I’m many miles away from qualifying as a major league baseball scout but some things are clear even to a fool like me. We fell far too much in love with 100 miles per hour pitch speeds. I’m not impressed in a kindly way with fireworks. I think that what MLB pitchers should be good at is getting batters out.

The San Francisco Giants have a man named Camilo Doval who throws very fast fastballs and even better sliders. They have used him as a “closer”, admittedly a term that has annoyed me ever since I sold cars for a living. Doval lost his closer job last summer and now the team honchos are saying that it was because he walked too many batters ( 5+ every 9 innings). Sorry, but that, as bad as it was, is not the whole story. A relief pitcher who is assigned the task of holding leads late in the game does not want to walk the first batter he faces. That’s trouble. But Doval has another problem. He is, as they say, deliberate. He does not hold base runners well at all. Consequently, a lead off walk is often equivocal to a lead off double. He also tends to lose track of the pitch clock and you could make yourself a Dagwood type sandwich and consume most of it while he hurls a half inning. Umpires are not supposed to do it but they frequently become skeptical of a hurler’s ability to throw strikes when these things are happening. So now you have a runner on second and you need to make better pitches.. Better pitches sometimes leave the yard. We lost, but we saw 6-8 pitches that  traveled over 100 mph.

Now we are also in love with bat speed. Home run swings on every pitch still seem to be acceptable long past the steroid era. Sacrifice bunts and squeeze plays appear to be coming somewhat back into favor, but only during the “cold” months. Starting pitchers don’t hurl more than 5 innings in MLB because they have never previously been asked to do that and they consequently lack the strength or “know how” required. That issue, which costs teams a bundle by forcing them to carry two or three more pitchers to compensate, will take a long time to overcome if it ever is attempted. But I’m just a fan. Can’t wait for it to get started again, though.