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Maybe something like you get as many bases as you have runners on base, plus one. Leave it in the game as a universal positive, but make it anticlimactic unless you’ve got guys playing small ball first.

Baseball in general just seems like it’s as close to a “solved game” as you’re going to get in an athletic contest. Analytics were just too powerful for a game so focused on discrete events with limited active participants.

But yes thats the point I was trying to make too.

Fair enough. Pro-Rel has certain direct consequences that make a salary cap untenable, but I can see how it’s the whole system of a pyramid that includes pro-rel that you were getting at. I am actually fairly protective of the American system as a completely alternative system of professionalization that emerged fairly organically here and actually has some advantages to go with its disadvantages, but you can’t just pick and choose pieces of them to insert into the other. A salary cap in UEFA is laughable. FFP is already eye-rollingly abused.

Absolute mind fuck.

Yeah, it’s absolutely byzantine. The legal structure of MLS is bizarre as well. Technically, it’s still a single entity, though de facto the “investor operators” now work almost as independently as traditional American franchise owners, but the roster rules absolutely reflect their legal origin as intracompany transfers and “funny money” credits, all filtered through a traditional US-sports collective bargaining agreement, and goosed whenever a sufficiently big star wants to play out a few years here.

And the college system helps too.

The number of players coming up to MLS through college has shrunk quite a bit over the years, and the number of impactful players doing so has cratered in the men’s game. It’s basically now a place to fill out a few spots on the bottom of the roster and the reserve team, and as an occasional pleasant surprise among the late developers whose pro prospects at 18 were bleak enough that a college degree seemed the prudent choice. Once MLS realized they could make player development pay for itself with academies sitting on top of the already lucrative American youth setups college soccer was doomed to be an also-ran. Really only American football and men’s and women’s basketball depend heavily on the College system, where those sports are financially self-sustaining, so in exchange for not getting players brought up in your own style of play, the pro leagues get 100% free player development, including bearing the risk for injuries. Baseball too, though to a lesser extent and “minor league baseball” as a development path for teenaged players from across baseball-playing countries is still perfectly viable. I am less well-versed in Ice Hockey, but it seems like a hybrid system of independent youth clubs, some college, and European clubs.

The lyrics are out of order though. The original starts in about 1949 and moves roughly forward in time, never backtracking by more than a year or two. The FOB lyrics are all over the place from the start:

• Captain Planet 1990
• Arab Spring 2010
• LA Riots and Rodney King 1991
• Deep Fakes 2015ish as a media thing?
• Earthquakes without more context? Lame!
• Iceland volcano, probably the 2010 of Eyjafjallajökull

American football:

Universal:

1. No TV timeouts. The game is already insanely stop-start. Get your shit together, TV broadcasters, and make it work as-is.
2. No “wounded duck” pass interference penalties on poorly thrown balls. Defenders in pass coverage should be entitled to their existing vector of motion.
3. Players leaving for injury must be out for 4 plays or more, maybe the length of the existing drive. Something though. One play is not sufficient to dissuade simulation for tactical advantage.

Stuff to try in college or the spring league:

1. No radio communication. American football can be too regimented sometimes, and old men treating young men like chess pieces is part of that.
2. Limited substitutions per play if there is no is no change in phase. You come out, fine, but you’re not going back in until the next time your team is on offense/defense/special teams. This will also enhance numbers 1 and 3.
3. Even shorter play clock. Keep it moving. Adjust when the clock runs if you want to keep the number of snaps consistent.
4. Remove kicking entirely. They’re vestigial minigames at this point that could be replaced with throwing the ball. Workshop it in the offseason to see how small the goalposts need to be to replicate current play balance.
5. College only: Admit they’re professionals, make them employees with enforceable (and purchasable) contracts, and route enough money into the non-revenue sports to keep them viable. It is what it is; don’t let the creeping in of sensible labor practices destroy the sport. Use the inevitable anti-trust exemption you’ll get to mandate some sort of nexus between the players and the schools (lifetime tuition waiver? part-time enrollment?), but stop acting like the already snobbish and laughable “amateurism” of the NCAA is even a viable concept.

Stuff to bring in that would make the game weird to modern eyes but might help reduce head injuries:

1. Mandate wide splits on the lines, two-point stances, and a wider neutral zone so that players are not exploding into each other head-to-head. A snap should look like a sumo match, not two horny rams on a hillside.
2. To allow for number 1, make “1 yard to go” the minimum for a given offensive snap.
3. Remove most/all of kicking again, though with the idea of reducing high combined-velocity impacts rather than just because it’s anachronistic. Treat an incomplete pass on fourth down like it was a punt. Give up on the idea of kickoff returns. Field goals could stay, but subject to the same scrimmage rules as other plays.
4. Consider whether every play from scrimmage should require the Offensive Line’s first step should be backwards or lateral. They already are on many passing plays, but making it mandatory would further encourage upright play that’s often ineffective technique today. The running game will be severely affected, but it is what it is and “every run play looks like a draw play” is a small price if we want to save American football over the long term.
5. Revamp tackling rules. Make it rugby style and penalize hits above the shoulder harshly. Consider whether big hits resulting in heads thumping against turf are common enough to be banned altogether.
6. Consider removing helmets so players have a sense of preservation over their own heads, but if not that, then go with something much lighter and more ice-hockey style so the helmet is not as tempting as a weapon and doesn’t encourage a false sense of invulnerability. It was for all the wrong reasons, but the “Extreme Football League” (nee “Lingerie Football League”) uses this type of headgear.

