One of our dorkier moderators put together this list once. It was only good through February of this year and only contains data since - I believe - 2009.
Personal Insults
Failure to Follow Moderator Instructions
Being a Jerk
Trolling
Now, I’m not going to name names. I just want to point out that I, a grown-ass man who has attended Ren Faires in costume since the 80s, has attended Star Trek cons when that was mostly what there was, has collected comics for so many years that he had to devote a room in his home to storing them, has his home’s wall art consist of geek things and original comic artwork and has a chalkboard wall in his home loft so he can do math on the fly…
Me, with all of that, pointed at this mod and yelled, ‘NERD’!
Men on first and second, one out … pop fly in foul territory off the third base line … fielder lets the ball drop to the ground … can the runner on second “tag-up” and advance to third base? …
ETA: Just curious … what rank is “warning on a whim”? …
Only one league left in the world clings to the now outdated notion of pitchers hitting. Sorry, but it is time for universal DH. Not that I get upset by this issue, I would be fine with ending the DH but increasing roster sizes by 1 or 2 with a limit on the number of pitchers you can carry.
In the past? This seems to be a very vibrant and living movement in the present, among others, with those who believe that no-one could legitimately and honestly support 45. I loathe this presidency, and yet I find this attitude tiresome and unhelpful. Go figure. Anyway, when I stop seeing disagreeable opinions here, that’s when I’ll be leaving.
Why not a full roster for offense and defensive players, then? We can have nine “designated hitters,” and a bunch of highly specialized outfielders and infielders that never hit.
My answer is: because that ruins the trade-off choices that make baseball so intriguing to manage and are (or should be) an essential element of the game.
Nobody but opponents of the designated hitter rule ever makes that proposal. Other sports have specialized defensive players who almost never play offense. Why not make the goalies in soccer and hockey play on offense too?
When I watch baseball I like to see good hitting and good pitching. If I want to see strategy, I’ll watch chess.
Meh, I see a lot of basketball players who are crappy on foul shots, to the point that their opponents will deliberately foul them for the chance to get the ball back after a missed free throw. Sometimes the last two minutes of an NBA game can last 10 minutes because of all the fouls. Why don’t we just give the NBA a designated foul shooter, so we can concentrate on offense and defense, and not get bogged down by strategy?
But soccer is not the best comparison, nor is hockey, as the transition between offense and defense is extremely fluid. My Timbers had a 12 second counterattack the other day: keeper makes a stop, distributes to midfielder, pass to striker for the goal. The goalie went immediately from defense to offense without the sort of hard line we see in baseball, cricket, or American football.
All that’s to say, I’m with Bricker. The DH roont the game. Roont it, I tells ya.
Sometimes they do. This is actually more in support of my point than yours, I think. No rule forbids a hockey team from playing their goalie as an attacker. In fact, it’s common for the losing team in the final minutes to pull their goalie, and sometimes even in the middle of the game a team that’s on power play will empty their net to give themselves a really strong numerical advantage center ice.
But the decision comes with important tradeoffs: an empty net means that you risk giving up a goal easily in the midst of trying to gain one. So the choice is a strategic one, weighing the cost against the benefit.
That’s the value (at least to me) in having rules that incentivize strategic thinking over brute-force repetition of a single tactic. Decide whether you need a pinch-hitter, knowing you’ll pay the cost of leaving him in for the rest of the game. That’s the pure form of baseball. Having your cake and eating it too with the designated hitter seems the lazy substitute for strategy.
