What do you guys think of the 26 man roster? Cant have more than 13 pitchers?
Personally I’m glad we don’t have to witness a manager bringing a reliever in to face one or two hitters in a half inning. Designated two-way players on roster? Do the Braves have any that can pitch 20 innings & also hit in 20 games? Position players 10 day IL, Pitchers go on 15 day DL. Will that decrease phantom arm ailments?
Below is a link to a pretty good article with some numbers regarding relief pitching. My take on this "Three batter minimum rule"
First of all.. and maybe picking nits... but baseball (or whoever decides these things... media?), needs to come up with a NAME for the rule that actually reflects the REAL meaning of the rule. This rule is NOT a rule "requiring" relievers to face a minimum of 3-batters. There will plenty of relief appearances resulting in fewer than 3 batters faced (when an inning ends)...and this is significant. This annoys me because it gives the false sense of accomplishing the stated goal (speeding up the game or fewer pitchers being used?). The linked article below does a good job of explaining the data. It will speed up some games.... but those it does, the impact will be marginal (IMO). If you believe the analysis below and you (as a fan) watch about 1 game per day (that is a lot)... only 1-2 games you watch per week will be impacted at all by this rule change. Saving you a total of probably 6 minutes per week (my swag).
Basically, we're looking at about 800 or so of these soon-to-be-banned relief appearances each year, plus a small impact to the length of "opener" appearances, because we're looking just at relievers for this data. While that hasn't changed appreciably over time, it's still notable. There are 26 weeks in a Major League Baseball season, and we saw 779 of these appearances in 2018. That's about 28 times per week, or roughly one per team per week. It's not a lot. It's not nothing.
I've said before... there are quite a few, more effective (easier) ways to speed up the pace of play. Top of my list:
No more mound visits (from dugout) - make call to bullpen from dugout.
Limit mound visits/meetings from catcher/infielders - rule already in place
New arm enters game "hot" and ready to pitch - maybe 2-3 pitches (max) to acclimate to mound
TV? - I don't know how much TV controls the length 'breaks' in the game, but I'd imagine there is some low-hanging fruit here too if TV could limit "time" of commercial breaks between innings/pitching changes
https://www.mlb.com/news/how-3-batter-minimum-will-change-baseball
Another example of baseball screwing up names of things.. "Robo-Ump" There is no such thing as a robotic umpire (yet). All the "experimentation" with this rule include an actual human being as the HP umpire. He simply has some sort of device (ear piece/iPod) feeding him output from the "system" detecting pitch location. Umpire still makes the "call"... overriding obvious erroneous detects (if necessary) and he and crew must make call on check swings.
Rant over... for now.
Buzz... Isn't there a minimum criteria that must be met for a player to "qualify" to be designated 2-way? And the criteria makes it a very small pool of players. In other words... very few teams will have 2-way players on their rosters.
I think Ronald Acuna Jr will lead the Braves in home runs hitting 42.
