I’m trying to come up with a clever name for this superball 11th inning Olympic abomination. Any ideas out there? Senichi Hoshino, the manger of Team Japan blasted the new rule yesterday, saying he wants to “strongly protest” the change. I don’t blame him. To have a rule change like this thrown at them two weeks before the competition is unfair. Would the IBAF do this if MLB were treating the competition as Japan and Korea do?
Hopefully other managers will come out against this. Not that it’ll do any good. I’d actually like to hear a Cuban reaction on the matter.
Read all about it in the Daily Yomiuri Online.
Hopefully we’ll see a few probability breakdowns of Colosal Action Jackson Basespeedball in the coming days. Beyond the Boxscore took the time to look up Tom Tango’s run expectancy charts in order to compare none on, none out run expectancy to two on, none out situations.
It goes something like this:
Zero runners on base: 0.555 runs expected
One to two runners on base: 1.573 runs expected
So obviously this is going to accomplish exactly what the IBAF desires, which is to get the f-ing game over so viewers can wake up and watch rowing at 2 a.m. Should be a real coup for NBC.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Simon Currie // Jul 27, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I thought NBC had a no live broadcast policy anyways. I hope that this IBF extra innings shenanigans is a Beijing only thing and won’t be applied to any future competitions. NPB isn’t shutting down during the Olympics, it’ll trudge on in the shadows of both the Olympics and Koshien.
2 jackson // Jul 27, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Hoshino brings up a good point. For the Americans they can just throw up their arms and enjoy a trip to Beijing, but if NPB teams are giving up their crucial players during a critical time in the season to be handed this, especially this late in the game, is pretty bad.
I hardly think they’d ask the swimmers to start from 3/4 of the way down the lane to make swimming more marketable; this really is a perplexing move.
3 Charles IV // Jul 27, 2008 at 3:18 pm
There HAS to be more to it than TV revenue. Two weeks before the games started? Did they just have this meeting in late July with graphs and pie charts and just say…………..damn we have to somehow find some more air time here. Hey lets cut down on the baseball……..those games are just too darn long.
I don’t buy it.
4 Salty // Jul 28, 2008 at 5:52 pm
This is the final round for baseball as an olympic sport (At least for the distant future), and they add a b.s. rule that completly changes teams’ strategies? It’s understood the olympic commitee does not want baseball in their games, so just cancel it entirely rather than change the rules. Also, this is a perfect example of why the olympics should be amature. A Japan Series championship, I feel, is much more prestigious than an olympic gold in a watered down game.
Go Red Sox & Hanshin Tigers!
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