This brings to mind one of my favorite TV shows, One Outs. It's about the strategies that a clever and "unsportsmanlike" player brings to a baseball team, exploiting the rules while violating the spirit of the game.
As one example: in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings. If the weather is bad and teams are unable to continue due to rain, a <5 inning game is considered invalid and scheduled for a later date. If one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits. (After all, it doesn't matter how many runs he gives up if the game is canceled.) This, in turn, gives the opposite incentive to the opposing team's offense, who wants their runners to be declared "out" so that the inning can end faster. There's a real-time rules-gaming arms race as both teams test the bounds of what's legally permissible, driven by incentives that lead to a very unusual game of baseball.
MLB has added a pitch clock to speed up games. 30 seconds between batters, 15 seconds between pitches with the bases empty, 20 seconds with runners on. This has sped up games by an average of 26 minutes!
Sounds a lot like the episode of South Park where the kids don't want to stay in the little league playoffs so they can enjoy their summer break, so they're trying to intentionally lose. Unfortunately so are all the other teams in the playoffs.
> in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings ... if one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits.
There are two bigger strategic wrinkles here:
1. Both teams only need to complete five innings (which is stipulated in the rulebook as making 15 outs, because baseball) if the visitors have the lead. If the home team has the lead after the visitors make 15 outs, then it's considered a complete game with only 4.5 innings played.
2. The batter can refuse to take first base, even in the event of a walk, and be called out instead. In the past you could game this, but with the pitch clock and limits on pitcher substitutions and mound visits, there's now a hard upper bound on how long an inning could be intentionally drawn out.
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I'm actually more interested in how the teams might go about this without the umpires noticing, because the umpire crew chief has complete authority over the game. Once they realize what's happening they can just tell both teams to knock it off and, at their own discretion, suspend the game anyway.
As one example: in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings. If the weather is bad and teams are unable to continue due to rain, a <5 inning game is considered invalid and scheduled for a later date. If one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits. (After all, it doesn't matter how many runs he gives up if the game is canceled.) This, in turn, gives the opposite incentive to the opposing team's offense, who wants their runners to be declared "out" so that the inning can end faster. There's a real-time rules-gaming arms race as both teams test the bounds of what's legally permissible, driven by incentives that lead to a very unusual game of baseball.