Sports occurences that are "wrong"

There are some things wrong in sports that have just been done for so long that people rarely question them. These are basically little things, but it still bugs me. Here are a few:

Defensive indifference in baseball. I hate this rule, which refers to a runner not getting credit for a stolen base simply because the catcher chose not to throw the ball. It is really only ever ruled this way in the 9th inning, and it’s just a stupid rule. The guy went from first to second. He stole the bag. Give him a steal.

The timing on coaches not going for two points in football. Say that a team is down by 15 points and they score a touchdown. Clearly, they need to score one touchdown, one extra point, another touchdown, and a two point conversion to tie the game up. Coaches, almost universally, will always kick the extra point the first time they score. All this does is defer the two point try to a later possession, thus denying the coach of the knowledge of whether that try is successful earlier in the game. This is seemingly conventional wisdom, and yet it makes absolutely no sense. If that second TD comes very late in the game, and the subsequent two point try fails, the game is basically over. But if the coach just went for two the first time, even if the attempt fails, at least the coach now knows that he needs nine points and can change the game plan accordingly.

Going for it on fourth down. Football coaches, NFL head coaches in particular, are far too conservative about this. They need to take a page from the poker world and simply analyze the probability. Let’s look at a hypothetical “fourth and inches” scenario. If this comes up, say, with a team on their own 30 yard line in the first quarter, the team will punt every single time. This is just stupid. How often does a team actually get stopped on fourth and a foot? 10% of the time? Less? In other words, if this were poker, this is like folding when your hand is a 90% favorite just because you might lose the pot once every ten times, and no reasonable poker player would do this in any normal situation. And in poker, at least the one time it does happen it is a clear loss. In football, there is still the possibility that the opponent will give the ball right back without even scoring, even if they are at the 30 or the 20. At least once or twice a year, you will hear commentators praising a coach for his “aggressiveness” or his “riverboat gambler mentality” when they go for it on fourth down near midfield. It’s not. It’s what they should be doing, almost every time, and certainly far more frequently than they are now.