Jake Mintz writes:
The college baseball team shattering HBP records is playing for the D-III World Series . . .
This spring, the Division-III Misericordia University Cougars were hit 153 times in 52 games for an eye-popping rate of 2.94 hit batters per game, an all-time NCAA record. They have ridden that avalanche of beanballs all the way to the D-III World Series, where they will take on No. 1 overall seed Johns Hopkins on Friday afternoon. . . .
Like other revolutionaries across the small college sports world, like the basketball programs who only shoot three-pointers, or the football teams who never punt, Egbert and Co. eventually began recruiting for their unique system. They want kids in the grit-and-grind small-ball mold: overlooked, undersized athletes who can make contact, wreak havoc on the basepaths and aren’t afraid of getting plunked. . . .
“There’s a safety component to it too.” Lindsay noted about practicing getting hit. “You don’t wanna be welting guys up during the week, but there are some safe ways to do it with tennis balls and stuff.” . . .
One former player remembered the general safety rules: You can dodge anything near your head without the fear of scorn or repercussion, and if you’re a fast player who is a base-stealing threat, you can dodge anything at your feet. Beyond that, if the ball is coming at you, it’s statue time — that is, if you want to keep your starting spot. . . .
Because many of their players are relatively short in stature, they tend to have shorter arms, which in turn, means many of their players stand close to the plate in order to reach pitches away. That also, obviously, makes them much more susceptible to plunkings. And nobody on the current roster embodies that dynamic more than Garrett McIlhenney, a lefty-hitting 5-5 outfielder who has a .404 average and 41 steals, but also leads the country with 30 HBPs and a .598 (!!!) on base percentage. . . .
“We hit that McIlhenny kid seven times this year in six games.” Said Arcadia University head coach Bryan Torresani, a conference-mate of the Cougars, who took five of six from Misericordia during this regular season.
Hey, it worked for Don Baylor!
The story reminds me of this kid in Little League who . . . ok, I saw him play in about 12 games and I don’t recall seeing him swing the bat even once. He would just stood there and try to draw a walk. Indeed, when 10-year-olds are pitching this can work, but . . . why bother? What’s the point of playing baseball if you’re never gonna swing? It’s not like he was a demon in the outfield, and he didn’t pitch, either. After awhile the umpires started to get annoyed and they started calling any pitch to him as a strike unless it went over his head, hit the ground, went behind him, or hitting him. I also remember a play where a little kid got hit by a pitch, and then the pitcher started crying, he felt so bad about it.
“why bother?”
Reminds me of my son’s experience in T-ball. When a batter would hit the ball, the coach would tell the batter and any runners to just keep running all the way around the bases. Throwing was so poor, that the odds were all the runners would score.
I guess the better question is why not have the kids play a game they can actually play rather than have them go out and fail at every aspect of baseball?
I’d say the same about social science: maybe most practitioners would be better off playing with Tonka Toys in the sand box or Barbie and Ken, where they can make up anything they want and it can be “true”! They can pretend a truck is a space ship, or that the driver committed suicide because stocks went down a tenth of a percent; or they can have Barbie and Ken and do power poses and job interviews and get the job every time!!! Wow, science is awesome!! Shaggy and Scooby and the gang!
What? You think literal children should not play sports that they aren’t good at? And what do you think T ball is?
I was a terrible baseball player but played on a pre-Little league team because my parents wanted me to interact socially with other boys.
I was undersized and had poor eye-hand coordination. I did swing at pitches but rarely made any contact. In spite of all this, it wasn’t a bad experience and can honestly say it was fun for the most part. I tell my girls that baseball is the toughest sport to master.
“toughest sport to master” – my vote goes to golf
Wait, if that was the case, how was there ever anybody already on base in the first place? It’s not like they were getting hit by pitches.
At first, I thought the name, Misericordia University Cougars, was some sort of in-joke. But then I found this:
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-iba-3&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-3&hspart=iba&p=Misericordia+University+Cougars&vm=r&type=gyff_9318_FFW_US#id=3&vid=c90170ba434b14734411c5f2be4f383d&action=click
It is a a 2:58:41video of a football game (played one month ago before what appears to be before virtually no one) of “Misericordia University vs. Junior College Football Team Mens Varsity Football.”
It was founded in 1924 by the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic order. ‘Misericordia’ is Latin for ‘mercy’.
I can imagine going to Confession there and being told to allow myself to be hit by pitches three times as a penance.
Mark Lemke, an average sized guy with short arms, had 3664 plate appearances in an 11 year career and was never hit by a pitch.
Tsk tsk, wasn’t willing to “take one for the team.” Think of all those missed opportunities. Just think what he could have achieved if he had had a couple of years of seasoning at Misericordia University.
Huh, I was all set to complain about how this was a rule violation and the umpires shouldn’t award the batters first base, but actually this is an interesting difference between MLB and the NCAA. In the majors, rule 5.05(b)(2) says that a batter is not entitled to first base on a hit-by-pitch if he “makes no attempt to avoid being touched by the ball”. But in college, rule 8.2.d.1.b explicitly says: “If the ball is within the batter’s box occupied by the batter and the batter makes no movement to intentionally get hit by the pitch, the batter is awarded first base. In other words, a batter who freezes inside the batter’s box and who is hit by the pitch shall be awarded first base.” I think that the NCAA should switch to the MLB rule, just to avoid this kind of risky play. Of course, even MLB umpires rarely enforce the rule correctly, but I think in blatant cases like this they would.