The broadcast teams are starting to push for making the Covid-season rules permanent. They probably will be, because the people who run baseball are dumb—and so are most of the people following it now. [thread]

Starting the runner at second in extras is dumb because you’re changing the nature of the game in the same game. You can score the winning run without ever actually having to get someone on base. That’s not baseball. But worse is expanding playoffs. (Cont’d)

People are dumb now, and we live in a culture with a seven-second attention span. But adding another round of playoffs makes the lengthy regular season pointless. In the NBA, eighth teams almost never beat one teams. Expanded playoffs doesn’t result in silly outcomes. But...

In baseball, it happens all the time. Baseball has the longest regular season because the whole point is rewarding incremental differences that show themselves as greatness over huge sample sizes...

The difference between great players and good ones shows up in growing collections of 162-game seasons. Same with great teams vs good ones. You can’t see the difference between a 90-win team and a 103-win team in one series or one week. But...

Expanded playoffs means you regularly have 86-win teams knocking out 103-win teams during a freaky weak. Baseball has more randomness built into it than any other sport. All you do when you increase the playoffs is increase the randomness. And that...

...directly cuts against what baseball is all about. But unfortunately as a culture we no longer value small differences magnified over time. Everything is about instant gratification turning baseball into that just makes it a weaker version of other high-adrenaline sports.

Trying to bring in fans by making baseball less like baseball is a fool’s errand. You’ll have some initial added interest—but eventually people will look for better fixes elsewhere. And those who’ve invested in a 162 (or 154) game season will turn away when it adds up to nothing

It’s not about “traditionalism.” It’s about what baseball *is.* Turning it into a ever shorter-sprint crapshoot takes away the distinguishing features that make baseball great and distinctive. But nobody cares anymore. (The end.)