Посты с тэгом: baseball

 Baseball has a density problem.  The ratio of “minutes of action” over “total minutes played” is low.  Consider for example, the “no-hitter” pitched by Roy Halladay of the Philadelphia Phillies.  Not a single opposing player was able to reach first base because of his performance.  Baseball is essentially a duel between pitcher and batter.   If there was a way to trade out some of the pitching duel for more field play, baseball would be less boring.

For this month’s LAB, let’s apply the corporate innovation method, SIT, to find potential improvements to the game of baseball.  The method is based on five patterns inherent in many innovative products.  By extracting and applying those patterns, we can innovate anything.  For baseball, we will apply Attribute Dependency tool.  Here is how it works.

We start with a list of attributes (variables) of the game of baseball.  Then we create combinations of those attributes with an eye towards creating a correlation between them.  As one attribute changes, so does the other.  This becomes our hypothetical solution to which we work backwards to see if it solves a problem or adds value.  In the case where there is already a dependency between attributes, we artificially break it and see what benefit it might deliver.  For example, there is no dependency between runs scored and the inning played.  We would change this by creating a new dependency where the value of a run changes as the inning changes.  For example, a team earns two runs for crossing home plate instead of one, but only in the ninth inning.

Here are several ideas that make the game “dense” with more action and make it faster.  These ideas are based on breaking and as well as forming dependencies between attributes.