The algorithm eats itself.

One of my favorite epithets flung around by the sabremeretricious is, "small sample size."  This is usually unleashed whenever one makes a prediction about any event, with the implication that anything short of a twenty-year chunk of day-in, day-out action is too small to draw any conclusions.

I heard the demons in my head shrieking this last night, when they announced that The General was 0-8 with 5 strikeouts against old friend Kirby Yates.  No, no:  small sample size!

But sure enough, LeMahieu then grounded into the ever thrilling, delayed-video-replay game-ending double-play.

Hey, this is not to bad mouth either The General or Ma Boone.  Of course you had to bat him there.

But what occurred to me was that, if you really make pitchers completely interchangeable, you'll kill the algorithm.

EVERYTHING will be "small sample size."  No pitchers will ever face batters often enough to get a really good grip on how they fare against one other.

Out go the algorithms.

Which is probably exactly what baseball owners want.

Lately, we're seeing serious signs that the old cartel system of professional sports leagues—which originated in the United States, with baseball—is starting to break down.  Our leagues/cartels are always trying to establish parity.  But the harder they try these days, the more that goal seems to elude them.

The draft, as Duque and Will Leitch have pointed out, is more and more an ineffectual anachronism.

Beyond that, the leagues are now just too big for many teams to get even a whiff of a championship for 30, 40, 50 years (Yes, I'm looking at you, New York Knicks!).  There are too many ownership groups just free-riding on the backs of teams that are actually trying (And yes, I'm looking at you, Wilpons!).

Rather than more parity, we see team after team running up huge win totals, while everybody else festers.  Franchises resort to tanking—but with what these owners want to charge, fans just aren't willing to sit through that for 4-5 years at a stretch anymore.

Throw in the diminishment of the pitcher, the increasingly one-dimensional nature of the current game, the constant injuries to superstars (whose accomplishments are often achieved under a cloud of PED suspicions to begin with), the general mistreatment of the fans, and the whole societal shift to entertainment through social media...and you have the reasons for all those empty seats we're seeing this spring, on the road and even in the Bronx.

So what to do?

Seriously reassess how to keep players healthy and playing?  Teach pitchers how to pitch without destroying their bodies and batters how to hit to the opposite field?  Find every way we can to go back to the old ways of playing that everyone prefers?  Maybe even...charge less money???

Nah.

What baseball owners would probably prefer to do is go to the "Rollerball" model:  nobody is above the game.  Nobody is anything more than an interchangeable cog in the machine.  No superstars means no super salaries.

Or put it in medical terms:  faced with a sick patient, the owners aren't interested in curing him, so much as altering his genetic structure.

If you can't achieve parity through everyone trying hard to build the best team they possibly can, you try to achieve it by making each at-bat as random as possible.

It will be more like a crude video game than a traditional fan experience.  With the only problem being that people prefer to actively play video games, and can do that almost for free.  Hmm...