. 87% of plate appearances with a ball in play (and half of those that weren't were homers).

76 plate appearances
24 hits
5 HRs
5 walks
0 strikeouts
0 HBP

And the icing on the cake: 2 hours, 36 minutes (Hi, BYH!)

 

I’ll take it!

 

Keep pitching to Judge. We're living in the era of brain dead sports.

 

Hot take: Baseball really isn't that damn boring.

 

I always liked Joe Pos's line about that: "Baseball is boring...until it's not."

I love a close MLB playoff game because every pitch has anticipation riding on it.

 

Baseball needs to stop trying to be cool, and maybe it will just naturally become cool again cyclically. Because throwing up jazz hands isn’t going to do.

 

I think of two places where you stand very little chance of getting through two hitters without damage.

One is Soto-Judge. The other is Ohtani-Betts.

I might be missing something. I can't say Phillies, because Schwarber-Harper are separated in the order.

But the last two nights, the entire focus while watching the Yankees has been keeping 4 through 1 clean, because you simply know they were going to get something out of 2 and 3.