Of course, although players like Boggs and even Ichiro seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule.
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CPBL has a zero tolerance policy for players with criminal history
Boggsy!!
Great hitter Wade Boggs.
Chose contact over power.
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/OldFoolishFlatcoatretriever-size_restricted.gif
Wow … what is this strange language ? Rather like me trying to explain Cricket to someone who has never seen it , I imagine 
Funny. Sabermetrics and the World Baseball Classic were what made me a baseball fan once more. Without the two, the game is just too dang slow to be interesting.
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I feel bad for him. Made mistakes as a teen, prevented from pursuing his dream the rest of his life.
I have zero faith in the US’s current plea bargain system. If they are rewarding the DAs for forcing plea bargains, that’s just plain wrong. The DA is supposed to be the one person you can rely on when you don’t have the kind of money to get a lawyer.
In this case, it’s even more complicated. Except for the plea bargain, Luke Heimlich has been insisting his innocence. The DA convinced his parents who then forced Luke to accept the plea bargain.
It’s a heart breaking story, to know that a girl might be molested at such a young age, and to know because of a broken justice system, someone never gotten a chance to prove his innocence.
My theory is that baseball as a spectator sport depends on fans who actually played the game as children. Not many MLB players played the game as children, although almost all were groomed for baseball skills since they were children. Groomed and coached /= good baseball, imo.
Outside some backwaters in New England and some semi-rural urban areas in the Southeast, sandlot games aren’t played anymore in the US. When I was a kid summer days were literally spent playing baseball. Like, from after breakfast until dinner time. If it was raining everybody went to the YMCA and played wiffleball on the basketball court and of course they did all of the above outside their parents’ supervision.
Kids aren’t raised that way any more, and its glaringly obvious in the poor level of individual play we see by Americans in MLB. Every game I watch I see some stupid play that never would have taken place even as recently as thirty years ago. Running errors, fielding errors, nobody can bunt. Etc.
They have beautiful swings, however. And pitchers have beautiful form. Fastballs have never been so widely thrown at such high velocities.
Kids in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Central and South America are still allowed to spend time outside their parents’ supervision, and if they’ve grown up playing sandlot ball they become the players that do not make these kinds of errors in MLB.
Sabermetrics and Moneyball are what injected new life in MLB after the 1994 players strike nearly killed it. Not sufficient for me, though. True, we have beautiful home-run swings and high fastball velocities, but too few of the other skills that make up baseball. Today the MLB is mostly cringe-inducing.
The issue here is that who would find bunting exciting to watch? The only way bunting would be exciting is that if most bunts don’t result in an out, and it would greatly help if you don’t already know that bunting decreases your team’s run expectancy.
And that’s the problem with many of the “other skills that make up baseball”… They have fallen to the wayside because with the advent of sabermetrics, they’ve been proven ineffective when most players have decent enough fielding skills. Why would you get excited over something that hurts your team’s chances for winning?
The same applies to other things like base stealing. On average a good base runner might to able to steal 2 bases out of every 3 attempts, but considering that 1 failure causes more harm to the team’s chances for winning than the 2 successful stolen bases, base stealing becomes meaningless.
Back to bunting, given two eras, 2002 the year Oakland As’ first made moneyball famous, and the current 2018 season, which do you think has a higher bunt for a hit rate?
The fact is that the league BUH% in 2002 was 23.4%. So far this year, MLB’s BUH% is 27.8 %. Of course you can take that stat and draw many conclusions. Perhaps fielders as you say are just worse than they used to be, but the same can be said about bunting when used as a surprise is much more effective than when everyone knew what’s coming.
In 2002, there were 3299 bunt attempts. Of those, 2527 plate appearances ended up hurting the team’s chances for winning. If you know that, how can bunting make a fan feel like it’s something worth watching?
The fact is if some of these things are really an important part of baseball, then change the rules to award them more or penalize them less, like when they moved the plate back to give pitchers less of an edge.
