Yes, the Yankees don’t have to pay much of the salary, but Marshall’s point was that there was a great disparity in the salary from the highest paid player on the Yankees (Rodriguez) and the lowest-paid player on the team (some rookie making the major league minimum, which is around $400,000).
So Rodriguez makes about 65 times as much as the lowest-paid Yankee.
Regardless of who’s footing the bill.
Although not as extreme as the sport of golf, there is an underlying ethic. Yes, there are all kinds of things that have been done to gain an advantage but at the end of the day there are pragmatic implications as to what you are trying to do. Just hitting a baseball from a major league pitcher is incredibly difficult. The hitter is processing a vast amount of information in a very short increment of time in order to successfully make contact with the ball. Overloading him with a cheat signal may be more harmful than helpful. It’s sort of like the Air Force pilots that are flying high tech fighter planes that overload them with information. It can get to the point where flying by the seat of their pants can be more effective than trying to process all of the data being thrown at them. The Israeli’s destroyed the Syrian Air Force by turning off the (at that time) high tech info systems.
The pitchers hide their hand placement on the ball. Without even looking at that a “spy” can tell a lot just by where the catcher sets up. Catchers change their signals when there is a runner on second base because they don’t want the runner to relay a signal to the batter. A lot of this stuff has already been thought of but relaying a signal to a batter with a quarter of a second to process it may be more harmful than helpful.
Two other components. The motion is supposed to allow you to throw hard and minimize injury.
It also has to finish in a position to protect yourself from the ball or to field it .
Fastest softball pitch was in the low 100’smph, fastest baseball about the same (limited by strength of tendons/ligaments/muscles/bones in the human body)
Cite? here’s mine.
On another note, as Spartydog says, there are certain ethical issues involved. For example, I once saw a batter on deck trying to time the pitch, by swinging just as it crossed over home plate. On the next pitch, the pitcher wound up, and beaned the guy on deck! He got thrown ot of the game, of course, but I bet the guy that got hit never tried to time a pitch after that!
But batters do that all the time. I’m amazed that a pitcher would take objection to something that is SOP. There may have been something else going on.
Some pitchers’ delivery leaves them extremely exposed to line drives back at the mound. It’s rare enough that they can have a career, but I’m sure the injuries are more frequent.
I can’t think of any significant starting pitcher who had a bad delivery like that. The poster child for this is Mitch Williams whose awkward finish was offset by what was unhittable hard stuff during his prime years. But Williams was frequently tormented by batters bunting to his off side. I really doubt a starting pitcher with a Williams-esque delivery would ever make it to the majors. He’d be converted to a reliever or retaught a conventional delivery in the minors.