Baseball Archives - Page 3 of 9

How does stealing bases work in baseball?

Dear Sports Fan

How does stealing bases work in baseball? I know that a stolen base is when a player runs from first to second or second to third base without there being a hit but I’m not sure when base runners can steal and what situations they do it in. Can you help?

Thanks,
Andres

Dear Andres,

The steal is one of the most exciting plays in baseball. A player on base tries to run to the next base without the assistance of a teammate’s hit. If he gets there before the opposing team can throw the ball to the base and tag him, he’s safe. If not, he’s out. It’s got speed, deception, timing, and coordination — everything you could want in a sport. A successful stolen base can propel a team to victory. An unsuccessful one can break a team’s momentum and destroy its chance of winning. So how does a steal work?

A player on base — that means they got to first, second, or third base through hitting the ball, being hit with the ball, or being walked — can try to run to the next base basically whenever they want. The only time they are not allowed to run is if a timeout has been called. Timeouts are not as obvious in baseball as they are in other sports, probably because they are unlimited, but they usually happen when a batter steps out of the batting box and holds up his hand or when a catcher wants to speak to his pitcher or visa-versa. If you’re at a game or if you have your television volume way, way up, you might be able to hear the ump screaming, “TIME” when someone gestures for a timeout and “PLAY” when the timeout is over. In some recreational baseball or softball leagues, a timeout is called by default whenever the pitcher has the ball. Not so in a professional setting.

The fact that base runners can try to steal virtually whenever they want doesn’t explain much about when players actually attempt to steal. Professional baseball players throw so accurately and strongly that unless a runner caught them completely off-guard, stealing in the normal course of play would be a miserable and ineffective gambit. No, what makes stealing possible is a rule that forces pitchers to throw the ball to home plate once they’ve committed to the motion of throwing in that direction. A pitcher who is guilty of starting to throw to home plate and changing his or her mind in mid-pitch is guilty of what’s called a “balk” and any players already on base get a free trip to the next base. The impact of this rule is that it allows sharp eyed, speedy players on base to watch the pitcher and start running to the next base as soon as the pitcher commits to a pitching motion.

Once a player decides to steal a base, she begins sprinting to the next base. She only has a few seconds to make it there. In that time, the pitcher will pitch the ball over home plate, the catcher will grab it, rise to his feet, and throw to the player covering the base the runner is trying to get to in one motion. The whole thing – running from one base to the next as well as the pitcher and catcher combining to try to throw that player out – takes right around 3.5 seconds. In a Smithsonian Magazine piece, Brad Balukjian describes an analysis of the process that suggested the most important factor in a successful stolen base is the top speed a runner reaches in his attempt.

By far the most common base players try to steal is second base. There are a few reasons for this:

Singles are by far the most common hit. Therefore being on first base is more common than being on any other base. From first, the only place to go is second.
While there are more lefties in professional baseball than in the general population, there are still more right-handed pitchers than left-handed ones. When a righty sets up to pitch, his back is turned to first base. This gives the base runner an advantage stealing from first to second but a disadvantage going from second to third.
As we covered in out article explaining why there are so few triples any more, there simply isn’t that big of a difference between being on second or third. Runners on either base are expected to be able to score on a ball hit out of the infield and not on one that stays in close. Stealing third isn’t often worth the risk. The difference between being on first or second, on the other hand, is a big deal and worth a greater risk.

While the rules about how and when a player can steal a base are fairly simple the rules about when their act is deemed to be an official steal by scorekeepers is much more complex. While it may not seem important (no matter how it happened, what matters to who is going to win is that the player made it from first to second or second to third) baseball players, managers, and true fans give statistical designations like this a lot of importance. Just one example of these distinctions is that a player who makes it safely to a base because the catcher threw the ball wildly in her attempt to catch the runner stealing is credited with a steal while a player who safely gets to the next base because the opposing player who was trying to catch the ball and tag him out messed it up, he is not credited with a steal.

Aside from stealing second from first and third from second, there are three other forms of stealing that are much more rare. A player on third base can attempt to steal home. This sounds insane, since to catch the player, the defensive team only needs to do half or one third of the stuff they normally have to do to catch a stealing attempt. Instead of the pitcher throwing it to the catcher who throws it to a player covering second or third base, the pitcher just needs to get the ball to the catcher who can stand there and tag the runner out. Only the fastest and most audacious players ever dream of attempting this. Jackie Robinson did it successfully in the 1955 World Series. A double steal is a play where two runners on different bases both try to steal the base ahead of them simultaneously. This can involve players on first and second running to second on third but it can also be used to disguise an attempt to steal home. The last form of rare stolen base is not allowed any more. In the early days of baseball, when entertainment and high-spirited hijinks were as important drivers of behavior as winning, base runners would sometimes steal backwards. This behavior is now prohibited by MLB rules and somewhat sassily too: if a player “runs the bases in reverse order for the purpose of confusing the defense or making a travesty of the game. The umpire shall immediately call Time and declare the runner out.”

