[jorvi]

Every sport hits this sort of threshold where they ban optimization. Swimming did it with 'sharkskin' suits and long distance running with Nike's Alphafly and Vaporfly shoes.

Maybe that's where advanced baseball bats will end up eventually.

[nradov]

Nike Alphafly and Vaporfly shoes are still allowed in sanctioned races but there is a 40mm limit on sole thickness (stack height).

https://www.therunningweek.com/post/carbon-plate-running-sho...

[next_xibalba]

Which is so silly. I would love to watch a sport where all the athletes are on cutting edge, dangerously experimental PEDs and all the equipment is engineered to the very limits of nature. We draw oddly arbitrary lines what is and isn’t ok in sports.

[demosthanos]

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.

[kevinventullo]

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

[demosthanos]

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.

[facile3232]

> 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?

[pinkmuffinere]

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?

[facile3232]

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.

[pinkmuffinere]

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

[mb7733]

Part of the problem is that it trickles down and affects sport at lower levels. I was an age group swimmer (ages 10-18) when those suits came out. I can't remember exactly but it at least 10x'd the minimal equipment budget for the season. The suits were not only much more expensive but they wore out after a small number of races.

Suddenly a line was draw between have- and have-nots based on whose parents could and would buy this stuff. (My club, like many, practiced in a small municipal pool and it was very budget friendly. The fancy suits would be a large fraction of the annual cost to a family.)

In my opinion banning the suits was great for the sport at the age-group level, and thus the sport in general.

[impossiblefork]

But it wouldn't be fun. It wouldn't be a good sport to participate. It would just be blood entertainment for the viewers.

Sports should be for those doing them, and then if people end up caring and commercial competitions end up viable, then that's a bonus but we shouldn't design them for entertainment of the audience.

Customization of equipment should always be fine unless it increases injury risk or completely destroys the game.

[dylan604]

Professional sports are all about entertaining the fans. If they can live a gladiator's life and ask "are you not entertained" and want to die in the lions den, then might as well let them.

Amateur sports like colleges or olympics could continue to have the traditional rules to keep things "competitive", but might as well let the pro-sports just go full tilt.

[impossiblefork]

If it's really about entertainment, then it has no appeal. Then you end up with professional wrestling. Professional sports are interesting because there's something fundamental, something challenging where someone's skill can shine.

[dylan604]

> If it's really about entertainment, then it has no appeal. Then you end up with professional wrestling.

Do you not see the contradiction here? Professional wrestling is huge. It has very loyal fans. The fans pay for pay-per-view and live event sales. They buy merch. Nobody attends a WWE event expecting Greco-Roman style wrestling. They all know exactly what they are getting.

[impossiblefork]

Only among certain kinds of people. But a European PM doesn't go watch professional wrestling, but if his country is doing well enough in association football and there's nothing incredibly important going on he will go to the match.

This is because winning in this game is seen as an achievement, and a natural and reasonable achievement-- after all, there are many world records that nobody cares about.

[next_xibalba]

I suspect you've never known anyone who participates in the elite levels of popular sports. They are very rarely having fun.

All the major sports alter their rules every year to increase their entertainment value. Here is a short, non-exhaustive list off the top of my head: NBA flopping penalties, NBA player resting policy, MLB base stealing rule changes, MLB free base runners, MLB pitch clocks, NFL changing overtime rules almost every year, NFL challenges and reviews, etc.

There is nothing wrong with not having much knowledge of sports, but it might be worth reconsidering your strident opinions if that's the case.

[impossiblefork]

I've actually even played sports against ex-elite players in the sports they were once among the best in the world in, although it was pretty obvious I had no chance. I've also played other sports with friends who were professional ice hockey players and professional association football players. I think what characterizes them is that they once at a time really hated losing, and you can question whether that is 'having fun' but I do think they were having fun at one point too.

But I agree that sports at the elite level aren't about health. It's not unusual to be doing things that at least risk injury.

I think these kinds of rule changes are destructive though. They certainly are in tennis.

[burkaman]

https://www.enhanced.com/

[dagw]

all the athletes are on cutting edge, dangerously experimental PEDs

The problem here is of course that you probably won't get the best athletes in the world to sign up for that. So you'd be watching desperate and quite mediocre athletes who feel they have literally no other option in life.

[nine_k]

That would be a great show, but hardly a fair competition.

The spirit of fair competition (and thus ordering teams according to some predefined metric) is very important to most sports.

[mjevans]

I wouldn't mind custom _diets_ (of normal food) and custom fabricated swim gear... provided the teams all had access to the same training tools before hand.

Custom drugs seem like a step too far IMO. As far as the suits go that's to level out body shapes as an issue.

[nkrisc]

> We draw oddly arbitrary lines what is and isn’t ok in sports.

