Tuesday, July 26, 2022

This Batter



Baseball players push the envelope when they can, but that will eventually lead to new rules. Observe Japanese high school batter Ko Yamaguchi playing in their national tournament. He makes no effort to swing, but instead does everything possible to draw a pitching violation. He crouches to shrink the strike zone, he wobbles back and forth, and he changes hands for each pitch. Yamaguchi eventually gets on base by being hit by pitch, which we suspect was his goal all along. Sportswriter Larry Brown dubbed Yamaguchi "the most annoying batter of all time." (via Boing Boing)


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2 comments:

  1. Bicycle Bill7/26/2022 03:06:00 PM

    Learned something today ... I didn't know it was OK for a batter to switch sides during a single at-bat.  Turns out a batter can do this as often as they want – including every pitch, like this doofus – so long as they don't do it during the pitcher's wind-up.

    Another thing ... since the batter never asks the umpire for time-out while swapping sides (and the umpire never calls time while he does this), the game is still live and the ball and any possible base-runners are in play, so I could see this ploy of his back-firing if a quick-thinking pitcher quickly turns and throws to a base to pick off an inattentive runner.

    -"BB"-

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  2. Anonymous7/27/2022 05:25:00 AM

    Before we hand this guy the crown, we should take a moment to pay our respects to Mike Hargrove, "the Human Rain Delay."

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