Everything on earth is going to change at some point. That is Newton’s First Law. Well not exactly, it’s the contrapositive of it, but at some point there will be pressure put upon say TVs to change because monitors have screens with higher refresh rates. They might make it so that you can smell the environment that’s in the show you’re watching or they might do the easier thing and just upgrade the visuals, sound, or add apps to it. The problem is their competition can do this too so unless they do something innovative they will get left behind at some point like a blackberry phone. At some point your house will be remodeled, the U.S. dollar will not be a physical thing, your favorite place to eat won’t exist and the game of baseball will not be what it is today. I am not saying that it will happen tomorrow but at some point; maybe in 1000 years or longer but these and more changes will happen. Baseball is not even the same game it was 10 years ago. Sports are changing right now especially. In tennis they can accurately depict whether a ball is in or out better than any eye could possibly see. Cameras are at a point where they are better than eyes and they should be used in sports. When they’re not, terrible calls happen that change the outcome of the game and history. In 2010, Armando Gallarraga had a perfect game with 26 outs recorded and an easy ground ball was hit to Miguel Cabrera at first. Cabrera underhanded the ball to Gallarraga for the 27th out but the runner was ruled safe by the umpire. Gallarraga was never a tremendous pitcher. He had a lifetime ERA of 4.78 and played a majority of his baseball career in the minors but he would have gone down in the record books with 21 other greats like Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, and Randy Johnson but he was beat by someone who hadn’t eaten enough carrots.

The play on which Armando Galarraga was denied a perfect game. Credit…MLB.COM, via Associated Press

The majority of missed calls occur behind the plate. In the bottom of the 8th, in game 7 of the 2019 World Series, the Astros’, Carlos Correa struck out looking on a pitch that was 4 inches off the plate and while it didn’t seem to have an effect on the outcome of the game; it changed the expected value of runs that inning from .523 to .286, making it almost twice as difficult for the Astros to score.

These mistakes shouldn’t and can’t be happening in a World Series game 7 and eventually the umpires will anger everyone enough to start a revolution or change against them because they will miss calls, that’s 100% guaranteed. The challenge rules have extended the umpire’s presence in MLB but umpires are completely unnecessary and cost the league millions every year. If they aren’t replaced by machines, people will start taking advantage of the fact that umpires are going to make bad calls because people have tendencies. If an umpire tends to call a lot of outside pitches strikes, both teams are going to play to this and they should if they want to win. Teams might even try to make the umpire’s experience in their stadium better than what they get in other stadiums purely in hopes of getting a couple good calls. This may seem kind of stupid but if you have ever played a sport you have definitely gone home thinking that the referee or umpire was playing for the other team and you easily could be right but that’s never something you should worry about as a player or at least that’s what a coach will tell you. In actuality you should know how and why you got screwed over so that you can use that the next time you see that set of umpires. That seems like enough about umpires, I am sure blood is starting to boil already.

Home Field Advantage

Home field advantage is a thing and if you don’t believe me you’re probably an Orioles fan. I also plotted the margins of all games from 2018 and 2019 on the home page of this website. Home teams win 52.83% of the time and that is significantly different than 50% because I used over 4000 games. Why do home teams win 2-3 more games for every 100 they play?

You could say it’s because they have their fans at the game cheering them on but how do you explain the fact that World Series have historically been won by the team with home-field “disadvantage” 51% of the time and stadiums are the most packed with home fans during a World Series. I would say that the main advantages are understanding how their stadium plays and not being fatigued by travel because long-trips, stuck in one seat, are going to get boring and not every teammate is going to like one another. For the sake of changing home-field advantage, I will say there are two sides that oppositely affect it. Fatigue hurts the away team and experience helps the home team.

The University of Notre Dame has historically had good hockey teams and when you play at their rink you will forever hate them, guaranteed. With that said what they have done with their rink is pretty genius and will forever give them a slight advantage in every game they play. They do two things that give them an advantage and very few people will ever realize them. The obvious thing they do is put the opposing teams penalty box on the other side of the ice which benefits them every time both teams get a penalty and Notre Dame is a fairly physical team so this is bound to happen at least once a game but it’s not going to completely change the game. The other thing they do is something that absolutely blew my mind when I realized it. They have the away benches lower to the ground compared to the home benches. This shuts down your glutes and tightens your hips flexors at a faster rate. Hockey is all about keeping the legs going and by the third period this will absolutely start killing the away team. So how can baseball teams implement what Notre Dame has done to their field?

