TVTropes gets made fun of a lot but it is a little astonishing how consistent that wiki’s voice is. It’s a great wiki to go to if you want to simulate having one specific autistic fifteen-year-old computer nerd infodump to you about any piece of media that exists. To be clear I am saying this as an overwhelmingly positive thing
“He is the sap of life, the blood throbbing in the veins, the sweet burst of the grape in the mouth… For the other gods keep their distance, but Dionysus possesses his followers completely and is wholly possessed in turn”
— The Greek Myths, by Robin Waterfield, about Dionysus
oh so the Yankees made their bats thicker and hit 20 runs bc of it and the league is just like yeah they’re allowed to do that?? this whole time apparently it’s been perfectly legal to just change the bats to make it easier and no one tried it until right now?? 150 years this sport has been around and suddenly someone had a bright idea??
look at this shit man
Jock clarification: it’s the shape of the bat, not the thickness.
Basically, the part of the bat marked in green is the area where hits tend to become home runs (on a standard bat). The designers of the new bat, now being called the torpedo bat or the bowling pin bat, realized that a lot of batters were making the majority of their contact within the red zone—especially as pitcher velocity has increased, which makes it harder to swing fast enough to make good contact with the thickest part of the bat, and as pitchers rely more on deceptive pitches with more horizontal movement, so batters might swing expecting something to be over the middle of the plate and instead it ends up inside, closer to them. On a standard bat, the thinner red zone results in more foul balls and weak infield hits.
The diameter of the torpedo bats is actually comparable to the widest part of a standard bat (the very end), and maximum diameter is regulated by the MLB. However, you don’t hit home runs off the very end of the bat—it just doesn’t happen. So instead, the torpedo bat shifts the widest part of the bat from the end to the red zone, where batters are most likely to make contact, and the increased width increases the likelihood of a home run or at least a well-hit ball from that zone. The end section of the green zone remains about the same width, because if you’re getting the bat around and making contact at that spot you’re already fine and don’t need much assistance, and the end is narrower because if you get a hit that far down it’s pure dumb luck and probably wouldn’t do anything anyway.
Personally I’m of two minds on this change. On the one hand, fuck the Yankees on principle. Also, if there’s an access issue I do think the league should intervene—the gap between wealthy teams and less wealthy teams has been growing lately, and some teams, players, and fan bases are getting screwed over as a result. (It’s very fitting that the other bat in this example belongs to the As, who are playing in completely inadequate facilities this season because their owner is an asshole.)
On the other hand… pitching has gotten absurd in the last few decades. Velocity has been increasing to the point where pitchers are more likely to need elbow surgery than not, and even high school players are tearing their UCLs trying to emulate what they see in the big leagues. Pitchers’ duels are theoretically exciting but excruciating to watch, so as a fan I am generally in favor of anything that puts the ball in play more. Personally I would rather see changes that allow for more hits while also safeguarding the health of pitchers (like making changes to the ball that would force pitchers to slow down), but so far that hasn’t been a serious conversation. And if my team gets a hold of these bats and starts getting hits, I’m not going to complain.
I am amazed to learn that pitching has grown supersonic fast, somehow
How? When? Who? Etc
There are a lot of different factors and imo they’re all fascinating.
1) In general, athletic performance has improved across the board. We know a LOT more about how the body works and how to keep it in good health—professional athletes don’t smoke anymore, which is the most obvious example.
2) Approaches to batting has changed. Historically some positions were valued more for their defensive skills than their hitting ability, including shortstops and pitchers themselves. As performance improves and sports becomes more competitive and lucrative, infielders have honed their batting skills to have an edge. The American League also introduced the designated hitter in the 70s and the National League finally followed in the last few years, which meant that, on the one hand, pitchers were no longer guaranteed an out (the pitcher on the opposing team) and had another Good batter they had to face, but on the other, they no longer had to worry about developing any batting skills whatsoever and could devote even more time to pitching.
3) Technology has changed. Baseball has always been a very mathematical sport, because it’s MUCH easier to track exactly what every player is doing compared to basketball, soccer, or American football. With advanced recording technology, players can analyze their own performance and their opponents in minute detail. Take an example from this vlogger who does baseball analysis:
This is him noticing that the pitcher holds his glove slightly closer to the low button on his shirt when he’s about to throw certain pitches. These are details that players can notice in order to predict what type of pitch is about to be thrown—will it be a fastball that comes in a straight line, or a changeup that is surprisingly slow, or a a sinker that drops as it reaches the plate?
