And there’s an average of 3.8 pitches per at bat, so roughly one HBP out of 380 pitches.
Yes. But …
The batter’s box is 6" from the edge of the strike zone. The players feet must stay in the box. The rest of him need not. Considering the standard batter’s stance, it’s not uncommon for some of the batter’s body to be inside the strike zone.
To be sure, a player who obviously reached his arm out to collide with a ball passing through the strike zone would be called out for interference.
6" at a distance of 60 feet is 1/2 of one degree of azimuth. Applying a strict liability standard to failing to achieve that level of precision on 100% of pitches thrown is unrealistic. The practical effect of any strict liability standard would be to cede about the inner half of the plate to the batter as a no-pitch zone.
For sure, MLB could change the rules. Move the batter’s boxes out to 12 or 18" away from the strike zone. Then crank up the penalties for pitchers making the larger, and therefore statistically less common mistake or “mistake”. As well they’d need to ensure batters did stay in the revised box, plus minus whatever slop is common now.
It’s unclear to me what the impact on game play would be. Maybe they should swing a 4’ bat instead of a not-even-3’ one. That way they could keep their body farther from the inevitable and evident hazard of high speed baseballs.
There’s so much wrong with this paragraph that I’m not even sure where to start.
First, as Telemark’s most recent post shows, they might be hitting 1% of batters, but they’re actually only hitting batters on something like one quarter of one percent of pitches thrown. Admittedly, there are also times when the ball is heading for the batter, but the batter manages to move out of the way. This is especially true when the ball heads for the extremities (lower arms/hands or lower legs/feet); it’s harder to avoid the ball when it’s headed for the midsection, or the thighs.
Have you ever thrown a baseball at a target? The pitcher is just over 60 feet from the plate, and the strike zone is 17" across, and maybe a couple of feet high (depending on the batter and the stance). Stand there and try that 100 times, and see how many times you miss by more than a foot either side of the zone.
The pitcher not only has to get in or around that zone, but has to try and do it in a way that is not predictable, that does not place every pitch right down the center, and that makes use of the fact that some areas of the strike zone are easier for the batter to hit, and to hit with power, than others. If the only criterion was getting a pitch inside the zone, I’ll bet that just about every major league pitcher could do that basically every time - just throw a straight fastball right down the middle. The problem is that, if you do that on a regular basis, the fans in the bleachers will get a lot of souvenirs from all the home runs hit off your pitching and your team will lose by double digits every time you take the mound.
And I don’t know where you get the idea that pitchers aren’t “trying harder to throw clean, and not hit the batter.” They are. As quite a few people have noted in this thread, it’s pretty damn rare for a pitcher to hit a batter on purpose. Putting a guy on base is, on average, a good thing for the batting team and a bad thing for a fielding team. Anyone who has watched more than about 20 games of baseball in his life has seen a pitcher swearing at himself for accidentally hitting a batter and putting him on first base. You’re right that the pitchers are incredibly talented; the fact that they are incredibly talented and still manage to accidentally hit batters about one in every 400 pitches shows how incredibly difficult it is to be that consistent.
That is incorrect, see rule 6.08 (b).
More usefully, here is Rule 6.08. The relevant bit:
If the ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, it shall be called a strike, whether or not the batter tries to avoid the ball.
Actually, it’s Rule 5.05 (b) in the MLB Rulebook (pdf)
He is touched by a pitched ball which he is not attempting to hit unless (A) The ball is in the strike zone when it
touches the batter, or (B) The batter makes no attempt to
avoid being touched by the ball;
(2) If the ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter,
it shall be called a strike, whether or not the batter tries to
avoid the ball. If the ball is outside the strike zone when
it touches the batter, it shall be called a ball if he makes
no attempt to avoid being touched.
Agree with the general comments above as applied to a batter doing the usual attempt to bat the pitch and / or simultaneously evade being impacted by the ball and is unsuccessful at both.
