The Yankees, basically, don’t like the changes, but they will adjust:
“We will adjust well,’’ manager Aaron Boone said. “We will be ready. I won’t go too far down into specifics on how we will do it. That’s all part of our job, to prepare Gary and all our players. We have to make adjustments and that is what major league athletes have to do all the time. … It’s a new way of doing things.”
Pitching coach Larry Rothschild admitted it would be “a major adjustment.”
“It impacts your bunt plays,” Rothschild said. “It impacts when runners are given signs. … The hard part is that in spring training, you are not going to have it impacted so much because there are so many pitching changes.”
Meanwhile, the Mariners GM sees it as a positive:
“I think it’s a good thing. I’m a big proponent of pace of play,” said Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto, a former pitcher who got annoyed whenever a coach would amble out to him on the hill. “In terms of visiting the mound — it’s dead time that nobody wants to see.”
A few points: Pitching changes do not count as official mound visits. Nor does visiting if there is a potential injury to the pitcher. And if the pitcher and catcher are “crossed up” — meaning they aren’t on the same page signal-wise — it’s at the umpire’s discretion to allow them to sort it out (permission to approach the mound, your honor?).
It all seems pretty straightforward in theory, but you know players and coaches are going to try and game the system.
Mentioned in both articles is sign stealing, and how mound visits were used to combat that practice. Teams might want their analytics departments to start studying entropy. Figure out what the common questions are between catcher and pitcher, and reduce those questions and their answers to a small number of bits. Maybe encode a pitch sequence in fingers, rather than single pitches. Times for teams to be clever.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2Gsoyv2
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