It doesn't take a genius to...fix baseball?

Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports enlisted some genius to provide ideas on how to solve baseball's perceived 'problems.'

https://sports.yahoo.com/10-degrees-mensa-members-idea-can-solve-almost-baseballs-problems-070035170.html

Passan lists Nick Elam's CV so as to demand that we deem him credible.  He then explains the Elam Ending for basketball, in which the target score of leader plus 7 replaces the clock at the first whistle under 3:30 to decide a winner.

Of course, Bokolis has been saying for years that the NBA is NASCAR; they go back and forth 200 times, yet it all gets sorted out in the last four minutes, during which they play a different game than they played for the first 44.  That's not to make myself out as some genius; I've been hearing similar solutions from everyone with an opinion since I was a kid.

While there are some things that Bokolis has been advocating all along, there is too much legislation for my taste.  Addressing inconveniences with legislation smacks of Soviet Communism, and they will eventually legislate themselves into a corner.

The thing that makes baseball beautiful is that it is essentially the same game it has always been.  That is what allows for comparative analysis of players of different eras through statistics.  You cannot do this in the NBA or NFL because both of those have had multiple rules overhauls and multiple derivations from prior versions of their respective games.

In a 'Dynamic Strike Zone,' Elam advocates something similar to what umpires- with a 'swing the bats, boys!'- were able to do before technology standardized the strike zone.  As shown with the NFL and NBA above, it's better to not legislate these kinds of things and having cameras everywhere gives you more than you've bargained for.

Bokolis has always been keen on stifling the parade of relievers and making two 15-team leagues/divisions.  I've never stated it here, but I've always thought there should be an 'airspace' rule on guys sliding into bases.  Most of the rest of the ideas are ineffectual, however cute, and Elam concedes that he hasn't put full thought into the issue.

Bokolis maintains that you will solve the pace issues by not allowing managers to call the pitches from the dugouts, by not allowing the batter any pause for air when he takes a strike and by requiring any pitcher brought on via mid-inning pitching change to finish the inning, or die trying.

If you speed things up, batters will feel a lot worse about striking out if it happens in 30-40 seconds instead of as long as it takes to read Casey at the Bat.

Bokolis has no problem with shifting.  If the batters refuse to hit the ball the other way, it's on them.  But, if a team over-shifts, they have to stay in that exact positioning for the duration of the AB.  No shuffling around after each pitch.

Ultimately, while a team game, baseball is dominated by a series of one-on-one matchups.  In these cases, psychology often matters more than talent.  At some point, pitchers became less confident in their stuff and so fearful of contact that they resorted to nibbling or, most notably in the case of John Franco, downright refusing to throw strikes.  Granted, today's players are better at punishing 'cock-shots' than those of prior generations.  This, of course, turns the battle into a hunt.

Perhaps if pitchers realized that behemoths like Stanton and Judge strike out over four times as often as they hit home runs, the pitchers could regain the comfort and confidence in the matchup, and throw with more conviction instead of alternately nibbling and trying to make the perfect pitch.

The faster they mow down those batters, the faster the game will go...and we didn't have to reinvent the game.

The Chapel belongs in a Shrine?

In the course of shirking stuff that I actually have to do, Bokolis has wandered to the minutiae of all minutiae and put together something quite pointless, but possibly fun for baseball geeks.  You can say it was done For Love of the Game {rimshot}.

After seeing this movie enough times, Bokolis was moved enough to try and conjure the stats for protagonist Billy Chapel.  Of course, I first checked the Interwebs, as I was sure someone else out there was at least as demented- and far more tormented- so as to have already done this.  Without going too far, I found two of note, here and here.

It was great stuff and, in reading the posts, you see that these guys wasted valuable brain cells, I mean, burned off a good deal nervous energy to chase out the demon.  Bokolis didn't quite agree with the final statistics, or with some of the reasoning, so, instead of criticizing,  I jumped into the rabbit hole to (allegedly) improve upon the existing.  I have to acknowledge that they afforded me the luxury of not starting from scratch, which allowed me to tinker instead of concoct, and greatly reduced the amount of time spent.

More time was spent writing this gibberish.

The macro:  Given the era in which Chapel played and the fact that I'm showing him to have pitched longer into games to justify the high decision rate, I could not make him have the ultra-low WHIPs you see from today's elite pitchers.  Similarly, I wasn't going to give him the ultra-high K/BB ratio common among today's elite pitchers.  I had to make him an innings eater sufficient to pack ~4100 innings into 19 years that included some abbreviated seasons, yet I did not see him as a strikeout king and the era didn't allow for it.  To boot, in the homer heaven that was the Tiger Stadium right field porch, he had to be a ground ball pitcher.