The best field for a team depends on their team. If you have a very fast team you might have your infield grass cut really tall to slow down ground balls and your outfield grass really short to keep balls in the outfield rolling. This could be done better by researching different types of grasses and turfs that cause more or less friction. If you have a team with a lot of power you would want to move the fences in so your team can hit even more homeruns and if your team is like the Marlins and doesn’t hit a lot of homeruns you might as well move the fence really far back or add a green monster so neither team can hit homeruns. This would help the Marlins because generally power and speed are oppositely correlated and their outfield will be better equipped, with their speed, to get to any ball. The backstop could be changed depending on how quick your catcher is and how often your pitchers throw wild pitches. If you have a lot of hitters that force the other team to put on a Ty Cobb shift, with the second basemen playing shallow right field, you could put a lip on your infield that makes it harder for that second basemen to field outfield ground-balls and this could be used for the opposite shift but it’s less likely. Your field should be molded to your team. The only problem is that some of these changes like moving walls or maybe even changing the walls material could be costly and some of them might cause teams around the league to hate you but you won’t care if you’re beating them.

The second part of home-field advantage is fatigue and the away team should do as much as possible to avoid this. For example, get to the stadium early, create a routine, have team bonding activities, and have teammates that make the locker room a pleasant place. With that said you’re in the other team’s house and they can make your experience an absolute nightmare. This is not something I recommend because it’s quite unsportsmanlike but I am saying it’s possible and will potentially give the home team more of an advantage. Say there’s only one bathroom in the locker room or not enough lockers, that would be frustrating for the away team and would cause several problems. There’s also a bullpen and you could really be mean with this one, maybe by off-centering the pitching rubber or make the mound very different from what they will see in the game. Again, I am not saying this is a good idea because if a team notices you doing things like this on purpose they will tell other teams and you will be hated by everyone.

Machines in Baseball

I do feel bad about this one because people could lose their jobs but it’s cheaper for the team and they will make better decisions. Third-base coaches get paid half a million to sit there and tell people when to do a certain thing. For example, when to steal, bunt, hit and run, and go to the next base; they also help coach. The problem with them is that they are human and decide actions based on not wanting to hurt the team because if they cause an out it’s their fault and they will have an icky feeling inside them. Therefore they play the game a lot safer than it should be. With one out and a runner on third and a fly-ball hit over 200ft the runner should tag up over 90% of the time but they don’t run that frequently. The odds the next better gets them in is less than 40% so you should be anywhere over 40% confident that they will make it in order to send the runner. Runners should steal second every time with no outs if their chance of success is over 85% because the expected value of runs for a runner on second with no outs times .85 is greater than the expected value of runs with a runner on first and no outs. There is a chart above that shows the expected value of runs given a certain base-state. With two outs you only need to be be 70% sure that the runner will be safe but how can you be any percent sure that a runner will be safe. A machine could easily calculate this with a classification model and using several different independent variables like information about the runner, pitcher and the catcher which is already available online thanks to Statcast. Actually replacing the coach with a machine would be a problem though because people won’t be comfortable with it and creating that technology would not be cheap although definitely possible. Something I do see happening is the use of an ear piece so that the third-base coach can easily relay the correct play that should be made to the players on the field. The team could then justify lowering their salary and spending that on better players or having them focus on other things like player development.

Importance of Pitchers

A lot of sports have goalies and as someone that has played defense in both hockey and soccer I know that the goalie is the most important player on the field. You can do everything right as a defensemen and if the puck or ball slips past the goalie the other team still scores. They are also the only person on the ice that plays the entire game. Why does this make pitchers the most important asset on the diamond?

Pitchers are baseball’s goalies. Baseball is divided into 9 innings, with 3 outs and then further divided by pitches per inning. Each team averages 146 pitches per game which has been slowly rising every year. This equates to roughly 16 pitches per half inning. A position player may bat 3-5 times a game depending on how many runners get on base. A batter gets approximately 4 pitches per at bat so they are responsible for anywhere from 12-20 pitches per game from the batters box. Let’s say a batter gets 20 pitches in a game and the ball hit to them 10 times that day. They would have been apart of 30 pitches. A pitcher that throws two innings would have been not only involved but the main part of approximately 32 pitches. Therefore a pitcher that only pitches two innings is as important or more than any batter on the team that plays the whole game. With this logic a catcher is no doubtably either the first or second most important player on the field but that’s a debate for another day. Once people realize this they will change the way they build their team. They will buy value hitters that will score a roughly average or below amount of runs and then they will go all out to get the best pitchers in the league because if the other team can’t score on you then they can’t win. Let’s look at the Tampa Bay Rays and the Oakland Athletics who spent by far the least amount of money per win in 2019. Neither team had a batter with over a .300 average, which 5 years ago signified a good player. They did have a good pitching staff that averaged less than 4 runs a game, about half a run or more less than the league average. Pitchers are only going to get more valuable in baseball because there is starting to be a higher frequency of plays that only revolve around them. The number of homeruns and strikeouts are reaching new highs every year. This is partially due to there being more information about what the pitcher is going to throw and more information about what a given batter is less likely to hit. Something I think we could see, maybe in 1000 years, and I am not saying this is extremely likely but what if nobody played defense? Defense is nobody’s favorite part of the game and making an error really sucks. I believe it should be apart of the game but what if the coach just selected certain parts of the field that were singles, doubles, triples or outs. Obviously there would need to be more stipulations but that’s just something to think about as baseball becomes more and more a pitcher’s game. Will it be embraced or will the game change in favor of the batters? I definitely think there will be changes to make batting easier. In the next 100 years, the mound will be moved back because at some point they’re going to say “why shouldn’t we try this?” It will make the most exciting part of the game even more exciting by allowing more hits. Also why was it randomly decided that 60ft 6inches was the perfect distance? I am 100% certain there wasn’t much science put into that decision they just said “hmm that’ll do.” There really has never been a need to change it because the game has been fair for both teams but at some point there will be a force that is saying that it should be changed and I believe it has already started. The only thing holding this force back is a history book.

