You’re right. My memory was at fault.
Rickjay - I agree that football can be a slog at times (and much more so nowadays with all the replays), but there’s nothing that can bring the game to a complete halt while it’s being played. The coach can milk, stall, waffle, and hedge all he wants, but the bottom line is that either his team advances the ball 10 yards or has to give it up. As for hockey fights, ever notice how almost nobody ever really gets hurt in them? That’s by design. Fists only against a foe who’s prepared to hit back, allows them to work out their frustrations without resorting to actual violence, either cheap shots or using sticks.
I’d also argue that the lack of accountability is a factor… take a cheap shot at a guard and he’ll hit back, but a batter can’t throw at a pitcher’s head. There are always going to be problems cropping up in an asymmetrical game like this.
Well, except frequent television timeouts, and the many other reasons to stop the clock. Football games take over three hours to play and only have eight or nine minutes of actual play, so something’s stopping the game.
Agreed.
NFL football is completely unwatchable except when pre-recorded and using fast forward through the commercials. Some commercial breaks are so interminable I manage to forget who’s playing. Or more frequently, which direction each team is going.
As to your various comments on baseball, I think you’ve nailed the nub here. It’s a finely honed balance that can easily be tinkered into massive imbalance. Said another way, there’s a lot more ways to change it worse than to change it better.
As @DKW rightly says just above, it’s also a uniquely asymmetrical game where the tit-for-tat sub rosa revenge strategy employed in other games isn’t easily applied. Which makes maintaining balance all the harder.
It would be interesting to look at some stats for total MLB at-bats in a normal season, total hit batsmen, total allegedly intentionally hit batsmen, and total dangerously allegedly intentionally hit batsmen.
Just how big an issue is this? Is it the leading cause of serious injury to players? Is it the leading cause of non-serious injury to players?
I know I don’t know and am not enough of a baseball stats fan to know how to readily chase these numbers down.
I’d propose:
(1) Unintentional struck batter — immediate ejection unless the batter intentionally got hit
(2) intentional struck batter — immediate forfeit of game and further punishment for the pitcher in terms of suspended games
(3) Any intentional violence at all—Immediate ejection and game suspensions for all involved
(4) All these should be accompanied by punishment of the managers on whose watch they happened and fines for the club
That’s ridiculous. Ejecting a pitcher for HBP means that you can’t pitch inside, you probably can’t pitch in a light rain, and the value of a good pitcher drops dramatically since any slight miscue can get them removed in the first inning.
Plunking a batter on the hip shouldn’t result in a forfeit. I’m fine with an ejection, but the game is still being played. It just means you’ll see more of these from the losing team in a blowout.
You’re using a howitzer to deal with an annoying mosquito. There are plenty of rules in place right now to deal with enforcing safety.
Intentionally hitting someone with a baseball going 70-90 miles an hour is deadly assault and it should be treated as such. Accidents are a different thing. If that happens intentionally, the game should end right then.
If that means pitchers can’t brush back hitters, then I’m all for it.
Too many forfeits from hitting opposing players and the entire team should be suspended from the league and banned from selling tickets or getting TV money for a set period of time.
Then you’re willing to accept that it fundamentally changes the balance between hitting and pitching. I’m not.
And 80 MPH baseball on the hip isn’t deadly assault and shouldn’t be treated as such. Throwing at the head is another story, and I don’t think you’ll find anyone (here at least) defending that.
I don’t see why threatening severe injury, which is what a brushback is, should be accepted as part of the balance of the game.
The fact is that, if a pitcher celebrated on the mound every time he struck out a batter, it would be very poorly received, believe me. That’s exactly what I would do if a batter tried to show me up after hitting a home run.
How about we make it equal, then? Intentional bean ball, batter can charge the mound and keep HIS weapon for a single shot too.
Why do we give one side not only “unwritten rules”, for intentionally doing something that can cause injury, but forbid the victim to defend himself?
Clearly as time has gone on, the “assumption of risk” doctrine in pro sports has gotten a workout. And as society evolves, so does our taste in what risks are acceptable to pay to watch = pay others to accept in pursuit of their paycheck.
NHL used to play goalies with no mask and everybody with no helmets. That’s now an unacceptable risk. To the audience, the teams, and the players.
We are all witnesses right now to the evolution of concussive play in the NFL. So far we have lots more questions and misgivings than we have concrete change in the rules or the player / coach / management culture. But those larger changes are coming.
Batting helmets came to MLB in fits and starts. Quite a story there spread over decades a century. Likewise the fairly recent rule changes to protect basemen & catchers from sliding runners.
Maybe both batters & catchers should wear hockey goalie helmets. With that gear one can be hit anywhere by the worst case pitch with very little chance of permanent injury. That solves the safety side of the equation. Then we’d just need to solve the balanced game play and moral sides of the equation.
@chisquirrel’s modest proposal would probably be a bit too far the other way. But it’s thought provoking!
If any of the wacky proposals in this thread were presented to the actual players, they’d laugh their heads off. No need for beanballs.
Clearly baseball players themselves haven’t been successful in maintaining a reasonable standard for human conduct, so I would take their input with a grain of salt at this point.
Because throwing a ball at 100 MPH within 6" of someone else is inherently dangerous. No amount of rules modifications is going to change that. Enhanced enforcement of truly dangerous actions (pitching behind, head hunting), and better protective gear make sense. Forfeits for a brush back pitch is nonsense.
In 2019 (let’s ignore this season, it’s weird) MLB batters stepped to the plate just over 19,600 times and were hit by a pitch 1984 times, so about once every 100 at bats, or about six times a year for the average fulltime player. Intentional HBPs are harder to figure because that’s not a stat but it probably isn’t a hundred a year in the entire major leagues.
The batter has more effect on the likelihood of an HBP than the pitcher does. Some guys stand close to the plate, or dive towards it as they swing, and are not super eager to get out of the way. The Cubs’ Anthony Rizzo gets hit 20-30 times a year; no pitcher in baseball hits as many guys consistently as Rizzo gets hit. Don Baylor was king of this approach; he once got hit 35 times in one season, a number unassailed by any pitcher since the formation of the modern major league arrangement in 1901. Don would just stand right over the plate and let himself get hit. He didn’t care. It was a significant component of his value as a hitter.
Intentional HBPs just aren’t much of a thing anymore, in part because they’re now very quick to toss the pitcher and his manager, and I’m 100% fine with that.
And Ron Hunt was hit 50 times in 1971. There are plenty of guys who don’t WALK fifty times in a season.
I was once on a grand jury where the prosecutor got the jury to vote that a guy throwing a scale (used to weigh illegal drugs) in the general direction of another guy — without hitting the other guy, and with no real evidence that he even tried to hit the other guy – was “assault with a deadly weapon”.
Yes, hitting a guy with a baseball is assault with a deadly weapon. Granted, it’s hard to throw a ball that close to the batter without ever hitting the batter. But I think it should be a lot less common than 1% of at-bats. I can tell you that in casual games (which I’ve played plenty of), where the pitchers are a lot less skilled, it is way less common than that. If it’s currently as frequent as 1% of at-bats, I think that represents a real problem with the rules and customs of major league baseball.
Yeah, at least baseball is a game that can be played with only a small risk of major injury. Have you seen the stats on the likelihood of a football player having brain injuries? It’s not just the big hits, it’s the accumulation of little hits over time, and the stress as the brain bounces around inside the skull. Helmets may actually make the game more dangerous.
I’d let me kid play baseball. No way I’d let my kid play American football. I expect that liability suits will destroy the NFL within the next two decades.