I'm compelled to hold forth on the vote of the Major League Baseball Rules Committee to outlaw the upper-body collision at homeplate: Beyond the question of the emasculation even of baseball, there is the question of how the homeplate collision can be outlawed as a practical matter, unless as A. J. Pierzynski joked, a fifth base is tacked on someplace behind homeplate.
A play at the plate will be very much more often than not a tag-play, that's to say, the baserunner will need tagging out as opposed to forcing out, which is in turn to say, it won't suffice for the catcher to get a foot on the plate while in possession of the ball, and in order to record the out the catcher must make physical contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate.
That in itself wouldn't make for collisions at homeplate; the collisions come into it because homeplate is of course the fourth and final base, and a baserunner is thus free to overrun it. Safe or out, once he's crossed homeplate, a baserunner is through running the bases. And because sliding means slowing, not only in the act itself but in the preparation for it, a baserunner will often find that unless sliding will get him around or under the catcher somehow, he'll be further ahead to run through homeplate: he'll get there faster by running through it than by sliding to it.
It is the natural right of a catcher to block his plate, following from the necessity of his making contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate, and in that same way, it is the natural right of a baserunner to run his course through homeplate, and may the best man win. Those are among the more fundamental of the natural rights and laws of the Great American Game and most Victorian of sports.
And all those fixed and moving parts work together to produce the collision at the plate. It's not as though Abner Doubleday sat down one fine day in Cooperstown, New York* and said, what this game needs is brutalizing, bone-crunching, bodily collision. Collisions are what come out the other end of the natural rights and laws, and formal rules, and physics, and plain sense, in baseball.
Now it may be stipulated that all of this is right and true, but at the same time, the homeplate collision is an injurious institution and consequently MLB is left with no alternative but to "do something". But I fail to see how a collision at the plate should be any more injurious today when it's outlawed than in the 20th and presumably also 19th Centuries when it was lawful and a commonplace. My idea is that what has changed is the society, with this decadent nature-is-what-we-say-it-is 21st-Century erosion and subversion of the manful virtues, and my suspicion is that what has moved MLB to action is the 21st-Century peril of the disabled list, if not also the monetary valuations of the catchers and runners.
A collision at homeplate cannot rationally be more injurious in the 21st Century than it had been in the centuries prior, but in this 21st Century an oopsie can knock a multi-million-dollar-salaried asset out of the lineup and make a treatment-and-rehabilitation case of him, and a season can easily be decided by the names appearing on the disabled list as opposed to the starting lineup. And fair enough: I'd never say that money on that order of magnitude oughtn't be a consideration, that a ballclub oughtn't have a right to expect some playing time out of a man they're paying maybe multiple millions of dollars in a single season, and the disabled list has gotten to be a scourge of big-league baseball to where it's a cliche for a contending ballclub to pray "so long as we stay healthy" as a sort of "Lord willing" appended to their more hopeful pronouncements. But it does strike me that that's what's moved MLB to action just now in rewriting a rule which I have to assume reaches back more or less to the dawn of the game as we know it.
In another century I played catcher, albeit as the rankest amateur, so I like to think I know whereof I speak on this score, not that I ever let my ignorance stand in the way of my opinion. I respect too much some of the men who've championed the MLB ruling to call it pussified, but I will say I'm against it and what's more that I regard it as an artificial imposition counter to the natural law of baseball, and time will tell if it can be enforced without aggrieving and outraging the catchers and runners, their ballclubs, and their fans. A baseball type can have his day spoiled by an umpire's calling a ball for a strike, even, and a play at the plate is as big a call as they come, ending as it does in an out or a run -- one or the other and nothing else.
* - Yes, yes, I know: that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, NY is known now to be a ludicrousness
A play at the plate will be very much more often than not a tag-play, that's to say, the baserunner will need tagging out as opposed to forcing out, which is in turn to say, it won't suffice for the catcher to get a foot on the plate while in possession of the ball, and in order to record the out the catcher must make physical contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate.
That in itself wouldn't make for collisions at homeplate; the collisions come into it because homeplate is of course the fourth and final base, and a baserunner is thus free to overrun it. Safe or out, once he's crossed homeplate, a baserunner is through running the bases. And because sliding means slowing, not only in the act itself but in the preparation for it, a baserunner will often find that unless sliding will get him around or under the catcher somehow, he'll be further ahead to run through homeplate: he'll get there faster by running through it than by sliding to it.
It is the natural right of a catcher to block his plate, following from the necessity of his making contact with the runner before that runner makes contact with the plate, and in that same way, it is the natural right of a baserunner to run his course through homeplate, and may the best man win. Those are among the more fundamental of the natural rights and laws of the Great American Game and most Victorian of sports.
And all those fixed and moving parts work together to produce the collision at the plate. It's not as though Abner Doubleday sat down one fine day in Cooperstown, New York* and said, what this game needs is brutalizing, bone-crunching, bodily collision. Collisions are what come out the other end of the natural rights and laws, and formal rules, and physics, and plain sense, in baseball.
Now it may be stipulated that all of this is right and true, but at the same time, the homeplate collision is an injurious institution and consequently MLB is left with no alternative but to "do something". But I fail to see how a collision at the plate should be any more injurious today when it's outlawed than in the 20th and presumably also 19th Centuries when it was lawful and a commonplace. My idea is that what has changed is the society, with this decadent nature-is-what-we-say-it-is 21st-Century erosion and subversion of the manful virtues, and my suspicion is that what has moved MLB to action is the 21st-Century peril of the disabled list, if not also the monetary valuations of the catchers and runners.
A collision at homeplate cannot rationally be more injurious in the 21st Century than it had been in the centuries prior, but in this 21st Century an oopsie can knock a multi-million-dollar-salaried asset out of the lineup and make a treatment-and-rehabilitation case of him, and a season can easily be decided by the names appearing on the disabled list as opposed to the starting lineup. And fair enough: I'd never say that money on that order of magnitude oughtn't be a consideration, that a ballclub oughtn't have a right to expect some playing time out of a man they're paying maybe multiple millions of dollars in a single season, and the disabled list has gotten to be a scourge of big-league baseball to where it's a cliche for a contending ballclub to pray "so long as we stay healthy" as a sort of "Lord willing" appended to their more hopeful pronouncements. But it does strike me that that's what's moved MLB to action just now in rewriting a rule which I have to assume reaches back more or less to the dawn of the game as we know it.
In another century I played catcher, albeit as the rankest amateur, so I like to think I know whereof I speak on this score, not that I ever let my ignorance stand in the way of my opinion. I respect too much some of the men who've championed the MLB ruling to call it pussified, but I will say I'm against it and what's more that I regard it as an artificial imposition counter to the natural law of baseball, and time will tell if it can be enforced without aggrieving and outraging the catchers and runners, their ballclubs, and their fans. A baseball type can have his day spoiled by an umpire's calling a ball for a strike, even, and a play at the plate is as big a call as they come, ending as it does in an out or a run -- one or the other and nothing else.
* - Yes, yes, I know: that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, NY is known now to be a ludicrousness
