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Things you often Wonder


mjmooney

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6 minutes ago, Michelsen said:

I think that’s pretty accurate. 

Baseball is going through a period of self-scrutiny at the moment, trying to come up with innovations to make the game faster in order to attract the younger audience (I think numbers show that the average baseball fan is getting older). Of course, most of these innovations tend to upset the purists and the established fan base, so it’s a bit of a dilemma. 

That's the sign of a declining and/or boring sport imo.

Snooker and Cricket spring to mind. Both have to invent shorter versions and try to make them more appealing, and try to inject fake excitement and atmosphere mainly because the real versions are too boring to hold a decent audience.

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4 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

That's the sign of a declining and/or boring sport imo.

Snooker and Cricket spring to mind. Both have to invent shorter versions and try to make them more appealing, and try to inject fake excitement and atmosphere mainly because the real versions are too boring to hold a decent audience.

Which is why I think baseball needs to be careful. Limits on mound visits and ad breaks, a pitch clock etc is fine to cut down on ‘dead’ time, but don’t change the nature of the game. Baseball is a slow game. Its slow pace is where the drama and tension of the game is. 

And it’s still America’s national pastime and wildly profitable - it ain’t excactly broke, so don’t mess it up trying to fix it. 

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11 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

That's the sign of a declining and/or boring sport imo.

Snooker and Cricket spring to mind. Both have to invent shorter versions and try to make them more appealing, and try to inject fake excitement and atmosphere mainly because the real versions are too boring to hold a decent audience.

I wouldn't say any sport is boring, to the people who enjoy it - but you are right to name cricket as an example. 

So from going from Test cricket (4/5 days) to one day games (100 overs).. then you had Twenty Twenty cricket introduced in 2001 (with the first world cup being in 2007) - all because sponsors and crowds were on the wane.  Now they are trying to do 100 ball cricket, which will start in 2020.. T20 games only take 2.5 hours!  It doesn't make sense.  

There will always be people who play the game, but it's the incessant money grabbing and TV which drives the sports into the ground.  It's all too commercial.  Which is why I guess we have football on 7 days a week.. It's getting too much. 

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When I was in the US, many years ago, I had some long discussions with my American relatives about sport - and I found a lot of parallels between US baseball/gridiron and UK cricket/football. I heard similar generational arguments: 

Young guy: Baseball goes on too long, it's boring, it's all about tedious stats, batting averages, etc. 

Old guy: You have to appreciate the subtlety, it's like chess, you youngsters have too short an attention span, etc. 

Not to mention all the nostalgia about long hot summer afternoons of long ago, the evocative sounds and smells, and so on. 

Sounds like baseball is going down the 20/20 cricket route, which the old guys will say debases the game. 

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14 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Sounds like baseball is going down the 20/20 cricket route. 

I’d say, perhaps with a dose of wishful thinking, that is unlikely. 

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51 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

When I was in the US, many years ago, I had some long discussions with my American relatives about sport - and I found a lot of parallels between US baseball/gridiron and UK cricket/football. I heard similar generational arguments: 

Young guy: Baseball goes on too long, it's boring, it's all about tedious stats, batting averages, etc. 

Old guy: You have to appreciate the subtlety, it's like chess, you youngsters have too short an attention span, etc. 

Not to mention all the nostalgia about long hot summer afternoons of long ago, the evocative sounds and smells, and so on. 

Sounds like baseball is going down the 20/20 cricket route, which the old guys will say debases the game. 

Just to be clear, this is rounders with an oversized bat we're talking about? A traditional girls game?

Then there's netball with running, another girls game

Ice Hockey is just a girls field game played on ice

NFL type Gridiron Football is Rugby made dangerous by all the armour, girlified rugby

:trollface:

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14 hours ago, sidcow said:

Who saw Apple overtaking Microsoft who seemed untouchable?

I worked for Apple back in the 80's and 90's  ... it was rather niche  and clearly a superior product but what Corporate clients we did have soon phased out from Powerbooks and Duos to Win based platforms , the fact that Microsoft released Office upgrades much later on the Mac platform didn't help in the corporate world   

I went to a prototype meeting one day with touch screen monitors and Apple newtons ..both products were crap really and i sorta recall saying to myself , if this is Apples future they are doomed  .... luckily I said it quietly and some genius sorta went away and merged the clunky touch screen and shrunk the newton and the rest is history

 

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8 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

That's the sign of a declining and/or boring sport imo.

Snooker and Cricket spring to mind. Both have to invent shorter versions and try to make them more appealing, and try to inject fake excitement and atmosphere mainly because the real versions are too boring to hold a decent audience.

i don't think its the sport that has got boring, its the attention span of the public has got shorter. We live in an instant gratification era now where everything has to be instantaneous. I'm just as bad, I used to love reading but haven't read a book in ages - i'm too distracted all the time! 

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4 hours ago, tonyh29 said:

I worked for Apple back in the 80's and 90's  ... it was rather niche  and clearly a superior product but what Corporate clients we did have soon phased out from Powerbooks and Duos to Win based platforms , the fact that Microsoft released Office upgrades much later on the Mac platform didn't help in the corporate world   

I went to a prototype meeting one day with touch screen monitors and Apple newtons ..both products were crap really and i sorta recall saying to myself , if this is Apples future they are doomed  .... luckily I said it quietly and some genius sorta went away and merged the clunky touch screen and shrunk the newton and the rest is history

 

It amuses me to think back to the early days of computing when Apple was seen as the plucky upstart and championed by people against the big evil Microsoft. Nowadays the same people are probably hating on Apple and labelling everyone who has an Apple product as an 'iSheep'*

 

*anyone who uses that phrase is already written off as a human being. 