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Why is the MLB baseball season so long?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why is the MLB baseball season so long? Baseball teams play like every day for more than six months. That’s SO MUCH BASEBALL! What’s the point?

Thanks,
Ken

Dear Ken,

The Major League Baseball regular season is 162 games. That’s almost twice as long as the NHL ice hockey and NBA basketball schedules. It’s 10 times longer than the 16 game NFL football schedule. It’s harder to compare baseball to soccer leagues whose seasons vary in length from around 30 games to 40 games but whose teams simultaneously compete in a number of other domestic and international competitions and whose players may be called up to play internationally as well. Still, it’s pretty safe to say that baseball seasons involve the most games of any common professional sport.

Baseball has had long seasons for as long as it has been played professionally. In 1876, the first year that professional leagues started mandating the number of games each team should play (before that, they simply gave a minimum but teams could play more games if they wanted) each team played 70 games. By 1901, the first year that the National League and American League both played, the schedule had doubled to 140 games. From there, the number vacillated a bit before moving to 154 in 1920 and then the current 162 in 1961-62. The primary cause for each lengthening of the schedule was team expansion. Up to 1962, the number of games was set by taking the number of possible opponents and multiplying by some number so that each team would play each opposing team 18 or 20 times. Since then, the leagues have sought to retain the same number of games (162) regardless of the number of teams and have done so by changing who teams play and how many times they face each other.

The simplest reason for why baseball seasons are longer than other sports is because they can be. Baseball is not a particularly physically demanding sport. Basketball and hockey’s 82 game seasons engender far more angst about the physical wear and tear on players than baseball’s season which is twice as long. The fact that the most commonly used performance enhancing drug in baseball history has not been steroids, but amphetamines called “greenies” supports the idea that the grind of a long baseball season is more mental than physical. Baseball is mostly a non-contact sport, so its teams can play 162 games in six months and even sometimes twice a day without losing an insupportable percentage of their roster to injury. Bonus fact — I read somewhere that early baseball was more beloved by lower and middle class people and early football by the upper classes because only upper class people had the luxury to risk injury in their recreational activities. Lower and middle class people who worked in more physical occupations couldn’t risk it, so they played baseball.

The other reason for baseball’s long season is that more than any other sport, baseball believes in large sample sizes to determine the best team. At its simplest, baseball is a series of one on one encounters between a pitcher and a hitter. Each game has around 60 to 70 of these contests. The long season provides a greater significance to the statistics produced by each player and each team and baseball is all about statistics! No sport cares more about its records – who is leading in each meaningful statistical category each year and in history. Of course, this is a bit of a chicken or the egg argument. It’s possible that baseball’s reverence for statistics comes from its long seasons and not the other way around.

Baseball’s long schedule gives following the sport a decidedly different feel from being a fan of any other sport. A favorite baseball team is like a friend you can rely on. They’re there almost every night. Baseball fans don’t need to schedule time to spend with their team, they can just use baseball to fill up any down time in their social schedule. Baseball remains one of the few sports that people still listen to on the radio, not just because its action is simple and slow enough to easily imagine but also because the number of games in a season mean that no single game demands full and undivided attention. Going to see a baseball game in person is far easier and more affordable because there are so many games. In so many ways, baseball’s plentiful schedule has molded it into the pastime that so many people enjoy.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Why aren't there more triples in baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Here’s something I’ve been wondering – why aren’t there more triples in baseball? I see a lot of doubles and there are always a few home runs, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a triple! What’s up with that?

Thanks,
Mona

Dear Mona,

Triples are the rarest type of hit in Major League Baseball by a long shot. Over this season and last, only roughly 2% of all hits have been triples. This wasn’t always the case. Until 1930, there were more triples in baseball than home runs. There are two main reasons for the rarity of triples in today’s game: they are difficult to achieve and not worth that much. We’ll take a quick trip into history to see what changed to make triples so unusual and then fast forward 80 years into today’s baseball to describe why they continue to be infrequent.