Are you suggesting the rules of sports are a natural property of the universe? It’s all completely arbitrary. That’s kind of the point: we watch people perform these arbitrary tasks and then we celebrate.

[pinko]

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAdG-iTilWU

[triceratops]

> Which is so silly. I would love to watch a sport where all the athletes are on cutting edge, dangerously experimental PEDs

It's called worker safety.

[zappb]

Formula 1 is supposed to be like that except without the drugs. It’s a competition for both the racers and the manufacturers.

[lesuorac]

It's not though.

F1 introduced a cost cap to stop the top manufactures from being able to test and develop everything they want to.

[dagw]

There's also a huge list of rules about things you're not allowed to do to make your car faster. F1 is quite far from simply building the fastest car, it's building the fastest car that adheres to this long list of 'arbitrary' rules and regulations.

[creaturemachine]

It's never been the same without the cigarette & booze sponsors.

[bluGill]

Cost caps are about how you can cheat. You still develop and test everything you want in the lab. Those that turn out useful get told to the F1 team.

[hibikir]

This stopped being true a long time ago, as the best, fastest machines we could make were very deadly in an accident. If you know about F1, you know that Ayrton Senna, at the moment probably the best driver in the field, died on track. But people forget that he wasn't the only driver that died on that track that weekend: Roland Razemberger died in qualifying the day before! And one could argue that by then, they've already made significant changes to regulations to make the cars safer: Go see what happened when one of the old ground effect cars decided to lift off.

F1's regulations are very strict and completely artificial, just not quite so strict as to allow only 1 car. This is both for safety and cost control. In Schumacher's days, why did ferrari dominate so much? Because they have a private circuit, a much larger budget than anyone, and the racers flew back to the factory to spend long day after long day of testing right next to where the parts where being manufactured. We'd not have a full grid if anyone had to compete with budgets like that

[tshaddox]

I mean, the "arbitrary" lines are what makes a sport what it is. The reason that you can't pick up the ball and run with it in football (soccer) isn't because they arbitrarily banned this "optimization" after some brilliant coach invented it.

[tayo42]

> dangerously experimental PEDs

Brazilian jiu-jitsu /submission grappling is like this right now

The biggest events don't test. That's adcc and ibjjf tournaments only test the winners of black and belt and they can skip the testing somehow

Personally I think it's bad for the sport and hobby. Downstream effects where it normalizes ped use for hobbyist tournaments and delusional parents have their kids on steroids and try. The best don't win neccesarily, just who handles the drugs the best

[umbra07]

why do you think they're on dangerously experimental PEDs as opposed to the standard PED profile in combat sports?

[rglullis]

> dangerously experimental PEDs

Would you be willing to be the guinea pig?

[dylan604]

Why would you ask someone reading HN that question? That's like asking a 'roided up athlete if they wanted to rewrite grep in Rust. Ask the athlete if they'd be willing to take PEDs if it would be allowed.

[triceratops]

You only need one athlete that's willing to. The others will have no choice after that.

It's no different than asking if workers should be allowed to work without PPE.

[dylan604]

If workers want to work without PPE, then let them. Just ensure that they sign releases acknowledging that the PPE was made available to them and they chose of their own volition to not use it, and that by doing so they release everyone from any liability about what happens to them from not using the PPE.

[AngryData]

And whats to stop the industry from only hiring those people and firing everyone who wants protection under the guise of 'They aren't as productive" and going back to 19th century working conditions where people die on the regular to save pennies?

[munificent]

Foreman: "You want to work today, or go home and tell your family you're broke? No? Then sign the fucking form. We don't pay for PPE here."

[liamwire]

Your comments go to show either a concerning lack of thought towards second-order effects, or a disturbing lack of empathy towards your fellow humans.

[triceratops]

It's a slippery slope from there to "the children yearn for the mines".

[next_xibalba]

No more than I'm willing to drive a race car 200+ mph (i.e. formula 1) nor step in a boxing ring and accumulate a bunch of micro-concussions. But I'll happily tune in for the many that would be willing to do it if the money was right.

Why in the world would this have any bearing on the conversation? What point are you trying to make?

[rglullis]

Do you watch sports because of the chance of people dying from accidents and because you know they are risking themselves, or despite it?

If the former, I regret to inform you: you are a psycopath.

If the latter, then please go read some Nassim Taleb and refrain from opining on what is acceptable risks for others unless you yourself are willing to pay for the consequences.

[DrFalkyn]

It’s called bodybuilding

[hnburnsy]

>where they ban optimization

Always wondered why the NFL doesn't ban sticky gloves.

[WillPostForFood]

They did ban "Stickum" back in 1981, a goopy adhesive players were dipping their hands/gloves in.

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/56/66/25/12281186/4/960x0.webp

[Someone]

They are available to all teams, financially affordable, do not make the ball dirty, and they lead to more spectacular catches. Why would they consider banning them?