Economist Russ Roberts posts a pod-cast with a partial transcript of an interview with Bill James. It’s fascinating throughout. One thing that made me feel good was that James wants an economic solution to pace of play problems:
Bill James: That’s right. But you could put into the system rewards to a team that played their games in a quick fashion. What you can do is you can say a game which has this many half-inning breaks, and this many play appearances, should be played in this amount of time. Right? And if the game is played in that amount of time then the team receives some sort of incentives or alert play. Whereas if a game is not played in that amount of time, then for every 5 minutes you go over, there is a disincentive. And there are a million things you could use as incentives. For example, you could use draft picks as incentives. Or you could use disbursements from the MLB [Major League Baseball] television funds as incentives. Or you could use roster rules as incentives. Or, a lot of things you could use as incentives. But you would have to–if you really want to solve the problem you would have to manage the incentives involved rather than managing the details of it.
Russ Roberts: I think you mentioned even home field advantage? Was that one of your ideas?
Bill James: That’s right. You could have a system in which if a team doesn’t play attention to the clock and plays slowly, that they could give up a, one or two, home series a year. Which would be, of course, a tremendous disincentive to slow play.
I have suggested focusing the incentives on players.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2rco5KV
No comments:
Post a Comment