My previous post looked at the metagame issues present in the NBA, and how a team reacts to the rules laid out for it. Tom's post then examined the political economy of the "Deflategate" scandal in the NFL. Today, I'll turn my attention to a different issue, with similar rules-based roots.
Newly-minted MLB commissioner Rob Manfred recently made waves with an idea to increase the scoring, and with it, the "action" in baseball games. The idea was to ban the growing trend shifting defenders positions when certain batters take the plate. The "shift" as it is known, makes defending batters with obvious left field-right field bias far easier, and as such, Manfred thinks that banning it would be better for the game.
Whether this decision is wise depends on where the league's priorities lie. On one hand, there is a clear incentive for the league to move toward a higher-scoring equilibrium whether die-hard fans like it or not. This gets at one of the things that fundamentally separate professional sports from recreational sports: professional sports are a product that is sold. Recreational sports, where the enjoyment of participants figures more prominently in whether a person joins in, face different incentives than a league where the goal is profit. While spectators may be present, they rarely factor in to proposed rule changes. No, rules change when they would make the game more enjoyable for those involved. Bans on various strategies have long been in place in recreational leagues of all sports and levels as long as people have played them. The particular nature of the game, league, or players dictate what rules are in place for a given game at a given game. We can say that such rule changes are endogenous to recreational sports.
Professional sports are different. They, by definition, turn the concept on its head. The value professional sports create accrues mostly to those not playing. Fans enjoy watching sports, they pay money for tickets and team memorabilia. They give their time watching ads between the action in professional games. This money flows into the pockets of team owners, who take on the financial risk of throwing the spectacles that are modern professional sports games. In contrast with recreational sports, the motivation professional sports rule changes are exogenous of the game itself. At the end of the day, it is the will of the aggregation of fans, as expressed in their dollars, that dictates the rules of professional sports.
While there will be exceptions(player safety in the NFL would be a great example), knowing this is the case helps understand the motivation for rule changes, and why they often seem unnecessary or foolish. To top it all off, because professional sports increasingly compete not with other sports, but with all entertainment for revenue, the need to stay closely in tune with their customers means that we should expect rule changes to be increasingly common.
So now back to the shift rule. The rule is clearly an attempt to move to an equilibrium with higher scoring. That seems to be what fans want, and indeed, a pitcher's duel could be less entertaining than a high-scoring affair. I can't say I'd not agree, baseball seems more fun with more scoring. The question is whether there's not a better way to increase scoring without damaging the game so that the value created isn't destroyed elsewhere. That destroyed value could come from a myriad of places, but tradition certainly is among them. History and tradition, all else equal, seem to make the game more entertaining for fans.
Yet, the shift itself is a natural response to the game's circumstances, It works. It makes individual teams that employ it better relative to each other,while destroying some degree of value in tradition. It emerged in the modern era because advanced technology and statistics have sent an exogenous shock through the league. The important insight is this: rule and strategy evolution does not necessarily create more value to the league as a while, even if it helps individual teams win. Game evolution usually does create value, but the chess metagame shows that stability of a metagame over time has allowed strategies and value to be created that never otherwise would have. So, in proposing the rule Manfred is taking a calculated risk that any destruction to tradition would be outweighed by the higher scoring in the long run.
So are there alternatives to banning the shift that would also increase scoring? Probably. Returning to a more strict strike zone would help. As could working to make ballparks more regular in size as new ones are built. I'm not even going to mention the possibility of altering baseball or bat rules to make for easier batting(because the outrage every time such changes are proposed online makes me think that the tradition value destruction would be extremely high) But if the ban is implemented subtly and is unintrusively, it could increase scoring and be value positive. It may be that Manfred's proposal is the least damaging option available. Wait, that sounds a lot like another controversial rule change recently...
I'll thank Aaron Moyer for getting me thinking about the issues that became this post.
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