Speed Walking: Baseball in a Hurry
Speed Walking: Baseball in a Hurry: Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed last week to change the intentional walk protocol so that the pitcher will no longer actually have to throw the four pitches that had been required. The reason? After some progress in speeding up the “pace of play,” baseball experienced a regression in 2016, as the average length of a game increased by four minutes. Under this new rule, the manager of the pitching team will simply point and the umpire will then award first base to the hitter. No mess.
The purists, and even the semi-purists, are grumbling about this change. For them, the idea of awarding a base to a hitter without a pitch even being thrown is at a minimum blasphemy, and at worst apocalyptic. We are putting the spiritual sanctity of the game at risk, maybe even tempting the end of days from a fiery comet etched in speedup rules.
Yet there are many who agree that the intentional walk never lived up to the artistry of baseball. A game would have to shift from the crescendo of a top-performing hitter stepping up to the plate in a crucial situation, the spectators being excited or horrified (depending on which side they were rooting for) by the possibility of what he might do, to the deflating reality that the pitcher was ordered to not indulge him. The intentional walk was born of the idea that we can avoid pain and suffering at the hands of a feared hitter by simply not giving him the chance to inflict damage. We can “walk” him.
To some degree, I write this without the necessary qualifications. I was not one of those especially feared hitters. My power game left me back in my college days at Penn, when I hit third in the lineup. This was crystallized for me once when I was playing against Manny Ramirez in the minor leagues. I was in center, and he hit a line drive into the gap that I thought I could cut off with a dazzling catch. That ball hit the light tower in right center field — opposite field from where his real power resided. I realized I could never do that, and my power aspirations ended that day.
So I mostly observed intentional walks from hundreds of feet away, as the center fielder. And I usually agreed that, no, we should not pitch to Vladimir Guerrero or Ramirez. Whenever it was one of my teammates, like Scott Rolen or Alex Rodriguez, being intentionally walked, I stuck out my chest too, knowing I was wearing the same uniform as a guy who instilled that kind of fear in an opponent. I ignored the possibility that anyone on my team would ever be walked purely for strategic reasons, like setting up a double play.
As my career wound down, I sank toward the bottom of the order, at times batting eighth just in front of the pitcher. (My ball-playing experience was mostly in the National League, where pitchers hit.) When you’re batting eighth, an intentional walk is used more as a slap in the face to the ninth hitter — who’s usually regarded as more of an impostor than a hitter — than because the eighth hitter was feared in any way.
At the other extreme was Barry Bonds, who was walked intentionally 120 times in 2004, just one fewer than my 121 unintentional walks over my best three seasons. My best guess — as the engineer I studied to be — is that only potential cost overruns prevented the Giants from installing the speedup option for all of these free passes he was given, some kind of mechanical people-mover that whisked you from home to first base. That way, you could have your intentional walk, but spice it up a little for must-see TV. Hop on, Barry.
Intentional walk. Intent is doing something on purpose, and knowing how to do it. It is thought-out, planned, strategic. But paradoxically, baseball’s intentional walk has more to do with not knowing how to do something: how to get a particular hitter out when it really counts. It is avoidance, denial, fear, probability — with a sprinkle of strategy. It says, “I will take my chances with the next guy.”
This makes me think that since we’re going to change the rule, let’s also come up with a more accurate term to describe it.
The Grant Pass?
Just something that makes for a better description of what is now going on. We are giving the batter first base with no fanfare. No obstruction. It should be comically redundant. It should reflect that we don’t even notice him walking to first because the action has halted. He apparated, like Harry Potter, and we didn’t even see it.
The rule change has simply exposed the soul of the intentional walk. We thought it was part of the game, watching a pitcher throw a baseball as if he were playing with a badminton birdie. I accepted it too, because I did not want Gary Sheffield to hit a ball that took off the hand of our third baseman, with the winning run on second base.
In fact, we must recognize that we are skipping over the best players in the game in the best moments for their brilliance to shine — and pretending that’s not what’s really happening. Of course, you can’t make a pitcher throw a strike even when he’s not “intentionally” walking a hitter. But at least now we can avoid having to watch this four-pitch stagecoach limp along on the autobahn.
Let’s embrace this change. I understand why we worry about a slippery slope: Next it’s three balls for a walk or seven-inning games or, heaven forbid, a square home plate. But we are backdooring time in a game with no clock. We can’t let pitchers and batters take 30 seconds between pitches, and we certainly don’t need to give a pitcher two minutes to finish doing what we already know is happening. So, as with a ground-rule double, we’ll give the hitter the base; he’s going there anyway.
source:-https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/speed-walking-baseball-in-a-hurry.html