When baseball was in its infancy, from the 1860s to the 1910s, most baseball fields had no walls. Baseball was played on a hypothetically infinite field. No matter how far a batter hit the ball, a fielder could theoretically run, pick it up, and throw the ball to a teammate in the infield. As you might imagine with this setup, the frequency of types of hit was in a natural kind of order. Singles were more common than doubles, which were more common than triples, which were more common than home runs. Every home run was what we now call an “in the park home run” because there were no walls beyond which, if a ball was hit, it would be an “out of the park home run.” Even after ballparks were built with walls, so that a ball hit beyond the wall was a home run, triples continued to be more common than home runs. The walls were set so far out (and the balls were so difficult to hit far) that they didn’t really effect how the game was played. According to the SABR Research Journal from 1901 to 1929 “the average distribution was: 76.9 percent for singles, 15.2 percent for doubles, 5.3 percent for triples, and 2.7 percent for homers.” During the 1920s, baseball team owners gradually moved the walls or fences in, to make outside the park home runs more common and also adjusted the way baseballs were produced to make them fly farther. As you can see in this line graph from High Heat Stakes, the frequency of home runs passed that of triples around 1930 and has never looked back.

In today’s game, triples are the rarest type of hit by a wide margin. In 2014, 68% of hits were singles, 20% were doubles, 2% of hits were triples, and 10% were home runs. The most obvious reason for the scarcity of triples is that they are hard to do! Baseball fields may look enormous, but the athletes on them are quite fast and they cover a lot of ground. Almost no matter where the ball is hit, one of the nine fielders should be able to reach it and throw the ball to the infield before the batter can run the 270 feet from home base to first base, around to second and then to third base. The only two plausible reasons for a triple today are some kind of mishap — a funny bounce, a tripping outfielder, an animal running onto the field — or the ball being hit to an area of the field that the defense purposefully left uncovered because they didn’t think the batter would hit the ball there.

Despite how difficult they are, teams could probably get a few more triples than they do if they were really trying for them. On any hit that’s not obviously going to lead the runner safely to third base, teams tend to be conservative and ask the runner to stop at second. It’s rare for someone to try to “stretch” a solid double into a risky triple. The reason for this is that having a runner on third base is not thought of as a big advantage over having a runner on second base. It’s commonly understood that a runner on second base will be able to run home and score on any hit that gets past the infielders. This is almost exactly the same for a runner on third base. Without any real incentive to get to third base, players would rather stop at second than run to third and risk getting thrown out.

How rare is a triple? Around 2% or one in fifty hits are triples. Teams average around eight and a half hits per game. Multiply that by two because there are two teams playing in each game and you get 17 hits per game. 17 times three is 51, which is close enough for me to 50. So, we’d expect to see a triple about once every three games or so. Rare, but not unheard of!

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

How does the men's college baseball World Series work?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why doesn’t anyone watch men’s college baseball? I think it’s because the format of their tournament is impossible to understand. I might watch it if I understood how it works. Could you tell me? How does the men’s college baseball World Series work?

Thanks,
Stacy

Dear Stacy,

Men’s college baseball often gets a bad rap. This is partially because professional baseball has an extensive minor league system that snaps up many of the future professional baseball players before they hit college. Losing these players robs college baseball of the air of elite competition that college football and basketball still have. Another factor certainly is persistent slight confusion around how a championship team is determined. The men’s college World Series follows a more complex format than most competitions we’re used to watching, but it’s not beyond our understanding by any means. Here’s how it works.

The tournament begins, like March Madness, the college basketball tournament does, with 64 teams. In the baseball championship, these teams are split into 16 groups of four teams each. These groups of four teams will play each other until one can be identified as the winner of the group. That team moves on to the next round of the tournament. This round, with 64 teams is called the Regional. The next round, with only 16 teams is called the Super Regional. Although groups of four are reminiscent of the men’s World Cup and the women’s World Cup in soccer, there are two major differences. Instead of two or three teams advancing from the group of four, as in the World Cup, only one team advances. Also, the format of competition is different. Instead of a round robing, where each team plays the others once, this part of the college baseball championships are played as a double elimination tournament.

The principle of double-elimination is simple. The teams play each other until every team but one has lost twice. As teams accrue their second defeats, they are eliminated from the tournament. Pretty easy, right? The only tricky part is how to decide who plays who. Within each group, the four teams are ranked or seeded from one to four. This allows the succeeding games to be played out formulaically.