Given his era and ballpark, I simply could not make Chapel Koufax/Pedro dominant.  When it came down to it, I essentially took Luis Tiant and made him better, sufficient to get over 95% on the first HOF ballot.  I am speculating that this is the type of pitcher the author of the underlying book had in mind when he wrote the book.

So, the ratios of 7.3 H9, 2.5 BB9, 6.3 K9 and 2.5 K/BB are comfortably within the range of the best pitchers of the era.  At almost 2900 career strikeouts, I thought I was a bit generous.  Given his story, I didn't see Chapel attaining 300 wins and wanted to keep him far enough below so that it wouldn't be a carrot.  Finally, I wanted to give him a top 50 winning percentage, but stay true to the line in the movie that he lost 134 games in 15 years.

The micro:  Like the others, I granted Chapel the rookie of the year award.  Unlike the others, who gave him a full first season, I thought it more realistic that Chapel would be used as a reliever and spot starter after first being called up.  So, I feathered him in as a post-strike call-up, while preserving his rookie status for the 1982 season.  I was uneasy about having him reach his peak so soon, as it is somewhat more unlikely that someone with 3 big years by his age 25 season would have such longevity.

Taking a cue from the movie, I made Chapel's stats more choppy from the time he claimed his shoulder issues started.  1990, '92 and '94 were comparatively pedestrian seasons, rebounding each time with terrific seasons.  I give that smoking-hot masseuse the credit.

I gave Chapel the three Cy Young awards seen in the film, as well as an MVP award in 1984, when the Tigers won everything.  He probably got hosed on the Cy Young in 1993.  You may presume that someone else won more games, which was the prevailing of the major criteria at the time.

For the comeback from the hand injury, I ramped up the innings from the first year to the second year more dramatically than the others.  It can be presumed that Chapel came back during the 1996 season, was eventually shut down, then increased the workload in 1997.

I wanted to give Chapel one solid season late in his career, but not a big year.   By default, his was going to be 1998.  For his final season, we are essentially fed the stats.  They are incongruous with his ratios, so you have to assume that he either often pitched out of major trouble, or was the beneficiary of an inordinate number of unearned runs.

We should also keep in mind that, while the movie was depicting the prevailing time, the underlying book was written sometime before 1988.  As such, even though I factor in the 1994 strike, we cannot rightfully presume the post-strike shrinking strike zone, shrinking ballparks, juiced ball and juiced players.  In the author's universe, the era never changes, and George W. Bush's 1993 Texas Rangers, in whose locker room the Steroid Era jumped off (after having been hatched in the 1987 Oakland A's locker room), never happened.



I took the familiar Baseball Reference format for this.  For shits and giggles, I even worked in ERA+.

For each individual season, I borrowed from an actual Detroit Tigers player.   Now, I should note that, in general, ERA+ is somewhat flawed in that it does not account for the declining workload for starting pitchers, as starters are no longer typically left in until they fail.  I'm not sure there's a metric that considers and factors the starter finishing the 7th, 8th and/or 9th innings.

In the case of the Tigers, the basis for ERA+ also reflects that their pitching, while never dominant during Chapel's (movie) career, was putrid in the late 90s, which indirectly helps Chapel.  Further, as discussed above, his stats in his final years simply reflect an aging pitcher and not a junk-baller in a hitting haven.  Otherwise, he would've had the same nickel ERA as the actual Tigers of those days.

Therefore, I deemed it necessary to set the basis for ERA+ for the final three seasons as equal to the average of the bases used in 1981-1993.  It might mean that 1994-96 are out of whack, but that is not enough of a concern to me.

For the career number, I weighted the season's number according to its percentage of Chapel's career innings pitched.  The 152 career ERA+ puts him just under Pedro Martinez, currently behind only Kershaw among starting pitchers.  Had I used the actual basis in his last three seasons, ERA+ would increase to 155, (within rounding error, but) above Pedro.

I thought about adding FIP, but I didn't want to fool around with assigning HR to each season, as that would be too random and poorly researched.

Well, have at it.  Hopefully, clicking the picture will expand into something more easily viewable.  If it doesn't, nyeh.

That's all the fuck I got.  If someone can figure out Chapel's WAR, they need serious help are better than I am.