an interesting idea for the baseball strike zone

Sometimes when flipping channels I'll stop on a major league baseball game and watch a few batters or a half inning. I used to watch a lot of baseball when I was young. Not so much the last few decades. If the Blue Jays have a good team in the playoffs I might watch a game if I remember when it's on.

So I'm randomly watching this game with the terrible California Angels. The announcers to fill time in this game between bad teams. They mention in their random banter this idea being kicked around baseball executives.

The idea is to make the strike zone both lower and wider.

I hear this and it's like aha! that would work. This change would simultaneously accomplish the following

• reduce walks
  
• reduce strikeouts
• reduce home runs

Baseball would immediately benefit from this change. They should make it. The number of at-bats resulting in some kind of ball-in-play has been in decline for decades now.

The analytics guys are geniuses. But the problem is that they "solved" baseball. Through intense and computer-assisted analysis they found "flaws" in the design of baseball rules. This led to overemphasis on walks and home runs as the optimal offense strategy.

The simple change in the strike zone would (for a while anyway) defeat or at least set back the analytics wonks.

With more batters putting the ball in play, then defense and baserunning becomes more important again. Walks, strikeouts, and home runs will still be an integral part of baseball, as they have been since the start in the nineteenth century, but just not quite as much. I hope MLB makes this change.

Australia central bank is insolvent

Surprisingly little coverage of recent financial news out of Australia. The Australia central bank has technically failed.

Australia's Central Bank Says It Is Bust

Australia’s central bank has equity wiped out 

Reserve Bank of Australia reports loss of $37bn 

hmmm. so the lender of last resort is itself insolvent. what to make of all this.

ah no worries mate we're assured

• bank of Australia losses are apparently backed by the people of Australia
• the bank of Australia is apparently free to just print money to meet its obligations
• if they hold the bonds to maturity, as they say they intend to, and the borrowers make good (by rolling over into newly printed bonds on payment day no doubt), then it's just an unrealized accounting loss
  

I'm sure the taxpayers of Australia will be thrilled to hear that first point.

For the second point, I'm shocked at such a flip attitude toward printing money. For years we've been assured by such as the Bank of Canada that there's no printing to see here. The money is all "backed" by gold or "other" assets AAA bonds (i.e. the money is backed by itself, money). But now all of that is weakened, thrown into some doubt.