Triple Homeruns

The hardest thing to do in the MLB is not to hit a homerun but to hit a triple. With that said a homerun gives you one run while a triple gives you just a good chance at scoring. Imagine hitting a two out triple with no runners on. You not only did something that takes the most skill by needing speed, power, and hitting the ball into a gap but you still have less than a 40% chance of doing the only thing that matters, scoring. In Finland, while they play the game rather strangely, they have a rule that whenever a batter hits a triple it not only counts as a run but the runner stays on third for the chance at an extra run. I don’t see the MLB changing the game to enable a batter to score two runs off a triple but I think the triple homerun is quite possible. With that said I believe an inside the park homerun should count for more than just one run. Say it counted as three runs. Imagine hitting a two-out triple so you already have one run. That decision to go for it all and run home now becomes more likely. With a 40% or less chance that the next batter hits the runner in for one run, realistically a third-base coach only needs to be more than 20% confident that the runner will make it home safe. This should result in more pickles and plays at the plate. Since being slow is arguably baseball’s biggest criticism. I think this would be great for speeding up the game.

Teams Best Suited for the Future

A mirror shows you less than a nanosecond into the past so technically if you had a large enough mirror that was far enough away you could see a couple years in the past. I have reverse engineered this process and can see what teams will be good in the future; so my predictions are 100% correct. For the next 10-15 years, teams like the Athletics, Twins, Braves and especially the Rays will be the teams that have the most consistent success and I want it to be known I am saying this prior to the start of the 2020 season. The Rays are able to spend $300,000 less than an other team per win. They also won 96 games in 2019. Therefore they managed to save at least 28.8 million dollars. That number is even more ridiculous when you compare it to the average team and not the second closest team to them. The average team spends around 1.6 million dollars per win, 900,000 more than the Rays. Compared to the average team, the Rays saved 86.4 million dollars in 2019, based on their 96 wins. So what should they do with all that money they’re not spending because they chose their players based on surplus value added? To answer that you have to think of an organization as a business. If you’re able to cut costs you don’t go out and immediately spend that money; that would be really dumb and would only benefit the team for maybe a year. They might spend a little extra on making more and better products or getting better players and making upgrades to the fan experience but they shouldn’t completely change what was already working. What the Rays need to be doing with that money is investing it, but how? Maybe buy a player that will bring in more fans or jersey sales. They could also buy bonds that will slowly bring them money because even a 2% yearly interest rate on a bond will double their money in 36 years and when you’re talking over 50 million, you get at least a free 1 million dollars every single year. Eventually they’ll be able to buy two teams with the money they saved but not many teams think that long-term. This in actuality means they would be prepared and able to buy any player they’d want when the time comes. With pitchers being the most important aspect of a team, the value of very good pitching will increase and being able to get cy young and all-star pitchers on your roster is absolutely the key to success because very few if any teams make it to the World Series with a group of no-name pitchers.

We could see baseball change a lot in the near future because of coronavirus. We could see several teams be sold as some owners may find it less profitable and more of a liability to own a team. There won’t be as many fans which means less ticket sales, less ballpark hot dogs and beers, and less kids getting to love the sport of baseball. Teams are finding ways to make money by selling cardboard cutouts but they definitely need to do more in order to stay afloat because replacing 640k per game while playing less games cannot be solved by a one time cardboard cutout purchase. I have started to see rotating ads, that you would see on the boards of an NHL broadcast, behind the plate. Ads are 100% the way teams are going to make the most money in hard times like this. Those seats behind home plate should be completely covered in advertisements and I realize the ad revenue would not go completely to the team but a deal is going to have to take place between those broadcasting the game and the actual teams or else the people making money from the ads won’t be able to show and profit off of MLB ads. The 2020 season will already have significantly less games but the disease is unpredictable and future seasons could easily be affected and if cases arise on a particular team games will get cancelled. This could cause an immediate retirement of umpires because they are just an extra liability to have on the field. They might also force the catcher to stand further away from each batter as they will be the most likely player to catch the disease, no pun intended, at least during a game. Their masks will likely be changed so that they prevent the spread of the disease. Managers might stay out of dugouts and teams might be forced to only be around their own members even while games aren’t being played. Obviously this isn’t going to make a lot of players happy but at least they would get to play the sport they love. The world really has no idea what is to come. Hopefully there is a vaccine and everything can return to normal but we should prepare for the absolute worst because a vaccine will at the earliest come at the end of the 2020 year but the disease could always change or a new one could arise.

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