[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Serious Nitpick to stop a commonly believed piece of bad information:
Please keep in mind the Yanks do not pay A-Rod so much more, the Ranger’s gave A-Rod his silly contract and pay enough of it each year that the Yanks are only paying around $18 million. The same amount or less than players like Jeter, Soriano, Beltran, etc. Therefore, while A-Rod makes a ridiculous amount of money, the Yankees neither signed the contract nor actually pay him the amount.
The Deal:
Jim
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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.
[QUOTE=BobT]
There is no explicit rule anywhere in the rules of baseball that prohibit the use of artificial magnification devices or remote signaling or anything like that to keep teams from stealing signs. If you read Joshua Prager’s “The Echoing Green”, he details how baseball has tried to take steps against this, but has never enacted a rule.
What happens is that when such instances turn up, teams get fined and players and coaches can get suspended, but usually nothing much happens. There have only been a handful of suspensions handed out for illegal sign stealing.
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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 .
[QUOTE=Pygmy Rugger]
Softball fast-pitches, in comparison, travel around 70 mph, about 30 mph less.
[/QUOTE]
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)
[QUOTE=RaftPeople]
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)
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[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Speeds of 70+mph (110+kph) are not uncommon at the professional level.
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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!
[QUOTE=Pygmy Rugger]
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!
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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.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
It also has to finish in a position to protect yourself from the ball or to field it .
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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.