HEMA: I’m right here!

It works in american sports bc there is no promotion or relegation. Can’t work in a sport with it. I know the big bash has no more teams than the few that participate and cricket economic model is even worse.

That’s certainly part of it. It is also relevant that American leagues are a legal cartels that can control player movement subject only to collective bargaining with the players unions, as this removes the unbalancing effect of external compensation. They are also generally the highest level of their sport (though sometimes by default because only Americans care), meaning the threat of losing players to outside entities is minimal, though until they accepted significant revenue sharing (generally runs close to 50% of revenues), the emergence of competitors was always possible.

The weird outlier in the US is MLS, which must compete in the global market. They benefit from (1) having a squishy-AF salary caps, and (2) playing in the middle depths of the global market for professional footballers, meaning that skillful organizations can replace talent more or less like-for-like. As an aside, MLS franchises are much better at doing this than they used to be, and there are as many players passing through on their way up as down.

MLS in America actually tried that many years ago (weird the phrase is even relevant to MLS, but here we are). On replays it actually looks quite reasonable, but being an Americanism, I don’t think you’ll get any support for it, which is a shame because penalty kicks are barely soccer at all.

It does seem strange, but there’s some possible rationale behind it. If the rule is not currently being enforced, it could be because refs feel the level of the rule breaking is not proportionate with the level of the punishment. Decreasing the punishment, as well as increasing the severity of the rule breaking required to incur it might induce refs to be more inclined to enforce the punishment.

This is the only plausible explanation. The refs don’t want to turn the game on a keeper wasting a couple of seconds. That said, various timekeeping tasks especially, but Association football in general has always had a sort of impressionistic philosophy for officials, tasking them with keeping the game moving and more or less fair, but I don’t think that system has held up super well in the era of high tech and higher stakes, though I do fear they risk losing something magical about it. American football is the absolute inverse, with a dense and legalistic rulebook and false precision that comes of pretending that (among other impossible tasks) the officials really see where the point of a ball lands under a literal ton of human flesh. That said, there is not the same level of resistance to objective standards and enforcement and rule evolution that you can see on the soccer side.

The social contract with soccer has always been that in exchange for shirt sponsors, you get zero commercial breaks except halftime. While American football gets a bad rap for its native flow (which is indeed quite slow and staccato, admittedly), the fact that they literally have “TV timeouts” is what’s most egregious.

And I say that as an American who, while also a soccer fan, just can’t quit gridiron.

“Can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?”

It drives me nuts that this is not roughly in chronological order like the original. Makes it feel half baked and way less impressive. That said, Billy Joel’s chorus feels like some serious Boomer deflection these days.

Outlaws. An early Spaghetti Western themed FPS from LucasArts. After Dark Forces (Retconned by Rogue One) and before DF2:Jedi Knight (the one with the amazibad FMV cut scenes and the best expansion pack ever), it leveraged the 2.5d engine for all it was worth and did a hand-animated slightly Don-Bluth-esque aesthetic that worked perfectly.

Level design was good. Multiplayer was fun, even though if you tried to LAN with an unswitched hub (it was 1998!) player 3 would lag like motherfucker and be relegated to throwing dynamite and praying. Story was straight out of a Tropes-R-Us, but well executed and with good voice acting (including John de Lancie IIRC). The coup de grace was the soundtrack, Clint Bajakian seemed to inhabit Ennio Morricone’s soul, but with leitmotifs to make John Williams proud. It absolutely elevated the game.

Ahh, yeah, I stand corrected. Sleeves were gone from the Thinkpads earlier than I thought.

Add in that its episode breaks were very nearly arbitrary. I have heard that people who waited and binged it liked it a little more.

Young Frankenstein would like a word.

Potentially less of a soulless cash grab.

Completely agree. I think it succeeded perfectly at being that, and it was the only live action Star Wars project I could get my 11yo daughter to sit through.

Acolyte I think got more hate than it deserved, but I can’t make the same argument for it. It was a quite a mess with only a few bright spots shining through.

They didn’t have much for him, it’s true, but I thought his part in the Bix coda was very nice. For me, B2 was like my dogs in Fallout or Minecraft, too precious and pure to expose to danger. :-)

This is a good suggestion. That generation of ThinkPad keyboards wasn’t the No-travel scissor switch nonsense that most laptop keyboards now anyway. It was IBM buckling sleeve technology, and a low profile tactile switch with similarly low-pro keys would probably be about the closest thing to its feel.