If the rules stay the way they are, bunting and many other aspects of baseball will have a place similar to the hidden ball trick. It’s fun when it’s done once in a while, but gets increasingly irritating with more frequent attempts.
Well, obviously I’m not able to make myself clear here. The answer is that I would find bunting (very) interesting to watch because I spent my youth actually playing baseball.
Another way to explain is this. If you’re younger than (say) 40, then you probably didn’t spend much time as a kid playing sandlot baseball. For you to find MLB interesting, you must be interested in sabermetrics and the game theory side of the game. You have to be: everything else about the game is boring to watch. Which is fine.
But to those of who did spend our youth playing uncoached/unsupervised sandlot baseball, today’s game is sad to watch because all the skill has gone out of it. Shifted infields, bad fielding, bad bunting, beautiful home run swings, inexplicable base running, pitchers with perfect form, fastballs >95mph, players who it seems never spent any time at all playing simple catch, game-theory infield shifts, and a seeming lack of passion about the game (plenty passion about winning, though) seem to make up modern MLB.
I understand why some people like it. As a person who played thousands of hours of sandlot baseball, though, I’m not one.
I’ve actually spent my youth playing unsupervised baseball. I wish I had the opportunity to play on a real team instead. I would find MLB interesting even without sabermetrics. Although, it doesn’t hurt the game knowing there’s a new and more effective way to analyze the value of each play and players. If anything, I find making sense of the game makes it more enjoyable.
Yeah, I don’t mean play sandlot ball exclusively. I played organized baseball until I was nearly 21. Started playing baseball when I was 6. My evil cousin and his evil mother came to our house to brag about his being enrolled in LL ball. My mother enrolled me and my brother, too. The evils came to our first practice so they could both cackle when I ate the first ground ball I ever saw (ok, it did result in a comical fat lip). I can still remember the thrill of buying league socks - and a real jockstrap - and being issued my very first team uniform. No swimming on game day! Etc.
Anyway, I watched ESPN highlights on youtube two nights ago and saw a MLB center fielder misplay a fly ball into a homer in right centerfield. He found the wall, leapt (not far) but couldn’t put the ball in the webbing, and the ball bounced out and over the fence for a HR.
Sigh. Real baseball is that if the ball hits leather you catch it, no matter what. In 1985 that play would have happened so infrequently that it would have been talked about constantly, all year long. That would have been beyond remarkable. Once a year play, maybe. Now such misplays happen every game, it seems. No big deal in MLB ca2018.
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Damn , I think I have something in my eye 
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Having a bunt arsenal is always a useful tool. Not many teams do much bunt defense and you can really catch people sleeping on certain situations where they aren’t ready of make real stupid mental errors. I liked bunting myself, rarely actually bunted besides a few times that caught someone off guard. Mostly I’ll show bunt randomly and put a thought into the pitchers head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPz09oNj55Y
An all Mandarin interview with Cleveland Indians’ Hu Chih-wei.
What I love about this interview is that the host, an youtuber called Tainan Josh, formed his questions based on observations using advanced stats.
He noticed that Hu’s primary weapon, his change up, underwent a huge drop in spin rate between 2017 and 2018. Josh assumed it meant Hu changed his grip, and was curious why could someone make changes to his most important pitch.
Hu explained that as he trained to improve his fastball, it increased the spin rate of his original change up grip, rendering it useless by late 2017, forcing him to ditch it.
It’s pretty fascinating, and shows how advanced stats can make baseball more interesting.
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I have no idea where to put this, but this looks like great fun
He had young Kaku pitch on two days rest after throwing 99 pitches.
Coach Kaku=abusive MFKR.
Gee, I amwonder why every Asian starting pitcher in the MLB has undergone Tommy John?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivoEQKWcRnw
Statcast and other statistics proving that MLB changed the ball during the playoffs.
What a fun deep dive into what really went on for the catcher who couldn’t throw.
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Interesting analysis.