Author Archive

Let’s Endure Four-and-a-Half Minutes of Mound Visits Together

A lot of our experience of baseball centers around being annoyed. Baseball has long, looping narratives, bits of fun, and good old thrills, but it is also full of small paper cuts. We’re annoyed our guy didn’t lay off one or that a call didn’t go our way. Ugh, really, ump!? We give our heads a shake and our shoulders a shrug. We sigh. Left out of October again. A summer day is too hot; the seat in front of us is occupied by a too-tall person. Our favorite team is unlucky, or underwhelming. Maybe they stink, but in the little ways. In the ways that bug you.

Baseball is constantly fretting that its games take too long. Some of that fretting is the result of knowing that most of us have to get to work in the morning, but mostly, the fretting comes from knowing that annoying stuff is just the worst. Annoying stuff makes us angry. Not in big, raging ways. But like when you bang your knee on the edge of your coffee table or spill soda on white denim. In the ways that wear you out and make you just a bit less likely to come back.

Part of baseball’s job is to safeguard us from these paper cuts, especially when we’re most vulnerable to them. January is a time to pine for baseball; our annoyance is directed at the game’s absence. We forget what it’s like to be cold and irked and in a rain delay. We forget Pedro Baez’s interminable delivery. We forget mound visits.

Last week, Jeff Passan reported the details of a memo outlining MLB’s proposed pace-of-play rule changes for the 2018 season. They come with a pitch clock and requirements that catchers and infielders and coaches more or less stay put:

The restrictions on mound visits are particularly acute. Any time a coach, manager or player visits a pitcher on the mound, or a pitcher leaves the mound to confer with a player, it counts as a visit. Upon the second visit to the pitcher in the same inning, he must exit the game. Under the proposal, each team would have received six so-called “no-change” visits that would have prevented the pitcher from leaving the game.

No one likes mound visits, but that’s a pretty drastic change. It strives to eliminate an awful lot of perceived paper cuts. I was moved to think about how many. As mound visits aren’t tracked, I took a small, imprecise sample. I decided to rewatch Game 7 of the World Series. Specifically, I watched the half-innings when the Astros were pitching, because Brian McCann loves a good mound visit.

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What If Baseball Had a Penalty Box?

I don’t watch a lot of hockey, but when I do, my favorite part of the game is when grown men sit in timeout. They have an angry little fracas and then are asked to cool down. In-game punishment is a tricky business: too light a touch, and violating rules risks becomes acceptable, too worth it. But go too strong, and the game becomes about the penalty; it’s not just an ump show but worse, a slog.

That’s part of the genius of the penalty box, the Sin Bin: removing one player from the ice spurs action. Your favorite team might score a goal. Perhaps you’ll be gifted a defensive highlight, made all the more impressive for playing down a man. But the true insight of the penalty box is a more basic one: we only ever stay really mad at things for a few minutes at a time.

There are exceptions, of course. Grudge holders, deviants. Last spring, we learned that Hunter Strickland carried his rage toward Bryce Harper through three years and a World Series parade. Some guys are just grumps. But most aren’t. Think about being a kid and playing in the yard with your cousin. Your cousin throws mud at you. Startled and angry, you throw grass back. You’re separated and sent to your corners to think about what you’ve done, but once you do, you’re ready to play again. How big a deal is mud anyway? You were dirty anyhow. Perhaps you should go eat worms together.

In the aftermath of the Strickland-Harper brawl, Sam Miller speculated on Effectively Wild that perhaps Harper would have better served by taking off his shoe and throwing it rather than chucking his batting helmet. He might have looked like less of a doofus, but the moment Harper bent down to undo his laces, it would have been over. The fight doesn’t happen. Reason returns. “Wait, what am I doing?” Bryce stops being entirely mad and starts being partially embarrassed. He remembers he’s a homeowner. He just needed a little timeout to change the whole afternoon.

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The Best of FanGraphs: January 2-6, 2018

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Getting to Know You

Meeting new people is always a bit awkward, so it’s best to just jump in. My name is Meg Rowley, and I’m the new managing editor of The Hardball Times and a new writer for FanGraphs. After a stint at Lookout Landing, I’ve spent the last three years as a writer at Baseball Prospectus, where I wrote about topics ranging from diversity in front office hiring, to Adam Lind (maybe) farting, to the problems with replay review, to the faces you see when the Twins cause a long delay at Dodger Stadium.

But before I wrote those pieces, I came to baseball, as so many where I’m from do, through my parents and the late-90s Mariners. That team taught me about joy and winning, but also about thrilling disappointment and the small moments that snuff out a season. Smart, tenacious writers here and elsewhere taught me to look at the game through a sabermetric lens. And now, David Appelman has trusted me to supply and shape some of your baseball words. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity and will strive to prove myself worthy of that trust.

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