Game 1: Team 1 plays Team 4
Game 2: Team 2 plays Team 3
Game 3: The winner of Game 1 plays the winner of Game 2
Game 4: The loser of Game 1 plays the loser of Game 2
Game 5: The loser of Game 3 plays the winner of Game 4
Game 6: The winner of Game 3 plays the winner of Game 5. Note that at this point, the winner of Game 3 is, by definition, undefeated. They won the first game they played — either Game 1 or Game 2 — and then won the matchup between themselves and the winner of the other of the first two games. Their opponent in this game has to have lost a single game before. In order to play in and win Game 5 to qualify for this game, they would have had to either lose Game 1 or 2 (and win Game 4) or lose Game 3. That’s all just a complicated way to say that this game, Game 6 is between a team with one loss and a team with zero losses. If the team that comes into this game with one loss, loses, then the regional is over. Every team will have lost two games. If they win, then both teams involved will only have one loss and another game, Game 7, must be played to decide who advances.
Game 7: The same two teams as Game 6, if needed to decide a regional champion.

For bonus confusion, seeing “Game 7, if needed” triggers thoughts in a sports fan’s mind of a best-four-out-of-seven series. This is the most common playoff format, used in professional baseball, hockey, and basketball. In that format, Game 7s may not be needed if one team beats the other four times in the first four, five, or six games. That’s why you’ll also see “Game 5, if needed” or “Game 6, if needed) in those sports. Never in college baseball’s regionals — in the double elimination format within groups of four teams, only the seventh game is dependent on earlier results to be necessary. The first six will always be played.

After the Regional round, the teams advance to the Super Regionals. In the Super Regionals, the 16 remaining teams are grouped into pairings of two teams each. These pairings are pre-set before the tournament, the winner of Group A will play the winner of Group B, no matter who those winners are. Within each pairing, the teams play a best-two-out-of-three series. In a sense, this is still a double elimination format, but it’s not unusual in the way the Regional round format was. Best-two-out-of-three is easily understood. It’s how many people settled sibling or friendly disputes as kids, with rock-paper-scissors or odds and evens.

The Super Regional best-two-out-of-three series get the field from 16 to eight teams. From there, the tournament enters the College World Series. This eight team tournament within a tournament follows the same pattern as the last two rounds, just with fewer teams. First, the eight teams are split into two groups of four. Within those groups, the teams play a double-elimination tournament like they did in the Regional round above. Once this is done, six more teams (three in each group of four) will have been eliminated. The remaining two teams face each other in a best-two-out-of-three game series to crown an overall men’s college World Series champion.

This year, 2015, those two teams are Virginia and Vanderbilt — the same two teams as last year. The series starts tonight, Monday, June 22 at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN. Game 2 will be Tuesday at the same time and channel and Game Three (if needed) will be on Wednesday at the same time and channel. Last year, Vanderbilt won the first game 9-8, lost the second 2-7, but won the third and deciding game, 3-2 to become the 2014 champion. Only time will tell if they can repeat or if Virginia will take their revenge.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Dear Sports Fan joins the real world: Meetup

Watching sports with someone who knows more or less than you can be a frustrating proposition.

If you’re the person who knows less about sports, you probably have a lot of questions. How many can you ask before the sports fan you’re watching with gets annoyed? When is the right time to ask? You don’t want to ruin the game for your companion by asking a simple question right at a suspenseful moment. Talking about simple questions, it can be difficult to learn when it seems like the answers to all your questions contain vocabulary words you’re not completely clear on. Words and concepts that are second nature to a sports fan, like offside, holding, second set, third and seven, or two and two, are not easy sailing if you don’t know what they mean. It often feels like a choice between pestering your companion incessantly or accepting that the sporting event can only be pleasant but indecipherable background noise.

Being the person who knows more about sports can also be tricky. Knowledge often comes from passion, so the person who knows more often wants to focus more on watching and less on talking. It can be legitimately difficult to explain the components of something you may have learned very gradually from an early age or from the altered perspective of being a participant.

It’s difficult to watch sports without understanding them but it’s impossible to learn without watching. It’s a Catch 22 of Hellermanian proportions — at least it was, until now. After four years of explaining sports online, Dear Sports Fan will be making its first foray into the real world. I’ve started a Meetup group called Dear Sports Fan Viewing Parties for people who want to watch sports with explicit permission to ask question and for sports fans who want to help create a supportive setting. Our first Meetup will be this Monday, June 8, at 7 p.m. to watch the U.S. Women’s National soccer team play its first game of the 2015 World Cup against Australia. We’ll be gathering at Orleans bar in Somerville near Davis Square. If you or anyone you know lives in the Boston area and would like to be a part of this experiment, let me know or sign up here.

