Mound Sounds

The Pittsburgh Pirates explain what happens during mound visits. It does seem to be rather customized to the pitcher:

Almost to a man, Pirates pitchers describe a mound visit as a mechanism of slowing the game down when it speeds up on them.

“Let’s say you’re taking a test, like a final, and it’s a timed final, and you have 10 minutes left and you have 50 questions left and you need to speed it up, and then all of a sudden the teacher says, ‘Hey, we’ll give you guys an extra 10 minutes,’” Trevor Williams said. “It’s kind of like that. It’s almost like you get an extra 10 minutes and you can look at your cheat sheet.”

That cheat sheet comes in the form of the trained eyes of Francisco Cervelli or pitching coach Ray Searage. They can spot problems earlier than the pitcher can feel them. They also offer the antidote.

“The funny thing is, is you don’t realize that the game speeds up until afterwards,” Steven Brault said. “That’s why the pitching coaches come out, because even if you step off the mound and take a deep breath and everything, and then you get back on the mound and nothing’s changed.”

Lots of good inside baseball in the article.

To me, dealing with fewer mound visits is an entropy and encryption problem. The finger signal is ancient in terms of the game. You can describe the language in three bits, and in most cases the code is difficult to read. What the pitcher and catcher need is a key that they know, but no one else knows, to translate the bits when they believe the code is being observed. One way, for example, would be to take the uniform number of some predetermined players on the field, and perform some simple math to reduce the number to a 0, 1, or 2. For example, it’s the third inning. The team decided to use the on-deck hitter, but the number of defensive player that corresponds to the inning. In the third inning the team would use position three, their third baseman. The on-deck hitter is 20, the first baseman is 9. Add them together, that’s 29. Take the modulo 3 of that number (the remainder), which would be two. So for that batter, if there is a man on second, the team would use the #2 set of signals.

Note that this would eliminate the changing signs mound visits, leaving more available for those moments when a team wants to slow the game down for the pitcher.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2p3ZHqE