I think that more sports leagues should adopt the “penalty veto” in addition to the existing system of challenges.
The idea is that every team should get to veto one penalty per game. Nothing crazy, just a way to fix bad calls. Personal safety fouls would be exempt — no vetoing horse-collars (football), boarding (hockey), and or headshots (any sport) — and non-penalty aspects of calls couldn’t be challenged, either — IE, a football team couldn’t veto an interception. Another exception might have to be made to prevent abuse at the ends of games.
IMO, it’s most obvious in games like football. Every football fan remembers that one call or mistake that robbed their team of momentum at a critical moment. And it’s even worse if it was a bad call! The penalty veto won’t keep bad teams from being bad. It just makes things more competitive by ensuring that one bad play alone doesn’t kill a game-winning drive or result in a game-winning power play (hockey).Sticking with sports for a moment, for those who don’t follow it much, Those Who Know Things about baseball already considered it to be in crisis the past couple years even before the current labor dispute.
Baseball has spent the past two decades bemoaning its flagging popularity and blaming its woes on the length of its games. I think this is one of those tragicomic cases of “taking the common idiot at his word” — whatever focus groups or market research they did told them that people thought baseball was boring and games took too long, so they took it at face value rather than grasping that baseball is an inherently boring format. The problem was, all of the things baseball did to shorten the game in the last 20 years, also killed offense. Only a handful of top-talent superstars are producing offense anymore. And it makes sense! After all, “three outs per inning” means that offense lengthens games.
What baseball misunderstood was this fundamental trade-off. People weren’t getting more and more bored because of the length of games; the games just felt interminable because barely anything was happening on the field! But even that is a bit misleading. After all, contrast with football. Football has frequent stoppages in play — as little as 10-25% of actual clock time is spent in live-ball play. In baseball, 2 of every 3 at-bats is an out, so it actually improves on football with a whole 33% of live-ball play time. So why is it less exciting? Well, football’s play stoppages guarantee you that nothing interesting is happening or could happen. You can be distracted for the other 75% of the game and never miss anything important. Baseball is a sport you have to pay attention to 100% because anything can happen!1 Even the pitcher (in the NL!) hits a few home runs a season. So in football, nearly 100% of the time you are paying attention, there’s action, but in baseball, you get rewarded with action only 33% of the time, and punished for any lapses in attention.
The competitive pressure clearly came from football2, whose transformation into an offense-heavy passing sport provided all the action fans were craving. Before that, football just didn’t have enough offense to be meaningfully more exciting than baseball. Baseball… strangled its offense. But baseball could have gone one of two other ways: (A) actually compete on showing the fans “action” — IE, more offense — or (B) lean into the “relaxing afternoon” aspect of the sport3.
MLB partially went with (B), but only as a side effect of having gentrified its parks (see footnote 1), not as any intentional strategy. So now they have bloated, expensive ballparks, a sport no one wants to watch, and a crashed free-agent market to boot. Which is sad! Because it didn’t have to happen, not if the people who ran the sport had ever bothered to understand it.I think Democrats need to start being more careful about their complaints about the media.
Today’s GOP may be the party of the insurrectionist descendants of the Dixiecrats, but they also brought a lot of honest conservatives on board with their assault on the media. It was a long, slow brainwashing that took decades of honest complaints to develop.
A lot of media progressives like Crooked like to talk about the need for an Anti-Fox: an apparatus of outlets and other organizations that don’t necessarily lie like Fox, but stand as a corrective to the MSM’s failures to frame issues the way we want. I’m torn here, because it’s good to have more voices in the room, and I do think that Crooked have mostly managed to keep themselves honest. But that’s also how I felt back when I was in the Fox media bubble. I felt like my side was keeping the MSM accountable for the stories it didn’t tell.
So, what I’m saying here is, this stuff is seductive. Many of the ways our political and media environments evolve are out of our control. Many decisions have already been made by decades and centuries of cultural ferment. So when we actually have a choice about what we build, we should be careful. Martin Luther didn’t set out to transform the printed word and start a permanent, globe-spanning religious schism. He was just an entitled asshole with some convictions he held so deeply, he was willing to sacrifice everything else he cherished just to not have to admit he’d ever been a jerk in his pamphlets.
We the leftist elites — educated, wealthy, ever-so-concerned about social justice — are entitled as fuck, and we’ve been jerks about it for decades just because we don’t just think we’re right, we absolutely know that the Republicans are a damned danger to the republic. The counterweight we already have in Crooked is probably enough to make the point we wanted to make to whoever was going to listen. I just hope that before it grows out of control like Fox did, we can admit to ourselves that fighting unrighteous fire with righteous fire, that “just being right” alone may not be the answer.
I for one believe that the answer is right there in the “Framers’ Manual”, IE the Federalist Papers. We need to break the power of the two-party system, and make sure that it can’t happen again. Just like how the answer to gerrymandering isn’t “bipartisan commissions” that just further entrench the two parties, the answer to Fox isn’t an Anti-Fox. It’s preventing concentrations of power.
A similar dynamic does work in soccer and hockey, where play is mostly unstopped, but the difference there is that it’s easier to tell when nothing’s going to happen for a minute or so, and the plays take long enough to develop that you can kind of passively calibrate your attention to the crowd’s ambient noise level with enough time to tune back in if it sounds like the game’s picking up.
Another tangentially relevant aspect of the long-term crisis is that baseball’s also been experiencing the same gentrification as most other major American sports — more focus on upscale “fan experience” nonsense, basically disinviting the poor masses in order to cater to the high-paying and upwardly mobile. And as with the rest of gentrification in America, the fan base has gotten Whiter in the process.
I think this is relevant because it mostly just speaks to MLB’s leadership never being all that intellectually curious to understand why it was losing the popularity battle with the NFL. They were preoccupied with gentrifying their fans into the same sorts of money machines as the NFL, not trying to think long and hard about their position within the market of American major-league sports.
Sort of like how cricket does test matches. Turn baseball into a long, loungeful event, drop the prices for everything to pack the stands and make it one big all-day party where people can pop in and out. Make up the money on volume, not gentrification.