Giving away these details is called “tipping pitches.” Historically, being able to throw fast was important, sure, but pitchers could also be pretty successful just by controlling WHERE the ball would cross the plate, and tricking batters into swinging at the wrong time or place. Today, it’s much much easier to accidentally tip your pitches because these kinds of replays are possible and batters know what to look for. Throwing fast enough that it doesn’t MATTER is the best way to ensure the batter doesn’t get a hit.
It’s also much easier for players to analyze their own minute mistakes and fix them, which again makes both pitchers and batters better than they used to be, and also measuring speed has gotten better. Pitchers are working towards a target, a specific goal, which psychologically makes that high speed more attainable.
On a related note: it’s been commonly believed for upwards of 70 years that hitting a fastball is the hardest skill in sports. On average a batter has 150 milliseconds to decide whether or not to swing. You can try it yourself. That simulator replicates a 90 mph fastball, which might have been the league average in the 90s or early 00s. It’s hard to say for sure because radar technology has improved so much in the last few years. Today, the league average is a little above 94 mph—a small difference, but one that matters a lot when you’re talking about the minuscule amount of time involved. This chart shows the number of pitches thrown above 100 mph since 2008. (It’s from last year so it is somewhat outdated, and bear in mind teams probably throw upwards of 24,000 pitches every season, but still.)
4) Medicine has improved. Also in the 1970s, a surgeon named Frank Jobe operated on a pitcher named Tommy John who had a torn UCL (an elbow ligament), grafting a tendon from his opposite forearm. John went on to play 14 more seasons, which was a pretty incredible success. UCL injuries are the most common reasons pitchers would have to cut their careers short, but Tommy John surgery has a high success rate, somewhere around 90% for general life and 80% for athletes returning to high-level sports; players typically only miss one season, and can usually recovery most if not all of their pitching speed, and undergo surgery more than once if necessary, although the rate of success does drop sharply after the second.
As a result, pitchers have become less cautious. Nobody wants a season-ending injury, of course, but elbow overuse is not a career-ending injury the way it used to be. Pitching faster won’t necessarily shorten your career, while pitching slower might mean your career will be long but mediocre, just because the competition is that fierce.
Finally, there does seem to be a ceiling. Aroldis Chapman holds the record for fastest pitch in an MLB game—105.8—and that record has held steady since 2010 with verrrrrry few serious challengers. Also, higher velocity does typically mean a pitcher has less control over the ball, so there are diminishing rates of returns. If you’re constantly throwing 105 fastballs in the dirt or over a batter’s head or six inches outside the plate, batters aren’t going to be tricked into swinging at it. So even those extremely fast pitchers don’t always reach those speeds, and many reliable pitchers do tend to hover in the 91-94 range for fastballs. Pitches with more movement also tend to be slower—and pitchers do rely on these fairly often as well, as I mentioned in my original comment. As long as they’re good at not tipping pitches, there is a lot of benefit to switching between pitches because it increases the complexity of the decision the batter has to make in those ~150 milliseconds.
the rapid disintegration of rainbow capitalism pretty much encapsulates the problem with rainbow capitalism in the first place: it is and always was performative fair-weather allyship that evaporated in the face of any real political pressure
Problem? It was never a problem, unless you had unrealistic expectations for what it meant. It was a symptom, and a good one. — Be strategic and think about this deeper for a minute.
It was absolutely performative fair-weather allyship. But it was a bellwether that the pink dollar was worth taking over any hypothetical backlash a business might face for supporting the queers. For some, and at some times in the past, it was a reassurance that they would do business with you even if they knew you were gay, and that was a huge issue if you eg. wanted to buy a house or a car. And it helped make queerness both more visible and more normalised in society, instead of trying to sweep teh gays back into the closet.
You’re not going to get rid of cynical cash grabs so long as capitalism is around, so you might as well be clear-eyed about it and recognise that while rainbow merch is totally unreliable for actual support, it was a sign that the smart money was betting in your favour.
You can always trust a business to find a sort of middle space that’s vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and sit there avoiding all controversy in the absolute most craven and soulless way possible.
This means that a business is in fact a very good indicator of what’s vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and what counts as controversy.
Don’t think of them as allies. They aren’t people. They can’t be. Think of them as a barometer. If the barometer is up, you’ve probably got sunny skies. When the barometer starts dropping, prepare for heavy weather moving in.
I often refer to rainbow capitalism as an indicator species. Not a keystone species, not a load-bearing organism holding an ecosystem (or an economic system) together. Rainbow capitalism is fragile like a frog species dependent on clean water and an abundance of insects. When its environment changes, becomes polluted, becomes fragmented, it vanishes. Its presence or absence indicates to observers the health of its surroundings just as a literal indicator species reflects whether specific environmental conditions are met.
