Major League Baseball (MLB) has been losing fans for several years. The average attendance for a MLB game has been decreasing for a number of years. If Major League Baseball would like to compete with popularity of professional sports such as Professional football (NFL) and Professional basketball (NBA), they need to embrace some of technologies that have made those sports so successful in recent years. Right now, MLB has a replay system used for determining home runs that are either fair or foul, whether the ball actually left the playing field or whether the ball was interfered with by a spectator. MLB should have an instant replay system that can be used for all judgment calls excluding ball and strike calls. MLB could adopt a similar policy that the NFL has where the head coach is given a certain number of challenges he can use to begin the instant replay process i.e. limiting coaches to two to three challenges per game. MLB could also look into adding an extra umpire to help with the replay system and alleviate time used for the challenges.
The challenge for implementing an instant replay system in MLB can potentially impact the speed of the game. That has been one of the major arguments against replay in MLB by the baseball purists. The purists seem to like the human and the mistakes that come along with humans making judgment calls that impact the game. The purists don’t seem to want to embrace emerging replay technologies in an effort the get the call correct because replay would interfere with the human element the purists embrace. “The lack of instant replay in baseball is one of those crises, and simply curling up in a ball and pretending that an issue in 2011 doesn't exist because it didn't exist in 1911 is p...
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... services. (2010, June 03). Denkinger supports replay in baseball. Retrieved from http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=5245891
Associated Press. (2010, June 2). Umpire: 'i just cost this kid a perfect game'. Retrieved from http://scores.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=300602106
MINTZ, A. (2011). How expanding instant replay can boost mlb’s bottom line . 22. Retrieved from http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2011/02/21/Opinion/Mintz-column.aspx?hl=instant replay in baseball&sc=0
White, P. (2010, June 12). Expanding instant replay not an easy call to make for mlb. USA TODAY. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2010-06-10-instant-replay_N.htm
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However, if the current rules remain in place and baseball continues without a salary cap, the only hope a small market team may have is to fend for themselves on the big market with financially superior teams. This becomes an exceedingly harder task when one team can afford the salary of two top players while those contracts are equal to the entire payroll of another team’s entire roster. Therefore, the question remains should baseball implement a salary cap, and if they do, how would it come into play. When asking the question regarding the salary cap, four supporting ideas arise for either the implementation of a salary cap or keeping it nonexistent.
Baseball statistics are meant to be a representation of a player’s talent. Since baseball’s inception around the mid-19th century, statistics have been used to interpret the talent level of any given player, however, the statistics that have been traditionally used to define talent are often times misleading. At a fundamental level, baseball, like any game, is about winning. To win games, teams have to score runs; to score runs, players have to get on base any way they can. All the while, the pitcher and the defense are supposed to prevent runs from scoring. As simplistic as this view sounds, the statistics being used to evaluate individual players were extremely flawed. In an attempt to develop more specific, objective forms of statistical analysis, the idea of Sabermetrics was born. Bill James, a man who never played or coached professional baseball, is often credited as a pioneer in the field and for coining the name as homage to the Society of American Baseball Research, or SABR. Eventually, the use of Sabermetrics became widespread in the Major Leagues, the first team being the Oakland Athletics, as depicted in Moneyball. Bill James and other baseball statisticians have developed various methods of evaluating a player performance that allow for a more objective view of the game, broadly defined as Sabermetrics.
Ever since the beginning of baseball players have been trying to bend the rules in order to give themselves a competitive edge over their opponent. Even people who do not watch baseball know about players 10 years ago using steroids and players just this year using biogenesis, but not many people realize that there is still cheating going on.
Baseball has been of the longest living sports in our world today. The game started with the idea of a stick and ball and now has become one of the most complex sports known in our society. Several rules and regulations have been added to help enhance the game for everyone. Although baseball has endured several issues during its history and development of the game the game has still been a success throughout the world.
...ame between Chicago Cubs and Tampa Bay Devil Rays in June 4th, 2003 after umpires found cork in his shattered bat. Sosa claims that it was an honest mistake and saying, “I use that bat for batting practice; it’s something that I take the blame for. It’s a mistake, I know that, I feel sorry, I just apologize to everybody that are embarrassed.” Sosa was 17th in the career home run list and people started to question were any of his 505 home runs also fraud. The cause for Sosa using the corked bat was because he was having a bad year in his 2003 season as a Chicago Cubs, not hitting a lot of home runs and being injured. The result of Sammy Sosa cheating in this game resulted in an 8 game suspension for the Cubs star.