Raising athletes to win, serve, and live

Sports are at least as big a part of raising children in this country as religion or civics. Kids spend hours every day playing sports and the way they see adults handle the everyday drama of sports helps to each them how to handle the real dramas of growing up. This week we have three stories about raising kids in and around sports. We’re going to hear from a former major league baseball player who has recently begun coaching his children’s t-ball team and from the family and friends of a young athlete who took her own life. We’ll hear about the army’s newfound devotion to women’s lacrosse and why their focused on that sport.

Confessions of a Major League T-Ball Coach

by Doug Glanville for the New York Times

Former baseball player Doug Glanville walks the line in this article. It’s tricky to write comedically about children — if the snark has even a hint of mean-spiritedness in it, the whole article will fall apart at the seams. I don’t sense snark at all, only love and appreciation for the absurd.

Base running is a little more straightforward, even though it can create moments I have never seen or imagined before in my life. The other day, we had three runners on third at the same time. After first trying to sort it out, I thought, “No big deal, let me see what happens when the hitter puts the ball in play.” So he did, and two out of the three ran home. Not bad.

T-ball is subject to a range of delays that have nothing to do with rain. Nor do they come from pitching changes or from challenging a call with Instant Replay. No. Our catcher went off to the Port A Potty; another one of our players was shaken up after being engulfed by his own teammates (eight apparent shortstops trampled him to get a ball hit near the pitcher’s mound); a couple of other players found the joy in knocking each other’s hats off at second base — until they found themselves disoriented in the evil and boring outfield.

Why Does the Army Care so Much About Women’s Lacrosse?

by Jane McManus for ESPNW

The image you might have in your mind of women’s lacrosse is that of a genteel sport played by young ladies. Don’t be tricked by the skirts that the players wear, they are ladies, but they’re the kind of ladies that will shove you to the ground and sprint over you to score a goal. That’s exactly the kind of people the army needs as they continue to open more combat positions to women.

The Army believes there is a crucial relationship between those two things — an athletic background and being a soldier. As the military prepares to allow women on the front lines of combat in 2016, there is an immediate need for strong, tough women from within the Army’s ranks. And, in a philosophy often mentioned on campus and believed by MacArthur himself, the Army believes athletes make better soldiers.

The data seems to support the basic premise held at West Point: that female athletes possess critical tools that would make them ready for the front lines of combat. Lacrosse is the next frontier for pulling good athletes to the academy

Split Image

by Kate Fagan for ESPN

This is a brutal article. It tells the story of Madison Holleran, a successful multi-sport athlete who recently died by suicide. As much as her family and friends would like there to be an answer to why and what we can do as a society to prevent other people from doing the same, there just isn’t. Depression is a nasty disease and it can strike anyone, anywhere. What follows here is some of Fagan’s writing about the impact of social media on young women’s lives. It’s not an explanation for suicide but it is something that we can improve.

Madison was beautiful, talented, successful — very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes. But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly. She was a deep thinker, someone who was aware of the image she presented to the world, and someone who often struggled with what that image conveyed about her, with how people superficially read who she was, what her life was like.

Everyone presents an edited version of life on social media. People share moments that reflect an ideal life, an ideal self… With Instagram, one thing has changed: the amount we consume of one another’s edited lives. Young women growing up on Instagram are spending a significant chunk of each day absorbing others’ filtered images while they walk through their own realities, unfiltered… She seemed acutely aware that the life she was curating online was distinctly different from the one she was actually living. Yet she could not apply that same logic when she looked at the projected lives of others.

Aside from footballs, what else can be customized in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

Okay, so… what with the whole Deflategate thing popping up again, I understand that in football each team is allowed to customize their balls within certain parameters, and the Patriots probably went too far. Honestly though, I was surprised that football teams could customize their balls at all. What else in sports is customizable?

Thanks,
Charlie

Dear Charlie,

I too was surprised when I first learned that NFL teams were allowed to customize the balls that they play offense with in each game. It seems unusual to give a team leeway over such an important piece of equipment. The ball is not customizable in any other sport that I’m aware of. Not in soccer, basketball, lacrosse, field hockey, volleyball, rugby, or even kickball. Perhaps it’s because in football, the ball is only used by one team at a time. Each team gets a turn playing offense with the ball while the other plays defense without it. When there’s a change of possession, there’s a whistle and the balls can be swapped in or out. Baseball is somewhat similar, although the ball is used somewhat equally by the defense (pitcher) and offense (batter.) It’s not surprising then that despite rules against any customization of the ball in baseball, it’s the one sport I know of where players (usually pitchers) are semi-frequently caught for trying to customize the ball to their liking. Pitchers won’t deflate the ball (it’s not inflated, so good luck deflating it) but they do try to scuff it up, spit on it, or rub sticky stuff onto it. That said, what you asked about were the elements of sports equipment that can be customized. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head of important elements of the five major sports that can be customized.

