BEAT THE CLOCK!

We live in an age where the various flavors of "acting out" have become so widespread & cross-collateralized that our senses--particularly taste, hearing and smell--have become less and less distinguishable from one another. (If Jimi Hendrix were still with us, he might just alter the lyrics of one of his famous songs to read: "Cultural synesthesia is such a frustrating mess...")

The first full day of baseball's 2023 spring training brought this home when several incidents involving the bizarre conclusion to a game between the Red Sox and the Braves sent the media, the fans, and so-called experts into a flurry of tongue-wagging. In the bottom of the ninth, with the game tied, 6-6, and with the bases loaded and a full count (that's 3 balls and 2 strikes, in case you've been in asynchronous orbit since 1889...), the home plate umpire called out the batter for not training his eyes on the pitcher within eight seconds. 

Braves' skipper Snitzer snorts as his team is burned by a bizarre twist
in the new "pitch clock" rule...

There was initial confusion, of course, because the batter thought he'd been awarded first base and began to make his way there in anticipation of a Braves' win. But he was swiftly advised otherwise by the home plate umpire, who waved him out and brought the game to an abrupt conclusion due to the stipulation that no spring training game will exceed nine innings in length. 

This immediately created a whirlwind of responses that, previously, we might have called a hue-and-cry-- save for the absence of the former and the superabundance of the latter. Players, managers, media folk, and fans all manifested prodigious cases of mouth-foam within seconds of hearing the news. 

Our informal survey of these howls of outrage quantified the reaction as roughly 56.3% negative, 12.9% positive, and 30.8% either impassive, undecided or blissfully unconscious. (Those three flavors of "other" don't track exactly with those increasingly indistinguishable senses we mentioned at the outset, but they'll do in a pinch.)

A standard negative response was: "just wait until this happens in the World Series." A more unusual positive response was: "just wait until this happens in the World Series!". And the response in the "other" category was: "Do they still play the World Series?".

For the record, the exact events that occurred in yesterday's spring training game simply cannot happen in the World Series--or in any other regular season game, for that matter. If we were in the regular season, the Braves would have been called out, their rally stopped at tying the score (Atlanta had scored three runs to tie the game before the bizarre batter punch-out occurred), and the game would have moved into the top of the tenth inning.

Some of the positive folk reminded us that the rule was being implemented from the get-go in spring training to ensure that everyone understood how it worked so that such "pitch clock violations" would be minimized when the regular season started. Other positivists were disappointed by such a stance, however, hoping that the violations would be much more frequent so that they'd become a significant new stat.

Clearly the rule can create many flavors: as it can occur at any time during the at-bat, from the initial pitch at 0-0 all the way to twelve fouls on a 3-2 count, all of those variations will need to be annotated. And any such invocation of the rule on three-ball and two-strike counts that "resolves" a plate appearance (walk or strikeout) will also have to be noted separately. 

TLP™: as unappetizing as ever!

Of course, the Tango Love Pie™ reminded us that the catcher can be the agent of discord (a thought process that, unsurprisingly, comes naturally to the Anti-Christ of sabermetrics). His claim was that the Red Sox catcher lulled the Braves' batter into not getting set in time, even though it was the sixth pitch of the at-bat and it's almost certain that the actions of the catcher were incidental to what happened. (It's much more likely the batter simply took longer because it's natural that, at a moment such as the one in question, batters habitually take a few seconds longer to get set.)

The mixed up flavors of the (monochromatic) hue and the (mouth-foam gargled) cry will continue, as "traditionalists" and "innovators" each draw from the bottom of a deck that's actually stacked in the middle. Frankly, the game needs more controversy, more change, more things to argue about--but it needs to do it in a far more meaningful way that what's manifested in the 2023 rule changes. 

We hope the controversy continues into the season, and that unintended consequences help us break through the strangled synesthesia that has settled in on the little world of baseball and the big world of cultural-political gridlock. How fitting that the imposition of a clock into a game can distract us from the "big clock" ticking on the planet, and leave us so willing to blindly react. Tradition and experimentation need to exist in tandem, so that complex interactive systems and forces can be more fully examined and understood. What the hell--let's all play "beat the clock"...because, in the end, that's all any of us can try to do--until we can't.