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8 hours ago, BOF said:

But it's usually pixelated.

Can't stand it. They're usually whimpering and squealing before its anywhere near their bush (and yes, they often resemble bushes!)

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9 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

That's the sign of a declining and/or boring sport imo.

Snooker and Cricket spring to mind. Both have to invent shorter versions and try to make them more appealing, and try to inject fake excitement and atmosphere mainly because the real versions are too boring to hold a decent audience.

To be fair I don't think the excitement of 20/20 cricket is fake.  I think it's just excitement. 

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10 hours ago, villa4europe said:

The console itself maybe but the division had $4.9bn in sales and $800m in profit last year

Things like PS+ and the accessories must be hugely profitable 

They ought to give them away I think. 

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the dude came up with the idea of selling a really stupidly expensive video game and then getting the players hooked on payable add ons, making sure they couldn't really play it well without loads of upgrades and special features. 

People's eyes must have lit up the boardroom. 

Having not bought a console myself since the PS1 I was utterly gob smacked when my son started begging for top up cards.  They are like a drug dealer giving free samples (albeit at £50 a pop) to get people hooked then rake in the constant flow of repeat business.  It's a total racket. 

Whilst we're on the subject remember how Nintendo and Sega had total world domination of the gaming market? Who saw Sega totally having to withdraw and Nintendo rely on niche products whilst 2 new entrants came in and blew away their dominant position with loyal customers in just a few short years. 

It does feel like no matter how big and dominant a tech company is now they are only one or two bad products away from disaster..... And they will make those mistakes sooner or later. 

Also see Nokia phones. 

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10 hours ago, Michelsen said:

I think that’s pretty accurate. 

Baseball is going through a period of self-scrutiny at the moment, trying to come up with innovations to make the game faster in order to attract the younger audience (I think numbers show that the average baseball fan is getting older). Of course, most of these innovations tend to upset the purists and the established fan base, so it’s a bit of a dilemma. 

Given that the average length of the game in the mid 1940's was under 2 hours and it's currently over 3 hours, I would think it would be possible to speed things up without upsetting the purists.

Baseball lost me long ago.  I went to a Royals game a couple of summers ago with my brother and his friends when I was visiting KC and the most exciting part of the evening was seeing how much better the beer selection was compared to when I had last been there in the early '80s.

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2 hours ago, Xela said:

i don't think its the sport that has got boring, its the attention span of the public has got shorter. We live in an instant gratification era now where everything has to be instantaneous. I'm just as bad, I used to love reading but haven't read a book in ages - i'm too distracted all the time! 

I can assure you, cricket has always been boring

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36 minutes ago, il_serpente said:

Given that the average length of the game in the mid 1940's was under 2 hours and it's currently over 3 hours, I would think it would be possible to speed things up without upsetting the purists.

Baseball lost me long ago.  I went to a Royals game a couple of summers ago with my brother and his friends when I was visiting KC and the most exciting part of the evening was seeing how much better the beer selection was compared to when I had last been there in the early '80s.

Surely all the American sports getting longer and longer is purely the commercial breaks they insist upon.  NFL is almost unwatchable live on TV for me unless I am reading a book at the same time and can switch between the two when the programme drops in and out of the action.  I suppose the more feeble minded or younger people won't do that sort of thing and change the channel instead during baseball/cricket/NFL etc or just not watch altogether.  What does surprise me is that the basketball players seem to be the best-paid American sportsmen having looked at that graph on the previous page, I'd have thought it would be NFL.

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54 minutes ago, il_serpente said:

Given that the average length of the game in the mid 1940's was under 2 hours and it's currently over 3 hours, I would think it would be possible to speed things up without upsetting the purists.

Ad breaks and the emergence of the relief pitcher would account for most of that increase, I’d imagine. They’ve actually cut ad breaks slightly, but it’s impossible to remove them all together, and relief pitchers will only play a bigger part going forward, going by current trends. 

You could enforce limits on pitching changes, but that would certainly upset the purists. 

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2 hours ago, Michelsen said:

Ad breaks and the emergence of the relief pitcher would account for most of that increase, I’d imagine. They’ve actually cut ad breaks slightly, but it’s impossible to remove them all together, and relief pitchers will only play a bigger part going forward, going by current trends. 

You could enforce limits on pitching changes, but that would certainly upset the purists. 

Well, the true purists should be upset about the fact that pitchers rarely pitch complete games any more.  They might not like new rules that enforce a return to the good old days, but they should be happy with the results if they're really purists.

Average game duration was still under 2:30 in the early seventies when I first became a fan and relief pitchers were already heavily used then, though probably not as much as today.  The Rolaids Relief Man award for best relief pitcher was started around that time.  So that still leaves over 1/2 hour that's been added to games primarily for other reasons.   I think back then, players just got on with it and played the game.  Batters didn't keep stepping out of the batter's box, pitchers weren't constantly stepping off the rubber.  You'd see some of that stuff in playoffs and world series games, but for the most part the game moved relatively quickly.

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