Small variations in equipment is fine imo. Can you imagine if all the specs said we had to have olhousen pockets, as an example? We’d be stuck with garbage.
Baseball changes what a home run is at every single stadium.
Don’t golf tournaments change the tee or cup location each round? (I’m only a casual golf fan I might be off).
Agreed. I think the bigger problem is not having a standard set of rules. I've been teaching a lot of beginners the game recently (doing my small part to grow the sport) and I get asked questions like "if you scratch on the 8, is that a loss?" "if I make a solid on the break, aren't I solids?" "do I have to call my shot in 10 ball?" and the answer to every one of these questions is "it depends." Because it depends on the league/tournament/rule set you are playing under. It confounds newbies. I give them *my* preferred rules, which are usually the same as WPA, but you can still see it doesn't sit right with most people that there isn't just a basic set of rules to use.
Baseball, for it's variety with its fields, doesn't have 4 strikes be an out at times, or only two outs to an inning, or sometimes you tag up on a flyout and other times you can just run. Let's get the rules for pool standardized first, and then we can worry about whether or not pocket size differences per tournament is really a big deal, other than for pure logistics.