What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture

philnotfil · Nov 2, 2022

I had never seen this idea of finite vs infinite games. An interesting lens for viewing things.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newslet...ics-ruined-baseball-sports-music-film/671924/

The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that there are two kinds of games in life: finite and infinite. A finite game is played to win; there are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing; the goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. The midterm elections are finite games. American democracy is an infinite game. A great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world comes from not knowing the difference. A bad fight can destroy a marriage. A challenged election can destabilize a democracy. In baseball, winning the World Series is a finite game, while growing the popularity of Major League Baseball is an infinite game. What happened, I think, is that baseball’s finite game was solved so completely in such a way that the infinite game was lost.
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When universal smarts lead to universal strategies, it can lead to a more homogenous product. Take the NBA. When every basketball team wakes up to the calculation that three points is 50 percent more than two points, you get a league-wide blitz of three-point shooting to take advantage of the discrepancy. Before the 2011–12 season, the league as a whole had never averaged more than 20 three-point-shot attempts per game. This year, no team is attempting fewer than 25 threes per game; four teams are attempting more than 40.
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As I’ve written before, the quantitative revolution in culture is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity. Take the music industry. Before the ’90s, music labels routinely lied to Billboard about their sales figures to boost their preferred artists. In 1991, Billboard switched methodologies to use more objective data, including point-of-sale information and radio surveys that didn’t rely on input from the labels. The charts changed overnight. Rock-and-roll bands were toppled, and hip-hop and country surged. When the charts became more honest, they also became more static. Popular songs stick around longer than they used to. One analysis of the history of pop-music styles found that rap and hip-hop have dominated American pop music longer than any other musical genre. As the analytics revolution in music grew, radio playlists became more repetitive, and by some measures, the most popular songs became more similar to one another.
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Or take film. As with music, you could certainly make the case that the communications revolution has created an abundance of video content that, in the aggregate, is fantastically diverse. But although the rules for making a viral video, or a critically acclaimed film, are deeply complex, blockbuster movies look a lot like a solved equation. In 2019, the 10 biggest films by domestic box office included two Marvel sequels, two animated-film sequels, a reboot of a ’90s blockbuster, and a Batman spin-off. In 2022, the 10 biggest films by domestic box office included two Marvel sequels, one animated-film sequel, a reboot of a ’90s blockbuster, and a Batman spin-off. Correctly observing that audiences responded predictably to familiar intellectual property, studios invested in a strategy that has squeezed original IP from the top-10 charts. Blockbusters are kinda boring now, not because Hollywood is stupid, but because it got so smart.
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docspor · Nov 2, 2022

The solution for the lameness of baseball has been around a long time.
1. no pitchers. a pitching machine throws each batter 3 strikes - random style of pitch I guess.
2. like kickball, hitting a base runner below the head with the ball while he's not on base is an out.

soccer: two balls, no offsides

l_boy · Nov 2, 2022

docspor said: ↑

The solution for the lameness of baseball has been around a long time.
1. no pitchers. a pitching machine throws each batter 3 strikes - random style of pitch I guess.
2. like kickball, hitting a base runner below the head with the ball while he's not on base is an out.

soccer: two balls, no offsides
Click to expand...

Have the pitcher and catcher play for the same time. The catcher plays for the other team - OR -

Change the strike zone - to the actual batter. A miss is a ball.

The batter may throw the bat at the pitcher at any time, or anybody else for that matter, but he then loses the bat for the rest of his “at bat”

Allow the batter to carry the bat while running the bases (unless he has already thrown it at the pitcher or infielder - at which point the infielders may throw it back at the base runner )

Allow tackling the base runner.

Hitting the base runner with the ball is an out.

As to stolen bases, allow them to steal the actual base, resulting in one less base to home. But they have to carry the base while running the bases. It is not officially stolen until the base runner crosses home.

The base runner can use the actual base to protect himself from balls being thrown at him to make him out.

If the base runner steals the actual base, but fails to make it home, he has to return the base to its proper spot, during which the on field players can hit him with the ball, but only if the ball is thrown from one of the remaining bases or pitchers mound.

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