Unless You’re Getting Rid Of It, Leave The Intentional Walk Alone

Some of the ideas that Major League Baseball’s Pace of Game Committee has come up with aren’t bad at all. Limiting the time between pitches, when a batter can step out of the box and the number of times catchers can hike over and helpfully tell the pitcher to throw a strike will all do nothing but good so long as they can be consistently enforced. But there’s one I do have a bit of a problem with.

Intentional walks will no longer include the pitcher lobbing four balls outside the strike zone. Instead, the manager will signal to the home-plate umpire and the batter will take first base.

No! No no no no no!

We all know how I feel about intentional walks. I hate them. Always have, always will. There’s only one good thing about an intentional walk. When the other team does it and it fails. The only thing better than that is when it fails spectacularly. If baseball is going to continue subjecting me to the very existence of the intentional walk, the least they can do is make people earn that shit instead of making the so-called free pass even more free.

Speaking of baseball, I’m glad I didn’t make any playoff picks this year. If you’d told me at the end of the season that by mid October the Dodgers, Tigers, Orioles and to a lesser extent the Angels would all be finished and 3 of those would be sweeps, I’d have thought you were nuts! And now, here we are. It’s been quite the postseason.

For the record, I’m calling a Giants Royals World Series, and to be honest, I wouldn’t mind seeing KC win it. They’ve had such an awesome run. I like the Giants, but if you need it, there’s my prediction.

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