MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

The line isn't purely arbitrary, it's a reflection of the reality of what most people expect from sports: we want them to be a contest of human skill on the part of the athlete, not just the amount of money someone is willing to spend on the team. We also want underdogs to have a chance, which is very hard without some sort of limits.

You could probably accomplish something similar by strictly capping spending per team to force people to do real engineering and optimize their play accordingly, but the result would be a very different sport that would appeal to a very different (and probably much smaller) audience. Formula One and Robot Wars come to mind.

On the discussion at hand, is there reason to believe this new bat shape will be too expensive for other teams to copy?

> we want them to be a contest of human skill on the part of the athlete, not just the amount of money someone is willing to spend on the team

This is simply not reflected very well in how professional sports are structured. If this were really a priority teams wouldn't be privately owned. It has extremely negative effects on each sport, easily dwarfing the influence of performance enhancing drugs.

Anyway, I would absolutely love to see what the human body is capable of. To me, hearing a ban of performance enhancing drugs is a guarantee of a more boring and less competitive game. I understand the impetus of protecting children, but we're already buying and selling humans. How good of an influence was this to begin with?

Can you say more about the impact of private ownership? I don’t watch sports at all, so this is news to me — what are the negative effects? Is it just you get teams with massive funding and others with none?

Yea, and to be fair the leagues try to compensate for this with varying degrees of success by regulating how much you can spend, subsidizing poorer teams, etc.

But ultimately you run into issues like the colorado rockies where the owner just views it like an entertainment venue and basically refuses to invest in the team in any rational way. The entire model of competiton-through-investment doesn't make as much sense once you realize you can place butts in seats without a competent team to root for.

(And personally, i think it makes a lot of sense for the team to own itself, or a state to own a team, or something like that. I think the Green Bay Packers have a setup like this.)

It's also not possibly to divvy players rarely—sometimes you run into people who are truly extraordinary, and exorbitant salaries can help balance this, to debatable efficacy.

Edit: yup, https://www.packers.com/community/shareholders. Kind of an orthogonal issue to disproportionate spending of teams, though.

I don't know enough to know, but my guess would be no. I was thinking of the swimsuit bans—my understanding is that the banned swimsuits are extremely expensive and wear out extremely quickly.

If I’m understanding correctly, not only do you get teams with massive resources, but also teams treated kind of like clowns to entertain their owner? That really is a crazy situation, lol.

It almost sounds like corporate ownership could help with this, something like shareholders owning the team, and then the management is obligated to do what’s best for the shareholders (and somehow that should be to win). It seems like part of the problem might also be:

- sports teams make money by selling tickets and merchandise

- teams sell tickets and merchandise by being entertaining, which may or may not involve winning