My scenario is the batter deliberately tries to cause a HPB by shoving his arm or whatever body part into the path of a ball that wasn’t going to hit him if he was playing typically.
In that scenario I’d argue that 6.03(a)(3) applies.
(a) A batter is out for illegal action when:
…
(3) He interferes with the catcher’s fielding or throwing by stepping out of the batter’s box or making any other movement that hinders the catcher’s play at home base.
Underlining mine. Deliberately deflecting the path of the ball with his body constitutes exactly that interference.
Which of the several rules proposed would actually apply turns (IMO) partly on how exactly the play unfolds and how abnormal the pitcher’s and batter’s actions are. e.g. Diving across the plate to avoid a ball passing behind the batter may take the batter out of the batter’s box. But doesn’t count as illegal interference because it’s a reasonable result of the reasonable effort to avoid being hit given the ball is passing behind him.
The ultimate point of my (rather contrived) example was that even if pitchers did have strict liability for plunked batters, that should not, and probably would not, mean that batters could jump in front of pitches to cause ejections, forfeitures, and all the other heavy penalties proposed.
I don’t believe it does. That rule seems (to me) to apply to a ball in play (i.e. runner coming from 3rd, there’s a play at the plate, and the batter steps in the way). Someone can certainly correct me if I’m wrong, but getting hit by a pitch (intentionally or not, by the pitcher or the batter) would be a dead ball, right?
This would only be relevant if a steal was happening. Otherwise the act of catching a pitch is the only catcher play at home base. And even then, the ball is dead so no play would occur. The runner would go back to base.
Possibly it could be interference if a runner was running and was obviously going to be caught stealing (maybe he fell) and the batter interferes with the pitch to make sure the catcher doesn’t throw him out. I suspect the umps could come up with a proper call there.
But otherwise I don’t think this rule would apply. If there’s no runner to be put out somewhere, there’s no catcher play to interfere with.
I don’t know why that would be shocking. The batter is standing very close to the plate. The pitcher is throwing from sixty feet away, which, believe me, is a REALLY long way. Of course batters will be hit.
You seem to continue on the assumption that many of these hits batters are hit intentionally. VERY few of them are intentional, and if you increase penalties for them you are trying to alter a behavior the pitcher isn’t trying to do in the first place. Most pitchers won’t deliberately hit a guy all year; hell, I’d guess many if not most pitchers will spend their entire careers in the majors and never try to hit someone on purpose.
I made a typo. There are over 196,000 plate appearances per season.
What about pitchers getting hit with unintentional line drives? Should the batters be ejected and the pitcher’s team be given a run?
A batter has almost to no control over where a batted ball is going as opposed to an aimed pitch.
Why does that matter? The pitchers are not trying to hit batters when it is unintentional.
Because pitchers have a history of throwing at batters and using that fear to throw very close which also increases the odds of an unintentional hit. Batters don’t have an equivalent counter-action.
A pitcher being hit by the batted ball shouldn’t be sanctioned, obviously, but it’s a real problem (as opposed to the non-existent problem of hit batters.) The ball is at it’s deadliest when struck by monsters like Stanton and Judge, and leaving the bat at 120 MPH with the pitcher situated 55 feet away, often in a defenseless pose. MLB has been repeatedly warned in the guise of pitchers taking line drives to the head. Someone is going to get seriously hurt, if not killed, and then everyone is going to wonder why nothing was done. It’s inevitable.
As I suggested upthread about batters, maybe pitchers should be wearing hockey goalie helmets too.
They did try a padded(armored?) cap.
Obviously, it only protected part of the head, not the face.
Remember what happened to Giancarlo Stanton’s face in 2014? I shudder to think about what a Stanton line drive could do to a pitcher’s face. Obliterate it, basically. This is the safety issue that worries me the most now that they’ve extended the protective screens down the foul lines (and man did that take too long.)
I don’t disagree, but then you are implying that pitchers are negligently or recklessly throwing too close to batters. So is that truly an unintentional by someone with the expertise and experience of an MLB pitcher?