Soccer: Not much. But then again, there’s not much equipment in soccer at all, that’s one of its attractions. A player’s cleats can be custom-made although the materials used as well as the sharpness (they can’t be sharp) and the height (they can’t be stilts) are controlled.

Basketball: Again, not much here. A players shoes can be customized and if he’s famous enough, they will be to great profit for him or her and a shoe company. There was a fad a while back of players wearing full-length tights on their legs but the league put an end to that, not because it necessarily gave anyone an advantage, but because (I think) they thought it made their players look silly.

Football: Beyond the ball, there are a few things football players customize. Their helmets are remarkably unregulated — mostly because regulation by the NFL would theoretically further their liability for brain injuries incurred under their auspices. Face masks may be customized but cannot include tinted visors unless players ask for and are granted a medical waiver. The number of bars and their location is also regulated and some of the more crazy Hannibal Lector looking masks you’ve seen in past years are being outlawed. (Which is good, because their weight is likely contributing to concussions among the players who wear them.)

Baseball: Major League baseball players are allowed to customize their bats and gloves but within pretty tight regulations. Bats have a maximum diameter (2.61 in) and length (42 in) and must be made of a solid piece of wood. Players have been caught corking their bats (hollowing them out and replacing the center of the wood with cork to make them lighter and theoretically better) and punished before. Gloves have a complicated set of rules, but basically they have maximum dimensions (catchers and first basemen have separate limits from all other fielders) and have to have individual fingers, not a webbing.

Hockey: Now we’re talking. Virtually every piece of equipment in hockey, except for the puck and the goals, are customizable within limits. Goalies wear armor from head to toe that is carefully regulated but thoroughly customized. For other players, the most important thing is the stick. Players can and do customize the length of the stick and the curve of the stick’s blade. The maximum stick length, of 63 inches, can be extended by special waiver for players over 6’6″. The longest stick, is 65 inches long, and used by 6’9″ Zdeno Chara. The blades can be curved however a player wants them to be but at no point can the curve be deeper than 3/4 of an inch. This is a rule that’s broken with great regularity and almost never called even though at any point a coach or player can challenge another player’s stick and have the referees check to see if it is legal. If it’s not, a two-minute penalty is assessed and one team gets a power play. The most famous (or infamous) stick challenge came in the finals of the 1993 Stanley Cup. It’s interesting that, as opposed to the current kerflufle in football, no one really blamed the stick violator, Marty McSoreley, or his team, the Los Angeles Kings for cheating in this way. In fact, if either team was seen as guilty, it was the Montreal Canadiens for calling it out.

Generally, it seems as if the more equipment a sport has and the more its use is isolated to one player or one team, the more customization is permitted. Anything that can be customized is regulated but breaking these regulations is often seen as a normal part of the sport — perhaps worthy of punishment but not of scorn.

Thanks for asking about customization,
Ezra Fischer

Sport as an element of recovery

We all live with the nagging fear and sure knowledge that at some point, someone we love will be taken from us. If all goes well and the ideal, natural order of things comes to pass, this means we will lose our grandparents before our parents, and our parents before our children lose us. For many, that order is interrupted violently by disease, misfortune, or violence. Tradition and cultural institutions are a way to cope with loss and serve as both assistants and markers on the road to recovery. Today we have two stories of people who have turned to sport as a form of recovery. Our third story, just as a lighthearted bonus, is something completely different.

Shedding the Blockers

by Robert Mays for Grantland

The athlete who overcomes personal tragedy to accomplish great things in his or her sport is by now virtually a cliche. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good story though. People’s lives, situations, and characters are infinitely varied and interesting to learn about. Almost invariably, to learn about someone’s history is to develop a fondness for them. When the NFL draft comes around, I will be rooting for Danny Shelton to land in a good spot. He deserves it.

From the start, it was obvious to [coach Jeff] Choate what he had in the middle of Washington’s defense. In the Huskies’ season opener, a late-August game in Hawaii, [Danny] Shelton played 78 snaps. Even at 339 pounds — a number Choate calls “conservative” — Shelton was on the field for all three downs. He would finish the season with nine sacks, but his presence also created opportunities all over the Washington defense. Like Vince Wilfork — a player to whom Shelton has been compared often in the lead-up to the draft — single-teaming him with a center allows him to control both inside gaps, freeing up linebackers to worry about plays further outside. After the first series in Washington’s 27-26 loss at Arizona, Choate noticed the Wildcats were content to not double-team Shelton at all. Shelton finished the game with nine total tackles, 2.5 tackles for loss, and a sack.

