In watching the Atlanta vs. Pittsburgh game yesterday Atlanta had a relief pitcher (Jordan Walden I believe) who has a very unusual delivery. I have never seen anything like it. Before releasing any pitch he would take a little hop resulting in both feet being off the ground when he would release the ball. This would appear to be illegal to me. What would stop him (other than laws of gravity) from leaping outside the pitcher’s circle before delivering the ball, bringing him much closer to home plate?
Rule 8.01 (a) says: The Windup Position. The pitcher shall stand facing the batter, his pivot foot in contact with the pitcher’s plate and the other foot free. … He shall not raise either foot from the ground, except that in his actual delivery of the ball to the batter, he may take one step backward, and one step forward with his free foot.
However when discussing pitching from the set position the rule makes no mention of keeping both feet on the ground. I always was under the impression that the pitcher had to have his pivot foot on the rubber when he released the ball. Is this not the case?
In watching clips of his motion, especially a slow motion clip (see 0.50), it is obvious that his pivot foot is not in contact with the plate at the time of release, and every pitch is a balk. Why the hell the umps aren’t calling it is beyond me.
I don’t think that any pitchers are still in contact with the rubber when the ball leaves their fingers. Thus all pitchers would be in violation of rule 8.01 if the strictest interpretation of the rule was used. But the rule probably refers to the beginning of the windup, in which case Walden is fine.
However, there does seem to be a hop of some sort, but there’s probably no specific rule against what he’s doing.
His foot drags off the rubber, so I think he’s sort of hopping to plant his front foot further out. But the rear foot is just dragging off of the rubber, not going up into the air. I don’t think it matters any more than the pitchers who have their rear foot totally off the rubber before they release.
Well, I think you are mistaken. His delivery is unique in all of baseball. He is by no means dragging his foot. Both feet are actually in the air when he lets go of the ball. Or at least they were Tuesday night when I saw him pitch for the first time.
All I’ve seen is the video Clothahump posted. It wasn’t clear to me from that video that both feet were off the ground at the same time. Perhaps he doesn’t do it when he knows someone is recording it to be seen in slow motion. Even if he has both feet in the air it’s not significantly different than the pitchers who pick up their rear foot before delivering a pitch as far as the rules go. Nobody seems to care about enforcing this. You’d need to use a slow motion playback or have an ump standing close to the pitcher to enforce this anyway.
I just watched the video and not having video of the actual game to compare it to I can only say that this seems to be a conservative example of what he was doing in the game I saw. YMMV. I got the feeling watching the video, that sometimes his right foot left the ground and sometimes it did not. Every pitch I saw in the game was thrown with both feet in the air. By the way, it was not me who noticed this first, it was Pirate announcer John Wehner, a former player, who was in the announcer’s booth on the third floor of PNC Park, a good 120 feet from home plate. He made his comment after seeing no more than 3 or 4 pitches. If he could see it, then I guess the umpire could also. Unfortunately no one on the announcing team ever brought up the legality of the technique.
I don’t doubt what you’ve seen, but I can’t see MLB starting to enforce this rule. It’s more likely they’ll change the rule instead, if they care about it all. This guy’s motion might make it an issue they have to deal with.
MLB has never enforced this rule strictly, and nearly all pitchers have their rear foot off the rubber before they release the ball. (Seethis, which was the first result in a Google search – freeze it at 17 and 26 seconds). Walden seems to come off just a bit further than usual, but no one is objecting.
The umpires just check that your foot is on the rubber when you go into your motion; if it comes off normally in the course of that – even if you haven’t released the ball – it’s not considered a balk.
Here’s an article with a good slow-motion gif of Walden pitching.
The purpose of the balk rule is to prevent the pitcher from gaining an unfair advantage vs base runners through illegal “deceptive” motions. Unless he somehow pivots mid-air in that split second and throws to a base (other than home), I don’t see how this is breaking the spirit of the rule. And while he does come forward about a foot or so, I can’t imagine that 15-18 inches is giving him any meaningful unfair advantage vs batters either.
Although technically against the rules, I’d rather baseball stop the other illegal pitching moves (balks) of motioning towards home then throwing the foot towards first past the 45 degree angle to pick off first and turning the wrong way (i.e. swinging towards home) to pick a guy off second.
I don’t think this applies to balks either, it doesn’t do anything to fool baserunners, and nothing is a balk if there is no one on base. This is about illegal pitches, and at some point you have to consider the effect of leaping forward before throwing a pitch. If the rule isn’t enforced it’s going to be difficult to deal with the case of a pitcher who gets himself 3 feet closer to home plate by jumping. He’s doing nothing different than Walden is in terms of the rules.
Actually, it does. The ball(at 100mph) arrives appx. .01 sec sooner while the batter has only a .014 sec window for his swing to drive the ball into fair territory. If he times a swing for a ball coming from 60.5 feet and it’s only traveling 59, he misses.
I know this is resurrecting a pseudo-zombie but I was thinking. If there’s no rule that the pitcher has to have one foot on the rubber (within reason) as he pitches, then whats to prevent a pitcher from running up to 30’ or so from the plate as part of his delivery?
I made a point of looking up ten or so other randomly selected pitchers.
Every single one of them had their back foot off the rubber when they released the ball, just as Walden does. In fact, I cannot find any pitcher who still has their rear foot on the rubber at the point of release. Even knuckleballer RA Dickey, who throws about as softly as any MLB pitcher, has his rear foot well off the rubber at release.
I can’t find any rule that says you can’t do that.
I don’t know what the problem is. Walden’s delivery is strange and jumpy, but in a technical sense it is no different from anyone else; he strides forward with his lead foot, and the act of delivering in the pitch his rear foot comes off as well.
You need to at least quote relevant rules. That is the rule for the windup position. Walden does not pitch from the windup position, ever.
Again, Walden’s back foot is leaving the rubber as he makes the effort to deliver the pitch, not prior to that. Pretty much every single baseball pitcher in the world does that. They aren’t going to start calling balks on all of them.