One of the things cut from the book was a discussion of equipment: uniforms and uniform code violations (which are common and largely trivial, unless they spark brawls).
The only thing I really miss is the elbow pad. One of the issues baseball’s had to deal with is the Biggio Problem: players who armor up and then take a ball off the padding for a free trip to first. Baseball’s struggled with how to regulate the issue, as it has with many similar problems, because there are several issues:
- Players being hit intentionally clearly is not what the rules intended to be a productive strategy for hitters
- Player safety is, rightly, one of baseball’s most important priorities
- Umpires traditionally have rarely enforced the rule that states being hit by a pitch that is in the strike zone does not result in a free base
Biggio, essentially, by hanging his elbow into the zone, is exploiting a rule designed to protect him. So far, baseball’s only real action is to require players to have a valid medical reason to wear armor up to the plate, but really, when Jeff Weaver can have one of the worst six-game starts to a season in baseball history and then go on the DL with an almost transparent excuse, we can admit it’s not hard for a player to get the team doctor to sign off on protective gear.
Other proposed solutions include not awarding a free base if the ball strikes the protective gear, which raises a whole other set of enforcement questions, and banning pads entirely, which would put players at greater risk of injury.
This last issue, though, is more complicated than it first seems. A player wearing padding may intentionally hang in on pitches trying to get hit, putting himself at far greater risk of being hit in an unprotected location.
For a good parallel, check out this article on NASCAR, where it appears that safety improvements result in more dangerous behavior and more accidents.
If allowing players to have pads has a similar effect, and the net result is more injuries, then the solution of banning protective padding entirely may actually end up reducing the number of hit batters and reduce the number of resulting injuries, by forcing players to act more safely.
Eric Walkingshaw | 15-May-07 at 11:15 pm | Permalink
I poked around unsuccessfully for some specific evidence of this, but it seems to me that football could be an extreme example of this phenomenon. It seems like increased padding and protective gear have contributed to making the game more violent, leading either to more injuries or making those injuries that do occur much more catastrophic.
joser | 16-May-07 at 12:27 am | Permalink
One way baseball could approach the pad issue is to define allowed padding precisely. In theory they could go to some insane degree (”elbow pads shall not extend more than 20% of the distance from the elbow to the shoulder, nor more than 10% of the distance from the elbow to the wrist, and shall be made of polywhatever of a thickness no more than something”) but in practice they could just work with a couple of vendors to produce MLB-approved padding in a couple of sizes (Eckstein S to Sexson XL), tell players they can’t use anything else, and allow the umps to enforce it (and opposing managers to challenge it). Surely by now every piece of the body has been padded in a game at one time or another, so working out what kind of protective gear might be needed shouldn’t be so hard, and players can’t really claim they’re being left unprotected. MLB dictates hats and cleats and whatnot, so how would this be any different?
Mat | 16-May-07 at 2:30 pm | Permalink
Umpires traditionally have rarely enforced the rule that states being hit by a pitch that is in the strike zone does not result in a free base
More than that, the rule that states being hit by a pitch that is out of the strike zone doesn’t result in a free base if you fail to make an effort to get out of the way. I understand why it is, practically speaking, impossible for the home plate umpire to call this. He’s got enough to worry about just calling balls and strikes. But I don’t see why the other umpires couldn’t get involved in this, the way that they are involved on check swings and so forth.
It doesn’t happen all that often, but occaisionally you’ll see someone get hit by an emminently avoidable pitch without even trying to move at all, and I find it annoying that the rule isn’t enforced in those cases.
Evan | 18-May-07 at 8:30 am | Permalink
The failure to avoid rule usually only gets used if the player actively leaned into the pitch. That gets called a couple of times each season.
Will | 19-May-07 at 1:42 pm | Permalink
Exactly, being hit by a pitch should happen because of wildness from the pitcher and yet, the same players top the HBP list season after season. ESPN has a tracker going for when Biggio breaks the “record.” In a perfect world HBP’s would be spread among players indiscriminatley instead of being focused in bunches on the gritty, scrappy players.