Away from football at Washington, he tried to be more of a Polynesian and a mentor with a 3.7 GPA than an athlete. This fall, he led a First-Year Interest Group on campus, helping mentor incoming students about the difficulties of the transition to college. He’s the first athlete Barker can remember asking to be involved with the program. Early on, when students would ask if he played football, he would lie. “I’d tell them I played tennis,” Shelton says. A few said he should give football a try. He told them he’d think about it.

Still in the Game

by Rick Maese for the Washington Post

While players, coaches, and owners get the spotlight, every professional team has dozens of stage-manager or techie type running around, doing incredible work to support them. These people, like Monica Barlow, who before her death was in charge of media and public relations for the Baltimore Orioles, are every bit as passionate about their teams as the people who wear the uniforms. Once in a very long while, we get a window into what it’s like to live for a team beyond simply being a fan. The view is as fascinating as the story of Monica’s death is heartbreaking.

Sports helps explain relationships. It connects generations, spouses, friends, parents and children. It becomes an expression of love and later a channel for grief. People etch team logos on headstones and sprinkle ashes on sports fields. For someone grieving a loss, a trip to the ballpark might offer a respite, a chance to escape their pain. For others, it’s a time to embrace their loss and feel closer to a loved one. For Barlow, it was everything. Baseball had dictated his routine for so long. Monica was gone, but the game would continue.

Predators’ Pekka Rinne Gets Puck Stuck In Pads For The Longest Time

by Darren Hartwell for NESN

After those two tear-jerkers, it’s good to cry with laughter for a change. A three minute delay in a hockey game because no one can find the puck… despite knowing that it went into the goalie and never came out? That’s a tear-jerker of a different sort!

Pekka Rinne doesn’t just save pucks. He makes them disappear. The Nashville Predators goaltender was his usual stellar self in Game 4 of his team’s Stanley Cup playoff series against the Chicago Blackhawks. With under six minutes remaining in the first overtime period, however, Rinne took his talents a bit too far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaqn-wHLg2M

How does it work in baseball when a game is called part of the way through?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why did the Red Sox game on Marathon Monday stop early? Isn’t that unfair? Who gets to choose when they’re stopping? How does it work in baseball when a game is called part of the way through?

Thanks,
Bobbie

Dear Bobbie,

It’s true, the game on Patriots’ Day in Boston between the Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles ended in less than the full nine innings. It was stopped by the umpire in the middle of the seventh inning because of rain. The game was not restarted, nor will it be finished at a later date. In baseball, it’s okay to have a game that’s less than nine innings and its result counts towards the final standings just as much as if it had been played all the way through. When this happens, it’s usually because of weather, but there are other permissible reasons. This may seem weird to you but it’s all part of baseball’s unique structure and culture.

If you want to understand the exact rules that govern when and why a baseball game can be stopped, your first stop might be the official rules of the game. The problem with this is that these rules appear to have been written by a mixture of lawyers and spies. You need an expensive education and a one-time pad just to make sense of them. Here’s an example:

No game called because of a curfew (Rule 4.12(a)(1)), weather (Rule 4.12(a)(5)), a time limit (Rule 4.12(a)(2)) or with a tied score (Rule 4.12(a)(6)) shall be a suspended game unless it has progressed far enough to have been a regulation game pursuant to Rule 4.10(c). A game called pursuant to Rules 4.12(a)(3) or 4.12(a)(4) shall be a suspended game at any time after it starts.

For mere mortals like us, it’s probably enough to know a simplified version of these rules. This information will serve 95% of time.

Once the game starts, the only person who gets to choose if and when to stop the game is the head umpire.
A game can be stopped temporarily, usually for rain, and can be restarted once the conditions allow play again.
If a game has to be stopped for the day, it is declared a “called” game and this is when the mildly complicated stuff starts.
If a game is called before four and a half innings are played, the game is declared not to have existed at all and the teams need to reschedule it and start from the beginning. All of the statistics accumulated in the game are stricken from the record. Let’s take a minute to think about how totally insane that would feel as a player. You’re having a great game — the best of your life. You’ve got two home runs in the first three innings. Then it starts raining and they’re just gone. Of course, a bad game of fielding errors could just as easily be wiped from the books, so maybe it works out. Rany Jazayerli has a great article about this in Baseball Prospectus. He notes that Roger Maris, who held the single season home run record with 61 for decades, actually would have had 62 but for one being erased in this way.
If a game has reached four and a half inning and the home team is winning (and therefore nothing that happens in the bottom of the fifth inning, when the home team is up to bat, could change the outcome,) the game is over and it counts as a regulation game.
If a game has reached the four and a half inning mark and it is tied, the game will become a suspended game. It must be rescheduled and when play starts, it will pick up right where the two teams left off, although some player substitutions are allowed.