Baseball is a unique sport in many different ways. It is the only major competitive sport that has no time limit. The success of a player is determined on how well he can play as an individual and how well the team plays along with him. There are many rules that determine the success of a player’s performance. A baseball game is played with two teams and each team is permitted 25 players per team; however this is only true for professional teams. There are three parts to baseball: offense, pitching, and defense.
Upon further investigation, baseball is more than just “One, two, three strikes you’re out,”there is a whole world of physics interacting and exerting itself upon the game, unseen to the human eye. So next time one sees a batter hit a home run off a knuckle ball at Coors Field in Denver, one will have a great appreciation for the physics of the game that came into play within that play.
Baseball remains today one of America’s most popular sports, and furthermore, baseball is one of America’s most successful forms of entertainment. As a result, Baseball is an economic being of its own. However, the sustainability of any professional sport organization depends directly on its economic capabilities. For example, in Baseball, all revenue is a product of the fans reaction to ticket prices, advertisements, television contracts, etc. During the devastating Great Depression in 1929, the fans of baseball experienced fiscal suffering. The appeal of baseball declined as more and more people were trying to make enough money to live. There was a significant drop in attention, attendance, and enjoyment. Although baseball’s vitality might have seemed threatened by the overwhelming Great Depression, the baseball community modernized their sport by implementing new changes that resulted in the game’s survival.
The problem of steroid use in baseball came into the national spotlight during the 1990s. It was during this time that home run records were being broken at an incredible pace. It was also during this period when several famous baseball players began to speak out about steroid use in baseball. The most controversial expose about steroid use in baseball is perhaps that of Ken Caminiti in 2002. Caminiti admitted publicly that he was using steroids when he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1996 and in the several seasons following that. That revelation of his drug use highlighted the issue of steroid use in baseball. From that point on, the professional baseball league was under constant scrutiny from the public as well as from the federal agencies. Many had criticized Major League Baseball as ineffective in its efforts to address the issue of steroids use in professional baseball. When the BALCO incident exploded in late 2003 and affected many big name players in baseball, the public and Congress demanded answers from the accused baseball players. It was then that steroid use in baseball sparked media frenzy and legisl...
Toby Moskowitz, an economist at Yale, and some colleagues broke down the gambler’s fallacy using three professions that rely on decision-making. Starting with Major League Baseball, the umpires must make decisions on whether to call a “ball” or a “strike” when the pitch is not straight through the strike zone. According to Moskowitz and his colleagues’ analysis, 127 umpires only got sixty four percent of 1.5 million calls right that were not obvious balls or strikes. Their research showed that if a strike was called before the same type of pitch,
The ball comes speeding over the net and slams down onto the face of the court landing just beyond the base line, the line running along the back of the court. I had called her winning point... "out." As I turned towards her, I could see the anger building in her eyes. We walked towards each other, and with only the net separating us, she began to confront me. She argued that, as she saw it, the ball was obviously in and that we should replay the point. I wanted this game as much as she did and we were both standing strong. I finally decided that there was no use in fighting. We had to resolve this argument between ourselves because there were no line judges to decide for us. We decided to replay the point and she won. I tried to convince myself that there would be times when a call would be questionable and that I should try not to point fingers. I still went home discouraged that night because I knew that the call I had made was fair.
Instant Replay is also going to change the game dramatically. It will have the chance to change just about every play in baseball. For example, was the player safe at home? Well, just check the replay booth. This strategy is also going to make the game much more fare to the players. A situation can occur in a World Series Game 7, and a team could need the final out and the umpire may have an incorrect call. This would be solved with Instant Replay. With the Instant Replay helping the MLB, this proves that America’s Pastime would have been better off, if added sooner. This system will continue to help the game in future years with the addition. The MLB’S Instant Replay system is a pro, rather than a con because the players love it. The players
This game of a stick and ball has captivated the United States during good and bad times. In either time most of us today can remember stories of players from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s. These are legendary figures in the sport of baseball that have are celebrated as hero’s and in scandal, i...
Today, baseball is known as a game composed of two teams of nine players each who play in an enclosed field. Both teams rotate between the position of offense and defense, where one team is batting and one is on the field. When playing defense, there are positions in both the infield and outfield in order to prevent runs from the offense. In the offensive realm, the batter’s goal is to outsmart the pitcher and move the players around the bases to score a maximum amount of runs. The primary objective of the game is to score more runs than the opposing team by the end of the nine innings. However, the early forms of this sport were played much different.