Weather is by far the most common reason for calling a game, but the rules allow for light or other technical malfunctions, “a curfew imposed by law” and the mysterious “a time limit permissible by league rules.” As far as I can tell, the rules that the rules are referring to here, do not exist.

With all the money and competitive importance involved in professional sports today, these rules may seem archaic or even irresponsibly lighthearted. They seem to suggest that the outcome of a game is not so important, that once the game is half through, that’s enough to call it done. This ignores a thousand late-inning comebacks. The thing is, baseball is a little bit archaic and that’s part of its nostalgic charm. It is more relaxed than other sports. The length of the regular season (162 games) means that each game actually does mean less. Compared to an NFL football season of 16 games, each baseball game is only 1/16 as important as each NFL football game. Part of what makes baseball fun to follow is its every-day, low-key rhythm. Being calm enough about a sport to accept a loss even though you were only down by one run in the fifth inning when it started to rain is emblematic of what baseball fans love about their sport.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Does a baseball team have to use a DH or designated hitter in an American League game?

Dear Sports Fan,

Does a baseball team have to use a DH or designated hitter in an American League game? What if they have a pitcher who is really good at hitting?

Thanks,
Charlie

Dear Charlie,

No! And thanks so much for your question because I had no idea that this was true before I researched the topic to answer it. Any team that would prefer to have their pitcher bat is allowed to do that, but by doing so, they must decline the option to have a designated hitter for that entire game. For people who are not totally familiar with baseball, let’s do a little background before explaining this surprising freedom within the rules.

A designated hitter is a player who hits but does not play in the field. It’s one of the strangest rules in sports because it has such an important impact on the game and yet it is used in only half the Major League Baseball games each season. The American League plays with a designated hitter. The National League does not. It’s perhaps the most important quirk that stems from a history as independent leagues and not just two halves of the same league. So, in games between two National League teams, the pitchers take their turn hitting, just like the rest of their teammates. In games between two American League teams, the pitchers concentrate just on hitting and let a designated hitter take their spot in the batting order, once every nine times around. In interleague play or games with one National League and one American League team, where the game is played matters. The team at home gets to use their rules while the away team adapts.

The advantages of having using a DH are clear. Pitching is a very specialized skill. So is batting. If you are able to use two separate players to fill these specialized needs, you’re more likely to get high-quality performance in both realms. In the National League, where pitchers have to hit, they’re usually the worst hitters on the team. Having a pitcher at bat one out of every nine times a team gets to hit translates over the long run into a less high scoring and less highly skilled game. I have to say though, the DH rule has always bothered me a little. I feel like it’s somehow cheating to let players play only half the game — either just defense or just offense. Plus, I thought, it would really do a disservice to a player who was so abundantly talented that he could excel in both phases.

Your question prompted me to dig deeper into the rulebook and discover something wonderful. The DH is entirely voluntary! Teams don’t have to use a designated hitter. Before the game, they can simply declare that their pitcher is going to hit and then play the game that way. What a power move! I imagine a team doing this to send the message to their opponent, “we don’t need the silly DH rule. We can beat you without it!” In reality though, this almost never happens, and when it does, it’s sometimes an accident. For instance, in 2009, then Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon mistakenly listed two players as playing third base and in correcting the error, was forced to play the game without a DH.

Other times, teams make a substitution during the game that loses them their DH rights. This is easily understandable. Imagine a situation where the DH is the only other player on the team that can play a position — say catcher, since that’s a very unique position. Part of the way through the game, the starting catcher gets injured and so the player who was playing DH needs to step into that role. Once the DH plays in the field, his team loses DH privileges and has to use their pitcher as a hitter as well.

One thing a team cannot do (but which would be a nice trick if it were allowed) is to start a player in the DH spot who they never intend to have bat — for example, a starting pitcher who is on a rest day. That way, the first time the DH came up to bat, the team’s manager would be able to substitute for the perfect pinch hitter — a fast contact hitter in some situations or a hulking power hitter in others. This tactic was thought of and used by former Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver before being outlawed in 1980 by the so-called Phantom DH rule.

Whether by accident or on purpose, a team declining or losing their ability to use a designated hitter is one of those rare baseball oddities that makes the sport so rewarding to follow.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer